Je ne t'aime plus mon amour.

“my love lies beyond the sunset rays”

ambient chill

I was betaing someone’s (porn) fic last night and ended up talking about general strategies for writing.

One thing that I notice is that some people think they are bad at description when they aren’t at all.  They are really good at visual description and description of action. 

Where there is room for improvement is in remembering to describe things that rely on senses apart from vision. Remember that in real life, sometimes the things that provoke the strongest reaction in a situation are not the sights, but the things we experience through sound, touch, taste, or smell– the ache of working muscles and the smell of sweat are more important to the experience of exercising, for example, than the color of the sports bra you are wearing. Sometimes the most important thing is not what we sense but how it makes our bodies feel– the drop in your stomach when you hear bad news, the chill on your neck when you come to a surprising realization.

What you can do to improve your reliance on physical sensations that aren’t sight when you are writing is simple.

1) Write your scene as normal. Finish it the way you usually would.

2) Read each paragraph to yourself.  Identify each action in the scene.  Then think about what that action might provoke in terms of each sense.  For example, a character is walking down the street.  What kind of street is it?  What time of day is it?  A street in the suburbs at night is going to be empty; there might be the sound of crickets or a radio softly playing from a nearby house.  You might smell grass clippings bagged for the morning trash collection.  You might taste the lingering scent of food wafting from a nearby house, but it’s likely you’ll taste nothing at all.  You’ll feel whatever the weather is, the pavement or grass beneath your feet.  By contrast, a street in New York City at morning rush hour is going to be full and vibrant and carry a lot more sensation.  There will be the sounds of buses, cars, cyclists.  And pedestrians, of course.  People may be loitering outside buildings chatting. There might be loud music blasting from a car.  You might smell street food or the smell of trash, the mingling perfume or cologne of the person who just passed, exhaust from said traffic, even urine or human sweat, depending on the place.  You might taste any of those scents, if they’re strong enough.  You’ll feel varying temperatures as you pass the entrances of buildings with air conditioning or heating on, heat lamps, steam escaping from manholes, the rumble of the subway beneath your feet.  Every city is going to have different sensations associated with it– the sensations of being in San Francisco or London or Rome or Tokyo or Mumbai will be different. 

Smaller actions can have quite a lot of sensory information, too. Your character is eating ice cream.  What flavor is it?  What is the texture like?  Ice cream can vary from icy to creamy, and it can have higher or lower melting points.  Some ice creams are custardy and richer. Some are soft serve and easier to lick at.  Is the character licking it as it melts down the side of a cone, or spooning it from a cup?  Does it have hot fudge that smells rich and chocolatey?  Do they hear the scrape of their spoon against the paper cup or the crunch of the waffle cone as they bite into it?  Does it evoke a sense of nostalgia for them?  A sense of satisfaction at a cold treat on a hot day?  A sense of apprehension because they are lactose intolerant and forgot to bring lactaid?  All of those things are helpful in establishing a scene beyond simply eating ice cream.

3) Now that you’ve thought through the sensory experience, think about which of those sensations are actually important to your scene.  What kind of feeling are you trying to evoke?  What emotions is your character feeling right now?  You don’t have to describe a sensation for every action, and you don’t have to describe every sensation for the ones where you do want to describe one.  If an action isn’t important to the story, you don’t want to call too much attention to it.  You want to describe the most sensory information around the actions that are most important to you in the scene.  Pick the ones that heighten the things about the scene you want to communicate, and pop them in where appropriate.