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

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?

May 16, 2024 2

Using Touch in Our Stories

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 using touch in our stories will bring extra depth to our descriptions.

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.

“Humidity had risen, dogging us like a whiny kid.”

from A Storm of Doubts by JPC Allen

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.

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

“My grip driving the receiver into the flesh of my palm, I spun

away from her.”

from “Bovine” by JPC Allen

For more posts on using the sense in our stories, click here.

May 9, 2024 2

Using Sound in Our Stories

This month, the theme for my blog is writing using the senses, and I’m starting with using sound in our stories. Sound is probably the most used sense after sight, and I find I rely on it a lot. Below are some tips on using sound in our stories.

How Do Characters Sound?

For some reason, the quality of a person’s voice catches my attention. An unusually deep voice for a man. A high, piping voice in a child. When writing dialogue, I like to incorporate how a character sounds, if it aids readers in imaging that character. Here are some ways I use sound for characters in my Rae Riley Mysteries.

My main character Rae Riley 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.
Mal, Rae’s dad, has a voice that is a “penetrating” or “booming baritone”.
Rae’s great-grandfather Walter has a “harsh voice … so deep it seemed to echo in his throat.”

Sounds Add Suspense

One reason sounds add suspense is that, as beings who rely primarily on sight, hearing something only, depending on the setting, can be scary. At the climax of A Storm of Doubts, Rae is caught in a storm at night. She has to rely on what she hears far more than what she sees, adding to the suspense. (I’d tell you more, but a ruined mystery is one of the saddest stories there is, and my publisher would not be pleased.)

Quiet Heightens Importance

I learned this technique from an old movie called The Uninvited from 1944. A brother and sister buy a home on the English coast that’s stood empty for 15 years. After they move in, they experience weird happenings and conclude two ghosts haunt their home. They dig into the past to discover why.

In one scene, the local doctor is flipping through the personal journals of the late doctor from whom he bought the practice. A journal entry reveals that the late doctor suspected a respectable nurse, who now owns a successful health retreat, let a patient die. There’s a moment of quiet as the local doctor, the brother and sister, as well as the audience, absorb the enormity of this fact. It lasts a couple of seconds, and then the housekeeper intrudes with a telephone message.

I wrote the literary equivalent of that scene in Storm. A woman has disappeared from the rural Ohio county where Rae lives with Mal, who is the sheriff. They are discussing the case with Mal’s sister, Carrie, a private investigator. Carrie thinks it’s possible the missing woman is dead.

Dad gave her a steady gaze. “That seems more likely with each passing day.”

Micah’s and Gram’s muffled voices drifted through the floor as I clutched myself and the harsh light picked out the concern on their faces.

I like using a normal sound like a muffled discussion between family members as a counterpoint to something as awful as the disappearance and death of this woman.

Writers, how to you use sound in your stories? Readers, what book uses sounds well?

May 2, 2024 1

Tag: Advice on writing descriptions