Using Color in Our Stories

How to write about the sense of sight is just too broad a subject for one post. So I’m focusing on using color in our stories to bring scenes to life that might lie dead if we rely solely on the tried-and-true descriptions using sight. I’ve loved exploring the names of colors, but before I discuss how to add color to our writing, I have to ask …

Does using a lot of colors make sense for your story?

The main character of my teen cozy mystery series is Rae Riley, a twenty-year-old amateur photographer. Because photography is her hobby, it makes sense to mention colors when I write from her first person point of view. It’s something the character would notice, so I can include. To give you an opposite example, fashion is not a hobby of Rae’s. So when she describes characters, she isn’t focused on their clothes unless it makes a definite impression on her.

Examine your point of view characters. Would any of them notice colors? Why? Understanding your characters will help you use colors in their descriptions correctly. But those aren’t the only people you have to understand.

Use colors readers can related to.

Last spring, I made a study of colors. I typed into Google phrases like “shades of brown” and then looked at the many names for different shades of brown. The site where I found the most helpful graphics was “Color Meanings”. Here’s the link for shades of brown.

As I read each name and looked at the color, I jotted down which colors readers would instantly recognize and which ones my character would know. “Coffee”, “caramel”, “cinnamon”, “beige”, and “sand” were all names that would bring an instant mental picture to readers. But others like “ecru”, “bistre”, and “ocher” might force readers to put down my novel to look up what in the world I was talking about. And would a young woman who wasn’t a painter use words like that? So I used names that were both appropriate for readers and my character.

Make the colors fit the genre.

I like to immerse my readers in my settings. But since I write mysteries, I can’t get bogged down in descriptions. If I wrote historical fiction, I might have more space to paint more vivid descriptions. Knowing what readers expect in your genre helps you decide how to write descriptions and employ color.

Here’s an example of how I used colors in to paint the scenes of a Memorial Day picnic at lake in a state park in Ohio.

“Families and groups of friends dotted the imported sand, clusters of wet, deep colors and pastels decorating the drab ground. Rick Carlisle tossed his seven-year-old nephew and namesake Richard into shallow water while his nine-year-old niece Alli paddled on an inflatable, pink swan. Under the picnic shelter on the edge of the beach, Senator Schuster chatted with an elderly man and scooped something from a vivid tangerine bowl. About twenty people milled in and out of the shelter from preschoolers to senior citizens, so it was probably a family gathering, rather than a political one.”

from A Storm of Doubts by JPC Allen

For more tips on writing with the senses, click here.

What books or stories have you read that used color well?

May 30, 2024 5

Using Smell in Our Stories

And by using smell in our stories, I don’t mean we should make them stink. (Ha!) But smell and taste are usually the last senses most writers think of including. Taste has obvious limitations for many scenes, but I think the reason I turn to smell last when working on descriptions is because I have such a poor sense of smell. Unless a scent is especially strong, I just don’t notice it.

Scent, Memory, and Crime Writing

Smell triggers memories like no other sense. When I smell cooking onions, I immediately think I’m back at my grandmother’s house. Even if the smell is coming from the basement cafeteria at an elementary school, I still think of grandma. A smokey fire reminds me of the wood burning stove that my grandparents had. Sunscreen, especially when mixed with the scent of bug repellant, sends me back to high school when I attended camp for marching band.

This unique aspect of smell inspires me as a crime writer. What if something tragic happened to a character at a young age, and now that the person is grown up, she can barely remember it? But when she encounters the same unusual odor that she smelled at the time of the tragedy, her memories come into focus.

Or a man is attacked and never saw who it was but did notice a distinct scent about the attacker. Months later, the man meets someone who smells the same way. With only this clue to go on, he begins digging into this person’s background.

Smell and Humor

For some reason, describing revolting smells lends itself to humor. Maybe it’s because of the over-the-top reactions we can create for characters. Like a mother trying to look pleased as her young children set some monstrous concoction in front of her for breakfast on Mother’s Day. Or a family’s reaction when their dog or cat enters the house after an encounter with a skunk. In the short story “Silent But Deadly”, humor writer Patrick F. McManus uses a dog’s inability to digest turkey gravy as the reason a teen breaks up with his girlfriend.

But a warning …

We can go overboard with using smells in our stories. I read a teen novel in which the author used the sense of smell to convey the decrepitude of the building where the characters spent a a lot of time. There were so many revolting smells that it actually turned my stomach.

Unlike sight or sound, which make up the meat of our descriptions, smell is best deployed as a pungent spice. Use it when no other sense will do, or if you want to give a scene an atypical emphasis.

What authors do you know who use smell effectively in their stories?

For more tips on using senses in our stories, click here.

May 23, 2024 2

Writing about the Sense of Sight

Brown. My novel had turned to brown. At least, that’s what my freelance editor Sharyn Kopf told me when she read my novel. I had used “brown” far too may times. Most writers write by sight. And most readers think by sight, so writing about the sense of sight is the easiest way to connect with readers. It’s also the hardest to write about from a fresh perspective. While tackling all the browns that had invaded the story, I developed three ways to work color into my story.

Write About Color as Your Main Character Sees It

It was a no brainer for me to focus on color when writing about the sense of sight in my YA mystery A Shadow on the Snow. My main character, Rae Riley, is an amateur photographer. She should notice color, more than most people. But she wouldn’t describe everything that was brown with just that word. So I had to dig into my descriptions and decide …

Could I Use a Different Color?

In Chapter 8, I had used the word “brown” so many times that the scene was practically wallowing in a mud pit. So I examined all the brown things and decided if they really had to be brown. For example, Rae has come to her uncle’s farm for a riding lesson. The horse she’s going to ride is Pokey. Pokey started as a brown horse because it was based on the first horse I’d ever rode during a lesson. I changed Pokey to a palomino to get rid of a brown that wasn’t necessary. And I love a palominos. In another chapter, I changed a walk-on character’s eyes to hazel because there was no good reason to keep them brown.

Or I deleted any color name, such as when I described a third-grade girl who is having a riding lesson before Rae. The little girl’s father is watching her. I describe him “with his warm, brown eyes and brown hair”. Later, when I describe the girl, I wrote “Alli took off her helmet, only a few wisps of hair, the same shade as her father’s, escaping her French braid.” Readers know she has brown hair without me using the word.

If I couldn’t change the color, I looked …

For Synonyms

In a couple places, I wrote that characters had dark hair instead of brown. The horse Alli was riding was sorrel instead of brown. Rae could know this because her late mother worked at a stable when Rae was in middle school. So I eliminated a “brown” and made the new color work with my main character’s eye for photography and her backstory. Rae describes the hair of one of her cousins as “sepia-colored.”

Click here for my review of a short story that puts color to brilliant use. Here are more of my tips on writing about the senses.

How do you use the sense of sight in your writing? What tips do you have for writing about the sense of sight?

March 31, 2022 3

Writing about the Sense of Sound

Sound is most likely the second the most used sense in writing, and there’s so many ways to tackle writing about the sense of sound. For example, I’ve always been interested in how characters sound when they talk. And I love how sound adds another layer of complexity to a setting.

How Do You Say That?

My interest in how a character sounds may come from years of being a movie fan. Describing a character’s usual voice gives a story a cinematic touch and is a way to help readers differentiate between characters without relying as heavily on visual cues. Below are the ways I described characters’ voices in my YA mystery A Shadow on the Snow.

My main character Rae has a slight Southern accent, which is noticeable now that she lives in Ohio.
Her friend Houston, who’s originally from Texas, speaks with that accent in a drawl.
Her boss Barb speaks in a “crisp clip” when talking to someone she doesn’t like.
Rae’s dad’s voice is a “penetrating” or “booming baritone”.
Rae’s great-grandfather has “a voice as deep and rocky as an abandoned mine shaft.”

Set the Scene with Sound

My goal in describing settings is to let the reader feel like he or she is living a scene with the main character. Sounds aids me enormously in creating that illusion.

Rae sets a trap for whoever has been leaving her threatening notes, waiting in her apartment one night when she has made it look like she’s not at home. Since it’s February, the apartment gets dark quickly, giving me an opportunity to appeal to the sense of sound.

“As the courthouse chimed 7:00”
Rae’s apartment is a finished room over a garage. Her landlady’s “car chugged into the garage beneath me.”
“A meow drifted up to me.”

The winter setting allowed me to add descriptions like:

“I crunched down the drive”
During a thaw, “the ground squished beneath my boot with every step”
“Cars and trucks ground by on the salt-covered streets.”

How do you use the sense of sound in your writing? What tips do you have for writing about the sense of sound?

March 24, 2022 4

Writing about the Sense of Touch

Touch is another sense that writers tend to overlook. In the story “The Price of Light”, author Ellis Peters brings medieval England to life through the senses and especially through texture. Once I sat down to analyze touch, I realized it encompasses many different kinds of sensation and writing about the sense of touch adds evocative variety to a story.

TEXTURE

Not only clothes, but everything we touch has some kind of texture, if we think about it. The table I’m eating on, the chair I’m sitting on, the jacket of the woman I brush up against in a crowded mall, the goop my kid just invented in the basement. If the point of view (POV) character is touching something, I can switch from sight to touch to give my description variety.

I’m sensitive to food textures. Regardless of how a food tastes, if the texture triggers my gag reflex, I’m done with it. In fact, I will soldier through food that doesn’t taste good, but I can’t choke it down if the texture is bad. Marshmallows and meringue are two foods with textures I literally can’t swallow.

AIR

The temperature and moisture of the air around us is sensed through our skin. So instead of limiting myself to how a snowy scene looks, I will add how the cold makes my POV character feel. Humidity can be described the same way. Instead of writing how the sweat glistens on someone’s face, I will write about how humidity wraps around my skin like a wet quilt. When describing wind, I can switch to how it feels, rather than the effects the character sees or hears.

PRESSURE

Pressure on the skin signals all kinds of emotions. If you want large man to intimidate your small main character, he can press against her, crowding her, trapping her. A squeeze of the hand can mean reassurance, a slap on the back affection or anger, a handshake, depending upon the strength, friendship or fury.

For more tips on writing about the senses, click here.

I know I haven’t exhausted the possibilities. What tips do you have about writing about the sense of touch?

March 17, 2022 2

Category: Writing with Senses