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This is, without a doubt, the most difficult sense to incorporate into one’s writing. After all, what does one taste when one isn’t eating?  

Reminders are one way to manage to insert the sense of taste into a scene. Remember my great-grandmother’s apple pie? The smell of baking apples with cinnamon triggers that taste sense in my mouth.  

Aroma and taste are closely connected. When one has a cold and cant’ smell anything, food also tends toward the tasteless or the peculiar. 

We also taste in other ways. Fear brings a flavor to our mouths, a dry, tinny sensation. Your character wakes up from a blow on the head and has a foul taste in one’s mouth. I’ve heard this described in numerous ways. Think of something nasty that goes as far in description as you like and you have it. 

Your character is traveling on a bicycle, motorcycle, or horse. The road is dusty. He tastes—what is in the area? Alkali? Copper? Or maybe she’s lying in the grass nibbling on a blade of it. Yes, this is technically eating, but it’s not a meal or snack. 

Think about licking one’s lips, or the character licking her lips in nervousness. What does she taste? Minty lip gloss from the trendy natural makeup shop, or the cheap waxy tasting stuff from the drugstore. Either way says a lot about her taste—as in fashion sense—or budget or current circumstances. 

Then, of course, when lips meet other lips, we have taste. This can go either way. If you want your characters to kiss later in the scene, don’t let them eat garlic or onions for dinner. They may taste good to the eater, but not to the kisser. Make it something delightful like chocolate cake or strawberries or baklava. 

This post is shorter, as taste is probably used less than any of the senses. If characters are tasting all the time, they’ll come across like they’re stuck on the oral faze of development when a child puts everything in its mouth. Taste is the ultimate spice, the most expensive, and must be used the least. I don’t like rules, so I won’t say one taste per scene, but one per chapter is probably a good goal to set. 

Thank you all for letting me visit here. I have received some notes that this has been helpful. If you have further questions, you can always reach me at: 

http://www.lauriealiceeakes.com 

Our olfactory sense is the first to develop, I recall learning from college biology. Smells trigger memory faster than sight our sound or touch. Even after thirty years, the smell of apple pie reminds me of my Grandma Abernathy, though she died when I was quite young. But those pies were an early childhood pleasure, and nothing has ever compared quite as favorably to them in smell or taste. 

Smell is one of our first lines of defense. I remember reading an article about this in which the wife kept saying she smelled gas. The husband smelled nothing. Finally, she grew concerned enough that they called the gas company. It took even the technician a while to find a miniscule leak in their gas line. The technician asked the man if his wife were pregnant. The husband didn’t think so, but that day, the wife found out she was. 

Apparently, pregnancy enhances the sense of smell to protect the mother from breathing toxins, get away from fire, perhaps, way back, detect wild animals getting too close. 

For myself, I use scent as an orientation tool. Think of the aromas you smell walking through a mall. Starbucks probably. One of those bath shops, and let’s not forget the candle store. We have a Coldstone ice cream shop right across the street. It doesn’t attract me, though I love ice cream. Why? Because the smell of the cakes and brownies baking is so overpowering, I get a sugar overload just walking past, setting up my gag reflex. 

Yes, smell saves us from swallowing substances that aren’t good for us. If you smell bitter almonds, don’t drink the poisoned soft drink, Heroine. 

Smell can be used as attraction. In my book Family Guardian, my heroine is a perfumer. Her nose is sensitive. She can pick the hero out of a crowd just by smell. She finds the bad guy by a peculiar aroma he carries with him. 

In case you haven’t figured this out, scent fascinates me. I’ve read a number of books on aromatherapy, as well as Diane Ackermann’s wonderful book A Natural History of the Senses. Yet incorporating it into one’s writing can be really difficult. One can only mention the hero’s aroma of sandalwood or the heroine’s lavender fragrance so many times before you annoy the reader. 

To involve scent in the story, one must get truly creative, for I believe we don’t consciously smell things as much as we see, hear, and even touch them. Scent, however, because of its importance to us as human beings, may draw the reader right into the middle of a scene more than any other sense. 

Audrey remained on the platform amidst a collection of trunks and valises until the locomotive’s last whistle died from the valley and pine resin scent from the planks beneath her feet overpowered the stench of coal smoke. 

With no other background here, you know this story is set somewhere in the past. Resin from the planks beneath her feet and the stench of coal smoke. The fact she can smell the resin implies heat enough to draw that out, thus using smell to suggest the sense of touch. Coal smoke is an older train. If I’d said diesel instead, the time would have moved well into the twentieth century. 

Smell is so important to us one shouldn’t even sprinkle it judiciously through one’s writing. One should use it like ground red pepper in cooking—with an extremely delicate hand. Think of its impact on the reader, but do not, under any circumstances, leave it out or you are missing an opportunity to connect your reader to your scene.

By Laurie Alice Eakes 

The sense of touch is one of the richest layers you can add to a story to enhance the reader experience of being there with the characters, of being the characters. One can use the sense of touch, of feeling the world around one, to indicate mood, attraction, even fear. It’s an excellent way to show rather than tell. 

The heat of the sun felt like a physical weight bearing down upon him. 

In fourteen words, this line conveys the sensation of temperature. We know the weather and possibly the climate, at least that it’s someplace or time of year with a hot sun. Even more, the reaction to that sensation of heat translates into mood. This guy is unhappy. He’s oppressed by the sun’s warmth, whereas someone else could be invigorated or relaxed by it. 

He brushed his thumb across her lower lip, leaving her mouth tingling with anticipation. 

Does this lady like this gentleman? Does she want another touch, perhaps a kiss? The line certainly tells us so. That brush of the thumb could have left a reaction of revulsion. She might have jerked away, scrubbed her lips in response. The word ‘brush’ conveys gentleness. He cares about her enough to want to be gentle, to hint at further contact. Yet, despite portraying attraction, the scene maintains purity of contact. 

His hard fingers clamped across her mouth with enough pressure to cut off her breath. 

In contrast, this guy’s fingers are hard, not gentle, clamping, not brushing. We have pressure blocking breathing. Lots of sensation here. We begin to feel the panic of not being able to breathe, fear of suffocation. Knowing nothing else, these few words of touch indicate this is not a nice man, and, for the moment, the woman is helpless. 

Also in touch, we fix the reader in the time and place. A character feeling the texture of rough wool against her skin shows the reader a far different image than a character enjoying the light smoothness of silk. 

A character running barefoot across a lawn is going to feel cool grass or rough stubble, or the rocks protruding from the ground, etc. A doorhandle is usually metal and perhaps slippery beneath a sweating palm, as a character is about to open the door and make an important speech, or walk out of a house for the last time. 

With judicious sprinkling, touch is a layer that enriches your writing, conveying mood, and drawing the reader deeper into your story.

Once upon a time, a friend sent me a few pages of a manuscript she was critiquing. Something was wrong with it, but she couldn’t figure out what. The writing was excellent. The author—whose name I still do not know—used action verbs, kept the pace going, and possessed an excellent command of grammar. Yet I, too, found something missing when I finished the scene. 

A second read-through told me the answer: She had no auditory words. Flames stabbed from gun barrels, snow floated from the sky, and wheels slipped on icy patches. We heard no booming of shots, no crunch of wheels, and no voices. In short, she’d produced an excellent silent movie. 

Yesterday, I suggested sprinkling visual details so as not to slow the action or bog the reader down with irrelevant pictures. Today, in discussing incorporating sound, the auditory sense, I don’t want to be repetitious in instructions; therefore, I won’t tell you to sprinkle auditory words throughout the scene. 

In fact, too many writers are so judicious in sprinkling sound in their work, they leave it out altogether. 

Dialogue can be construed as sound. Yet, without an occasional suggestion of a tone of voice, one may as well have a speech synthesizer reading. No, the words themselves are not always enough to judge tone of voice. Think of this: 

“I love you,” she said. 

Or 

“I love you.” She spoke through gritted teeth. 

The first one: Yeah, that’s nice. Second one: Whoa, what’s going on here? 

In other areas, unless someone is profoundly deaf, people live in a world of sound. Think about what you can hear right now? For me, it’s the murmur of the ceiling fan, the distant hiss of air brakes, the click of a computer keyboard, one cat giving herself a bath and the other’s bell jangling as he tries to persuade me to play with him. 

Since we are surrounded by sound, to have our characters not be surrounded by sound is cutting the reader out of experiencing the character’s world. For today’s before and after, I’m using something I have written. This is being told through the point of view of a third party not in this snatch of dialogue. I’ve changed the original as though I included no auditory sense. 

“Thank you, but I’m not leaving until I either have the keys to this practice or the money back,” Dr. Vanderleyden said.  

“You can’t have either.” Doc’s heavy footfalls stalked across the room, making the floor vibrate. 

“You’re drinking in the middle of the afternoon?” Dr. Vanderleyden asked. 

What’s lacking? Tone of voice and thus most of the emotion. Any signal that the guy pours himself a drink. Any movement. It’s talking heads. 

I have deliberately neglected the visual input here because this is through the point of view of a character who is blind, so the auditory clues are paramount. 

Here is the original:  

“Thank you, but I’m not leaving until I either have the keys to this practice or the money back.” As smooth as warm maple syrup or not, Audrey Vanderleyden’s voice held a thread of steel.

“You can’t have either.” Doc’s heavy footfalls stalked across the room, making the floor vibrate. A drawer scraped open. Glass clinked

.“You’re drinking in the middle of the afternoon?” Dr. Vanderleyden sounded appalled. 

Through sound alone, we have:  

attitude—sounding appalled

character—steel in the voice

movement—scrape of the drawer opening

action—glass clinking 

Unless your character lives in a silent world, sound is a crucial sense to add to your work.

Writing with Good Senses

Since many of the latest posts have been about the business side of writing, I am going to concentrate on the craft side of writing during my visit here. We have five days. We have five senses; therefore, I will take a different sense every day.

Today, let’s talk about visual detail. This one nearly everyone gets right. We live in a visually sensory world, where everything from advertisements to the plate of food we are served at a restaurant are arranged to appeal to the eye. In writing, we want our readers to visualize the scene playing out, be able to play it in their heads like a movie unfolding on the screen. Chances are, superimposed over the computer screen or paper full of words before you, you see your characters running or sleeping; hiding or strolling through the grass; swimming or… You get the idea. But how do you convey these images to the reader without bogging them down with detail?

Spread out the descriptions. This is so basic you’d think everyone would get it. They don’t. From the local paper to bestselling novels, to manuscripts I judge in contests, I find paragraphs describing a place or event in detail. I don’t want to give a negative example of something others might recognize, so I’m making something up. It’s awful, and it’s a fair representation of what is out there.

He drove up to the house. It was big and green with gambrel windows above and picture windows below. A sidewalk bisected the front lawn, leading to a stoop.

A child sat on that stoop. She was as small as the house was big with blond pigtails and bare feet.

He got out of the car and slammed the door. “Hi,” he said to the child.

“You did come.” She bounded off the step and ran down the sidewalk.

What’s the focal point here? The house or the child or the man or the car? That depends on the story. We’ll focus on the man and child. So let’s focus on visualizing them.

He spotted the green house and parked the car in front. Sunlight reflected off the windows, blinding him, and for a moment, he didn’t see the child sitting on the front steps until she stood, shoving her bare feet into flip-flops.

“Hi.” He climbed from the car and slammed the door.

She raced down the sidewalk to the street, blond pigtails flying. “You came.”

Although setting details are minimal, the reader gains the impression it’s the only green house, a sidewalk from steps to street implies lawn or some yard, so we can presume town or suburbia or city neighborhood. It’s a house, not an apartment building or school. He’s in a car, so it’s contemporary—probably. Enough detail sprinkled throughout the narrative to let the reader visualize the setting.

Likewise, we sprinkle details about the child through the mix. She rises and puts on flip-flops. She runs and her pigtails fly. Youngish child. Excited child.

Sprinkled is the operative word. Spread your visual details out. Blend them with the action to keep the sense of sight flowing, which keeps the story moving.

Award-winning author Laurie Alice Eakes doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t making up stories in her head. One day she started putting them down on paper. Lots of practice, a degree in English from Asbury College and a Master in writing from Seton Hill University culminated in the publication of her first hardcover Family Guardian, which won the 2006 National Readers choice Award for Best Regency. She has also sold essays, articles, and other novels. Her next book, Better than Gold has just been released from Barbour Publishing. 

She lives outside Washington, DC with her husband, a law student at Georgetown University, and sundry animals.