How to write a book - using your five senses
Like a great movie, the most energetic writing engages all 5 senses; smell, touch, sight, hearing, and taste. Put your readers smack dab in the middle of a sticky, leech infested swamp, or the vibrating cab of race car driver and you'll transport them--and they will thank you. In John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, “Over at the pavilion, the rubber thump of roof ball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistle-chains out of and of glue and the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children’s murmuring.” Here Updike uses four of the five senses: we see the pavilion, we hear the thump of the ball and the click of the checkers, we smell the plastic ribbon, and we feel the sweat on the handles.
These sensory details are powerful because, if done with skill, they actually evoke in the reader the smell and feel what is being described. If I write, "Jack was wearing a bulky grey wool sweater", you might picture Jack standing 10 feet away. If I write, "Jack’s sweater smelled of wet wool and salt, with one small loop on the edge of the left sleeve unfurled", I have created a writer’s version of a close-up. Now when you picture Jack, chances are you are close enough to smell him and see the unraveling yarn. Use this device the way film director's use a close-up; to highlight something important to the story or characters. You needn't use this tactic on the waiter who brings your main character’s food (unless you are tricky and dropping a red herring), but if Jack and his seafaring ways are important to the story, then bring us into the stinky, gritty, greasy realities of his world.
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