Writing senses: a master guide

When writing senses, they can be horrible and ghastly and scary but there is no reason to fear them. I'm going to show you how you can write senses so easily you'll be able to be right into the action in about five seconds.

What are the senses?

Here are five senses: Touch, smell, taste, hearing and sight. Writing these can be super tricky, as most people can understand what a character is seeing through their eyes, but not smelling, tasting, or hearing. Consider some of the most visceral and beautiful things in literature, and also life, what emotions do you have. Think of the memories that you made somewhere, can you picture what those are? Can you write down exactly what you were doing and remember the little things. With senses, as everything in writing, comes down to the little things.

You know what they say about little things, if you don't notice they are there, it might be something else. Of course the small details come across quite strongly in fiction, the aim to make a living and breathing world to consider everything at our disposal.

Tools to build worlds and enhance senses

We, as writers, have got so many tools that help us and I'm going to introduce you to these right away. Many of the tools are things that you are already doing, but likely don't notice. Again, the little things in fiction count.

We've got tools to manipulate language, which is the most powerful, through metaphor, using specific words and playing around with their meanings, using puns, giving details, filtering it through the eyes of the character we are writing from. I want to say that you, as an amazing writer, know all of this stuff. you've got storytelling abilities - everyone does! - and you've just got to understand how to use the tools in the box.

Playing around with language and the narrative frame

I encourage you to make sure that you play around with language. We talk a lot about critically framing narratives in literary theory, and the 'frame' of the narrative being a metaphor or a way of describing a certain message. This and that and this other thing mean this and that. Now, if you don't want to, don't get too deep into the interests of literary theory, but DO use the framing device. Before that, though, its dive into the mechanics of language.

Using what you've got in your language toolbox

So if you've never done any creative writing in your life, you understand what language is. you might not know how to make it work for you, but its an interesting case study none the less. What you've got to do is consider how your character would frame things and experience them. this gets especially interesting in writing disabilities (but I need a whole other post for that). You can use tools such as:

• Metaphors: to compare a sense to another thing

• Similes: to compare using 'like' or 'as'

• Figurative Language: Language that is dealing with metaphors and suggesting one thing isn't like another in some way or comparing or contrasting.

• Emotive Language: Language that tries to grapple with your emotions or paint a particularly emotive picture, for example of animals or staving children.

Something that might help when you're first figuring out senses, is making sure that you have got something like 'I hear tweeting birds' and remove the 'I hear' in the editing stage.

Narrative Frames

Basically you are putting your work into a specific frame (like you would a photo) and using memories for it. Consider something like using a picture of your grandmother to denote a tale of old age. Maybe she was a domestic housewife which you can write a novel about a woman being trapped in her house to showcase something about the attitudes towards women in a time period. Writing, like everything, has an eliment of life reflected back at us.

In the modern age its really important that, even subconsciously, art imitates life. Currently we've got so much going on and so many senses we can draw from, that writing, if you know where to look and keep your eyes open (which is really hard) means that there's things you can draw from, and a narrative frame, you can use to make your narrative interesting.

Of course, if the idea of a narrative frame confuses you, I'll try to put it in a way that you can understand. This idea could also work, in a more literal sense, in scenes. Maybe writing from photos, being able to place yourself into the scene directly, is a useful thing to be able to do. Maybe writing from a perspective of someone who is seeing exactly what you are in your writing, really could help you understand the senses they put forth.

LD;DR: narrative frames are like putting a photo in a frame and keeping it there.

Writing to images

Now I have given you a few tools to work with, how about you try to work with them. You can chose one of these pictures below, or use one of your own. Write a small peice about one of these places using some of the tools I've taught you. Consider how you can use metaphors or how you can manipulate language to work for you. Consider maybe a framing device. Ask yourself what the characters are feeling, smelling, tasting, seeing, ect.