Tag: Writing with the senses

Use All Five Senses to Describe Your … Yard

use all five senses to describe your yard

We’re moving outside for this week’s prompt, the last one for the month dealing with writing from the senses. My challenge today is for you to use all five senses to describe your yard. I stood outside on our four acres and wrote down my impressions.

  • Taste: Nothing
  • Smell: Nothing much. Maybe a little damp.
  • Touch: Cold wind blowing my hair, brushing my cheeks.
  • Sound: All kinds of birds singing (wish I knew bird calls better). Sound of traffic on state route.
  • Sight: Green and brown grass, gray sky, bare trees, white-limbed sycamore, colorful hives, bright yellow, shed, muted-colored barn.

Here’s how those impressions inspire me:

I wiggled my toes as the moisture in the wet grass sneaked into my leaky boots, pulling my collar up around my cheeks as the wind did its best to slice them. Did I really like Dave enough to go birding when the wind chill indicated the morning should best be spent wrapped in an afghan and around a cup of tea? The birds were out in force, all kinds of trilling, chirping, and singing ricocheting from tree to tree. I had no idea what made which sound, but they all sounded deliriously happy in the biting wind and damp air.

The gray sky had turned from pearl to charcoal as the morning had grown old. I wiggled my toes again and hugged my old rain coat closer to me.

Dave darted out of the woods on the other side of the weedy clearing and motioned to me. I squished my way to him, my toes growing numb.

“You’ve got to see this,” he whispered to me. “I never expected–“

A shot made us jump.

Dave glanced back in the woods. “This is a state park. Nobody can hunt in here.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a gun. Maybe something snapped off, like a limb of a tree.”

Several more cracks, one right after the other, reached us.

Dave’s eyes widened as big as my own.

For more prompts for the senses, click here.

How you use all five senses to describe your yard and inspire and a story?

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Use All Five Senses to Describe Your…Kitchen

use all five senses to describe your kitchen

I decided to give you a break with this week’s prompt. It should be easy to use all five senses to describe your kitchen. Here’s what I sensed in my kitchen.

Sight: Honey-stained cabinets, maroon counters, white appliances, cream-colored walls

Sound: Refrigerator humming, dryer in laundry room running, bird chirps outside window

Touch: Smooth counters, sleek appliances, wet dishes drying

Smell: Empty grape juice bottle, nothing cooking, so no aromas from that

Taste: Besides the staples, I can sample dried cherries, Good and Plenties, crackers, milk, orange juice

So now I’ll put these sensations into a story.

Weighed down with a backpack and overstuffed duffel bag, I trudged to the back door of Grandma’s house and opened it. The aroma of cooking onions and bacon flew to me, and I drew it in deep.

Grandma stirred a big pot on the white stove, as if she hadn’t moved since I’d left a year ago. The cabinets were still the same honey color, the smooth counters the same maroon, the dryer was thumping away in the basement, a smaller pot bubbled on a burner.

Grandmas looked up and jumped, then hurried to me. “I need to recharge the battery in my hearing aid.” She held me a hug so tight that I could barely get my arms around her to return it.

“I thought you were coming home tomorrow,” she said, moving back to the stove.

“I found an earlier flight.” I took a spoon from a drawer and dipped it into the small pot. I blew on it and then slurped the sauce. The heat and tang of the tomato sauce tasted like home.

Click here for more prompts using the senses.

What do you sense using all five senses to describe your kitchen?

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Use All Five Senses to Describe Your … Car

use all five sense to describe your car

For this week’s prompt, I challenge you to use all five senses to describe your car. Sometimes, we overlook potential inspiration because we are too familiar with it. So sit in your vehicle of choice and write down what your senses take in. If you can work in taste, bonus points! The above photo is me in my Mom-mobile. Here’s what I sensed:

Sound: Windshield wipers working, Christian rock song on radio, kids chatter

Sight: Dust (My car really needs dusted and vaccuumed). Mystery book on dash. CDs on shelf. Dash illuminated. Driving through gray countryside as wet snowflakes fall.

Smell: Nothing special, although I have a terrible sense of smell.

Touch: Smooth steering wheel. Slick finish on dash controls.

Taste: Water and mint gum. (I usually carry those supplies in my car.)

Now how can I work these observations into a scene?

The windshield wipers whipped back and forth, back and forth, as the singer crooned on the radio a ballad.

My son said nothing.

What was wrong? Caden was always so chatty when I picked him up from school. Now all he did was trace lines in the dust on the dash.

The smooth steering wheel slid through my hands as I made the turn in our SUV.

“So what did you and your friends talk about at lunch today?” I said.

He shrugged, unwrapping a stick of wintergreen gum. “Stuff.” He scrunch down in the bucket seat.

The next song began in an upbeat tempo. But the atmosphere inside our SUV was anything but.

For more prompts using all five sense, click here. And here’s a post from Seekerville about appealing to the senses when describing a scene.

How would you describe your car using all five senses?

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Use All Five Senses to Describe This Scene

Use all five senses to describe this scene

I’m challenging you to use all five senses to describe this scene as part of this month’s theme of writing with the senses. Here’s my inspiration from a similar photo I posted a few years ago.

The ocean breeze blew my hair across my sunglasses as I sat at the table on the porch of the beach restaurant. The fragrance of grilling shrimp and garlic stoked my hunger after a morning of swimming.

“Glad you made it, Hailey,” said my younger sister Emma, flipping back her long, chocolate brown hair. “You swam so much this morning, I didn’t think you’d have the energy to climb up the steps to get here.” Her piping soprano didn’t blend well with the soothing murmur of surf and wind.

Our older brother Brandon dropped his linemen bulk into the seat at the head of the table. “Eat fast. We need to catch the ferry to Bear Island at one-thirty.”

I sipped from the glass of ice water. Then I gulped. I was thirstier than I thought, the water carrying away sea salt from my lips.

“What if we skip Bear Island?” Our cousin Logan sauntered out of the dark interior of the restaurant.

Shielding my eyes from the sun’s glare, I looked up to him where he leaned against a post.

“What’re you doing up?” Brandon placed his glass on the table. “It’s not noon.”

“I wanted to ask all of you if you want to go some place else this afternoon.”

“Where?” asked Emma, pulling at the purple T-shirt covering her swimsuit.

Logan didn’t answer. With his sunglasses on, it was hard to guess where or who he was looking at.

Then he said, his subdued voice slipping into between the rattle of dishes and bursts of laughter behind us, “How about Rook’s Cove?”

My brother and sister went rigid as chill skittered up my spine that had nothing to do with the sudden gust blowing in from the sea.

For more prompts about to exercise your descriptive muscles, click here.

How does the photo inspire you to use all five senses to describe this scene?

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