Review: Sensory Writing

Val Andrews, Sensory Writing: How to Write Unforgettable Stories by Including Sensory Detail (Opal Tree Press 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210910630-sensory-writing?ref=nav_sb_ss_4_15

Using sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste and ESP to enliven your writing
I often advise authors to ‘use sensory clues’ as an alternative to info-dumping (a writing crime of which I am especially guilty). Writing from your characters Point Of View—what are they seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, tasting—is a great way to Show not Tell. It places the reader ‘inside the protagonist’s emotional journey’, precisely what we are trying to do with our writing.
This book outlines everything an author needs to know.
Sensory detail can:
• Stimulate sensory memory
• Activate imagination
• Foster empathy
• Evoke emotional resonance
• Embody cognition and muscle memory
• Sensory engagement and immersion
• Increase attention
• Enhance memory
• Narrative presence
• Create flow and vary Pace
Some tips for using more sensory details:
• Choose specific, concrete details
• Enrich with metaphors and similes
• Use selective focus to guide perception
• Create dynamic descriptions
• Symbolic use of colour
• Weather
• Visual contrast/harmony
Sensory details should not be thought of as ‘additions’ but rather as ‘integral components of your story’s emotional and thematic development’.
Use the six senses in your writing:
• Sight
• Hearing
• Smell
• Taste
• Touch
• The 6th sense
Sensory writing
Your character receives messages from their five senses and processes them. How do they respond? This is a big part of character development.
Aim for specificity and make the experience unique to your character and appropriate for their world.
Creating one dominant sensory experience and focussing on the emotion it invokes can ‘anchor’ a scene in the reader’s mind. Then you can add extra or contrasting experiences to add complexity. Ending a scene with a strong sensory detail is an effective device for leaving the reader with a lasting emotional impression.
Changing sensory details can be an effective device for a shift in the Plot, and your character’s sensory experience can change as they develop emotionally. Varying longer passages with much sensory description with shorter passages with little can help to vary your Pace.
Use sensory description to attune your character’s inner mood with their outer environment. And past events can leave sensory traces in the present—e.g. the lingering scent of gunpowder on a battlefield.
Sensory tropes can zero in on your genre, but be wary of cliches, and subverting those tropes can provide contrast.
Mixing the senses, e.g. using sound and colour can make your scenes more vivid or freshen up your metaphors.
To feel real, your characters must be located somewhere on the personality spectrum. The OCEAN spectrum, Clifton Strengths model, DISC Assessment, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Enneagrams are different tools to use for doing this.