Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
Further Disclosure: I realize that some readers, for any number of reasons, may not have access to all five senses. I have written and revised this post in the fervent hope that it does not come off as ableist. If I have come off in that offensive way, I want to apologize. I will do my utmost to not let it happen again.
Why Sight and Sound Are Just the Tip of the Imagery Iceberg.
When we're writing a book, it's easy to rely on the narrative tools we’ve learned “through osmosis” from the media we most often consume. With the advent of streaming services, film and TV shows are far and away the most consumable versions of media right now. (Put in other words: How many books have you read during COVID-19? How many mindless films and TV shows have you watched?)
Audiovisual media can only rely on those two senses (i.e., sight and sound) to tell their story, but because none of us can resist a binge-worthy show—and because the publishing-to-Hollywood pipeline widens every year—many writers have come to rely heavily on cinematic description too.
The problem with relying heavily on sight and sound within your manuscript is that, especially if your protagonist doesn’t interact directly with the scenery they’re seeing and the sounds they’re hearing, instead merely taking them in as a passive observer, the scene can feel like it’s taking place under bulletproof glass. As a result, the reader cannot connect to it either, and whatever interest they may have invested in your narrative is likely to wane.
But there is good news! We as novelists and memoirists, due to the nature of our medium, can manipulate more of the five senses than screenwriters can. There are three other senses we can take advantage of that haven't necessarily worked well for cinema before: smell, taste, and touch. Because cinema and television haven’t laid claim to these sensory experiences and because they are so unique to each individual, these senses when conveyed on the page feel more intimate than sight and sound. After all, anyone standing in a scene can see and hear what’s going on around them, but because smell and taste especially are so subjective, they seem to be a hotline to one character’s view of the world. As a result, using these senses in a personal essay or a short story can be a good strategy for connecting the reader with the subject of the essay or the main character of the story.
Writers Who Do This Well.
For craft references in using the “other” three senses, I highly recommend Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume (1985) as well as Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter (2016). Perfume is a historical thriller set in eighteenth-century France, in which a serial killer with a preternatural sense of smell murders women and encases them in wax to extract their scent. Creepy, I know, but also so, so well written. Sweetbitter, meanwhile, is a contemporary, semiautobiographical novel concerning the drama of front- and back-of-house workers at an upscale Union Square restaurant, so there’s a lot of engaging taste imagery, which Danler puts to exquisite use when it blossoms into metaphor.
How to Apply the Five Senses to Your Own Work.
It’s fine, expected even, for your first drafts to come out without their sensory imagery fully formed. As humans, we tend to gather information about a new setting on a zoomed-out scale before investigating the small details. For instance, we likely notice that a dress on a hanger is blue before we finger the stippling of the seed beads on the bodice. If you want to be better at deploying the five senses in your first drafts and/or free writes, I recommend determining an anchor sensation (e.g., “The water slipped cool and silky through Joe’s fingers”) before you start writing, then letting your narration ripple out from there.
For what it’s worth, if one or more of the five senses is not available to you for any reason, and you therefore do not feel as confident in your ability to use it in your writing, don’t feel like you’re not contributing work of the same imagistic caliber as other writers. Instead, think about how your lack of one or more of the senses makes your other senses stronger. My mother, for instance, is legally blind, so while Jimmy Fallon is a silly blur on her TV screen, she could hear the cat sneeze on the other end of the house. You have been given a unique perspective on the world, and you can use your novel, nonfiction book, or other text as a platform to let us sense-typical folks understand how you see the good and the bad of life. Check out work by Kody Keplinger, like The DUFF, to read what New York Times bestselling authors with disabilities can do.
When you’re revising, keep a keen eye out for opportunities to flex your sensory imagery muscles. For instance, if a soldier in World War I is stuck in no-man’s land, don’t just describe how the trenches look, what the shells bursting overhead sound like. A movie can do this; hundreds of movies have. Instead, as you revise, consider what it must feel like to constantly be standing (or sitting or lying down) in mud, having done so for weeks, to not even be confident of the sturdiness of the ground beneath your feet. What does the muck smell like? Is it awful, smelling of rot and refuse, or, perversely, is your main character coming to think it smells like home? Make note of all the sensations and thoughts you can come up with, and choose your favorite two to add to the scene.
I limit your options to two here because there’s the other cardinal sin of describing for the sake of description, which I’ve explained in a previous blog series.
With that in mind, we shouldn't add imagery just to add imagery. Notice that the example of the soldier applies their opinion of the trenches to the sense imagery they are taking in. I alluded to this a bit earlier, when I mentioned how subjective taste and smell can be when associated with our likes, dislikes, and free associations. One person can scoff at a sunset while another weeps all because of interiority, what's going on inside them at the given moment. Description and imagery should be shared by your narrator in concert with them telling the reader how your character feels about said description and imagery. (For more on interiority, I would like to direct you to my friend Tiffany White's recent Instagram post, which covers it well.)
It takes practice, but using all the sensory imagery available to us as writers and attaching it to interiority can make even a third-person narrative feel more immersive and intimate than the two-dimensional experience of TV/film.