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EXPERT ADVICE

You Know It Makes Sense!

By Heather Cooke

How do we find out about the world? Through our five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. So if we want our readers to believe in the world we're creating, why not give them sensory detail to experience?

"Yes, I know that!" I can hear you cry. "But how?"

Wearing my other hat as a Christian minister, I've led spiritual exercises that involve putting yourself in a Bible scene and letting your imagination play with it. Most associated with the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius Loyola, the technique is now used by Christians of many denominations. You can try a similar comtemplation technique in your garden or perhaps your local park. Sit quietly, empty your mind and absorb your surroundings. If you close your eyes you should find it helps you to concentrate on the smells, sounds, tastes and feelings you encounter.

Have these questions in mind and work through each one slowly.

• What can you see: flowers, trees, insects, other people, cars, fences, walls, statues, animals?

• What can you hear: birds singing, insects buzzing, dogs barking, cars passing, wind, washing machines spinning, conversation?

• What can you smell: flowers, wood preserver, perfume from passers by, coffee, wet dog, next door's barbeque?

• What can you feel: soft petals, rain drops, the warmth of the sun, rough wood, damp grass, gravel, warm roughness of brick walls, snow flakes, someone else (only advised if you know the other person of course)?

• What can you taste: coffee/tea/wine in your hand, raspberry sauce from the cone.

You'll probably be surprised at how many sense impressions you notice! And, as all writers should do anyway, keep a notebook close at hand and jot down any vivid detail. Both in fiction writing and in descriptive non-fiction, such as travel articles, vivid sensory details help our readers experience a scene for themselves, feel as if they're actually there.

The more you perform contemplation exercises, the more alert you'll be to the use of sensory detail in what you read, too. Here are some examples from two novels I've read recently. First, Vikram Seth's magnificent 'An Equal Music', hailed as the best novel about music ever written. Naturally, given both the subject matter and the storyline (which I won't spoil for you if you haven't read it yet!) it is exceptionally strong on the use of sounds:

"The world is mad with sound: forms rip, trams rumble past, vibrating underfoot; coffee cups clink, and over the murmur from the busy bar I can hear the peristaltic cranking of - is it a fax machine or a teleprinter?"

[in Venice] "the splashing of water against stone, the tweaking of a child's balloon, wheels bumping down the steps of a bridge, the flap of a pigeon's wing, high heels against the floor of the colonnade... the deep thrum of the engine of a vaporetto."

"Sweet birds sing, cocks crow distantly, an engine putters. Weeee-weeee-weeee-weeee-weeee-chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk."

The most obvious visual detail to use is colour, usually the more specific the better:

"...walls of terracotta and ochre, a red-roofed town.gardens of irises and pink roses. the grey-green water of the lagoon."

"The canal... is dishwater grey."

Sometimes, however, simple colours are best:

"A lit twig shines white against the sky. Beyond that, the night is black."

In Sue Monk Kidd's blockbuster about racism and the civil rights movement (and a lot else besides!) in 1960s America, 'The Secret Life of Bees', the use of smells is particularly vivid:

"The jail cells smelled with the breath of drunk people."

"I stepped into a deserted corridor clogged with too many smells. Carnations, old people, rubbing alcohol, bathroom deodorizer, red Jell-O."

"...and the smell of pork lathered in vinegar and pepper drew so much saliva from beneath my tongue that I actually drooled onto my blouse."

"I... caught the faint scent of honey coming from the wood.I could smell nothing then but the pomade on her hair, onions on her hands, vanilla on her breath."

She also uses striking visual detail:

"She was almond-buttery with sweat and sun, her face corrugated with a thousand caramel wrinkles."

Examples from the sense of touch include:

"I stuck my hands under my arms, and my sweat was ice-water cold."

She describes the taste of fear:

[I] "felt a metallic-dry taste rise from the back of my throat and slide over my tongue."

And some vivid sounds of the bees stayed with me:

"...bees swirled around our heads with a sound like sizzling bacon."

"A perfect hum, high-pitched and swollen, like someone had put the teakettle on and it had come to a boil."

It isn't just fiction where vivid sensory detail comes in useful. Listen to the sounds in Bill Bryson's 'A Walk In The Woods':

"...undergrowth being disturbed... a click of breaking branches, a weighty pushing through low foliage...and then a kind of large, vaguely irritable snuffling noise."

Just look at the wealth of detail packed into this single (if long!) sentence from 'Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town', by Paul Theroux:

"...the Africa I knew was sunlit and lovely, a soft green emptiness of low, flat-topped trees and dense bush, bird squawks, giggling kids, red roads, cracked and crusty brown cliffs that looked newly baked, blue remembered hills, striped and spotted animals and ones with yellow fur and fangs, and every hue of human being, from pink-faced planters in knee socks and shorts to brown Indians to Africans with black gleaming faces, and some people so dark they were purple."

Whatever sensory detail you use in your writing, be as specific as possible. If you see someone walking, do they stride, saunter, shuffle? If something is red, is it scarlet or crimson? And if you can see candy floss or coffee, what do they smell like? Weave this into active writing, and your readers will be transported wherever you want to take them. You know it makes sense!

Heather Cooke is a Writers Bureau tutor, teaching both fiction and non-fiction. She has had hundreds of articles and stories published in markets ranging from Chat to the Church Times, as well as three novels. She is also a priest in the Church of England.