Use All Five Senses to Describe Your … Junk Drawer

Use all five senses to describe your junk drawer

Or your junk closet. Or maybe your junk basement. We have a junk playroom, now that my kids are teens, but I couldn’t take a picture of that room or my husband would die of embarrassment. So I settle for asking to use all five senses to describe your junk drawer. Like the last two writing prompts, write down your first impressions as you look at the items in your junky space.

  • Sight: Lots of pencils. Gift card. Tools. Batteries. Foam darts. Bobbers. Etc.
  • Sound: N/A
  • Touch: All sorts of textures–smooth, scratchy, rough
  • Taste: N/A
  • Smell: Leather

How can I use these impressions? I could write a comedic story about a mom cleaning out the family junk drawer and horrors she uncovers. Or a teen searching frantically for an important item.

I like the idea of characters finding something unexpected. Such as teens or twenty somethings are cleaning out the house of their late great-grandmother and find an item in her junk drawer that sets them on a quest through her past. Or a husband finds an item so odd that he has to discover who in the family put it there. When everyone denies it belongs to them, he has a mystery on his hands.

For more prompts in your own backyard, click here.

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Using Smell in Our Stories

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.

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Using All Five Sense Describe Your … Bedroom

using all 5 senses describe your bedroom

Or any bedroom in your house that you might like to use as setting. My kids’ bedrooms contain a ton of inspiration, especially my youngest’s room, which makes a landfill seem orderly. Wouldn’t you love to read about the villain breaking into the hero’s house, only to get caught because he entered one of the kids’ bedrooms and wiped out by stepping on a Tonka truck? Using all five senses, describe your bedroom, as if it isn’t yours. It will make you see it with new eyes.

Here are the impressions from my bedroom:

  • Sight: Shaded from evening sun. View of backyard in shadows. Blue quilt. Faux pine furniture. Blue carpet. Family photos. A mirror. A ceiling fan. Lots of piles of books and papers.
  • Sound: Distant murmur of hear pump. Scraping on stone of someone working outside. Bird chirps
  • Touch: Cool
  • Taste: N/A
  • Smell: N/A

As I wrote this, I began to imagine someone waking in the evening, which would be odd. It immediately begs the question, why?

I lifted my heavy head from my pillow. Shadows had stretched across the house and backyard, deepening all colors to cool shades. The fan turned lazily, the air ruffling my hair.

Sitting up, I ran my tongue around my dry mouth.

I needed cool.

I pulled back my grandmother’s sky blue quilt and dropped lead-lined feet to the floor.

A few bird chirps penetrated the four windows facing the backyard.

Using the pine nightstand for support, I lunged into a vertical position.

I swallowed, my throat feeling sandy.

Might as well see if I could make to the bathroom for a drink.

If you want to write a scene set in a bedroom at night, stay up late and write your impressions then.

For more writing prompts about setting, click here.

What’s a familiar setting you can describe using all 5 senses?

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The Roller Coaster Method of Plotting

For everyone who attended my workshop at the Mt. Zion Ridge Press Writers Conference–here’s the graphic I use for the roller coaster method of plotting, which I learned from James L. Rubart and Cara Putnam. I have it on an older post and discovered that you can’t find it using the keywords “roller coaster method”. I don’t know why. So I’m posting it here for easy access.

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Using Taste in Our Stories

using taste in our stories

Because the sense of taste can only occur in certain settings, writers may overlook it and not take advantage of it where they can. But using taste in our stories can bring a fresh perspective to a scene that is dominated by sights and sounds.

How a meal tastes can show the emotional state of your point of view (POV) character. If your character is eating a favorite food, and someone tells her bad news, she will find the food tasteless or disgusting. Conversely, your character eats something he usually avoids, but he’s in such a good mood, his distaste disappears.

Describing what tastes your character likes and dislikes gives readers insight into her character. If your character is critical or spoiled, then she would harshly describe how certain foods don’t meet her high standards. Or your character may eat something he hates so as not to hurt the feelings of the cook, giving readers clues about his personality. For more on food as writing inspiration, click here.

Words may be compared to tastes. A character makes a confession, and the words taste bitter. He says the name of a loved one, and it tastes sweet. For some people with a rare form of synesthesia, certain words really do stimulate a sense of taste.

Since smell and taste are so closely link, you can bring in taste to give a different spin on a smell. The odor of burning metal leaves a metallic taste. Sweet-scented flowers, the ocean, and fires all have a tastes to them.

HISTORICAL FICTION

Historical fiction has the difficult job of making readers understand a time that they know little or nothing about. Writing about the food of a time period is one way to help readers connect with those distant eras. Because her novels are set during the American Civil War, my friend Sandra Merville Hart tests early American recipes on her website “Historical Nibbles”. Describing food in a historical story tells a lot about a character’s class, ethnicity, and wealth. The lack of food is also a critical component in many historical periods. In Sandra’s novel, A Musket in My Hand, one of the reasons two sisters disguise themselves as men and join the Confederate army is because Union troops keep raiding their farm for food, and they are barely surviving.

SPECULATIVE FICTION

In many ways, speculative fiction is similar to historical fiction because other genres introduce readers to unfamiliar worlds. Some worlds in speculative fiction are so alien that writing about the food the characters eat makes it seem not so strange after all. In Watership Down, wild rabbits in England try to survive while establishing a new warren. Food is always on their mind, and writing about how they think of food draws readers into their world.

ROMANCE

So much of romance centers around food — couples get to know each other going out to dinner, grabbing a cup of coffee, planning a meal where they will meet each other’s families. Liking the same food can be a symbol for showing how well a couple is matched. And if they have very different tastes in food, that can be a symbol that all is not well in their relationship. How they interact through a meal can be a comment on the relationship. In the classic movie Citizen Kane, we watch the disintegration of Charles Foster Kane’s marriage during a montage of breakfast scenes. When they are first married, he and his wife sit right beside each other, chattering away. As the years pass, they sit further and further apart until they sit at opposite ends and eat in silence.

CRIME FICTION

Since I write crime, I have first-hand experience with working food into my narrative. A good way to get characters to discuss a problem, and impart information to the reader, is to have them sit down to a meal. It’s a natural way to slow down the pace and have a thoughtful conversation. Analyzing clues during a running gun battle just doesn’t work.

In any genre, a character’s food likes and hates adds a layer of believability or a quirk, like I wrote about in this post. In the Nero Wolfe mysteries, Nero Wolfe’s gourmet tastes are one of the reason he’s a private detective. He charges exorbitant fees to feed his exorbitant appetite.

How do you use taste in your stories? Or what story uses taste well?

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