5 Senses

5 Senses and How to Use Them

by Elizabeth Sinclair

        Have you ever run your hand over a piece of velvet? Listened to the rain falling softly against your window pane? Savored the taste of a sweet chocolate candy? Smelled the freshness of sheets just off the clothesline? Seen a snowflake dance through the crisp air on a winter's day, then land and melt as if it had never been? If I asked you to remember one of the above and relate the incident to me, could you?

Any combination or single incident of the five senses evoke memories of happenings in our lives. We retain those memories like pictures in an old photo album. Funny enough, so do our readers. That's why using them can evoke emotion in our readers, make them experience what we're writing right down to their toes. It's all because we've stirred a memory and they're recalling how they felt, when that incident happened. This recollection helps them see what we want them to see, feel what we want them to feel, taste what we want them to taste, hear what we want them to hear, smell what we want them to smell. In turn, this adds texture and emotion to our stories.

Let's do a test. The following list of words will evoke a memory for each of us. See what ones they evoke for you.
roses            snow      coffee   bread baking
church bells rain      gardenias   baby powder
herbal tea music      silk   bacon

We don't have the luxury of being able to include illustrations in our stories to help the reader see and feel them, so we must resort to other means -- the five sense and figures of speech. By combining the five senses with figures of speech, such as similes and metaphors, the writer has some of the most powerful, evocative tools she could ever ask for.

Here is an example:

"The smell of salt spray filled his nose. It tingled from the cold, as his nerves did from tension, and he looked down at his hands. They were red and raw and trembling. He rubbed warmth into his numb fingers, setting them to stinging..." Victoria Barrett -Beyond the Misty Shore

"She looked as out of place here as a long-stemmed rose in afield of ragweed "

"...she wobbled unsteadily on her impossible high shoes, kind of like a baby taking its first steps."

One of the essentials to using this method to provoke emotions and images is to compare a specific thing or event to something the reader will be familiar with. For example, comparing a woman's hair to the maze of wires in a telephone relay station is not only less than romantic, but will go right over the heads of the readers. Few, if any, have ever seen the wiring in a telephone relay station. Result? No basis for comparison. Consequence? You've blurred the mental picture and lost that evocative edge with the reader. However, if you compare your heroine's hair to corn silk blowing in a soft spring breeze, you'll probably hit the mark and have the reader sighing in envy.

Okay, now that we've learned how to write them, let's look at using them to our advantage as a writer and push the emotional buttons of the reader. Remember the memory thing we talked about? Here's where it comes into play. Simply using the five senses to describe scenes isn't enough. We want the readers to "feel" along with our characters. How do we do that?

Example: While Jane waited, she strolled through the garden. It was full of humming insects. The roses were just beginning to bloom. There were rows and rows of them: white, yellow, pink and red. She stopped here and there to smell a bud or blossom.

Nice, right? It's a lovely scene to "look" at, but we want more. We want the reader "in" that garden. To do that, we need to make a few adjustments.

Revised Example:
While Jane waited, she strolled around the garden, noisy with the hum of busy insects going about their daily task of pollination. The roses, just beginning to bloom – like they were back home, she thought with a pang-- peppered the air with fragrance. Nature’s perfume counter. She smiled at her whimsical thoughts. Bending her head, she inhaled the sweet scent of a velvety red blossom, but drew away when the tears stung her eyes The heady aroma reminder her of her childhood and her grandmother, the keeper of roses.

Our little scene has taken on a whole new meaning just because we’ve had the character react to the five-senses stimuli. Without the internalization, prompted by the five sense, the scene lacks meaning and is nothing more to the reader than the POV character taking a pleasant stroll through a rose garden. By adding the character’s reaction to the five-senses stimuli, we’ve also evoked the reader’s memories of such a garden and the homesickness associated with it. If that’s the emotional reader-reaction you were looking for, then you’ve hit it.

This is much less boring to the reader. Why?Because it’s setting a picture in their mind. It’s letting them get closer to the character and her problems. It’s drawing on their emotions, too. This close relationship between the prose and the reader is vital to the reader being able to associate themselves with the character. By dipping into the reader’s memory bank you can accomplish this with ease. We have long memories. Sometimes with a little prodding we can remember things we’ve forgotten. This is a writer’s ace-in-the hole.

Exercise:
Using one of the five senses, take turns composing one sentence to describe each of the following:

A woman’s hair
A child’s laughter
A tree
The morning sunlight
A thunder and lightening storm
A man’s smile
The engine of a car
Cookies baking