Use your moments to perceive what's around you in terms other than the visual, measuring warmth and smoothness and smell.Engaging the senses, particularly the non-visual ones, is often key to creating a story that stands out from the mass crowding every editor’s inbox. It’s such a useful strategy that every writer should have it in their toolbox.
Here are some specifics of how to evoke the senses and entrap your reader (particularly within the first three paragraphs). You may mechanically apply these techniques at first, but if you persist, you’ll find including sensory details becoming second nature and helping you build the story’s world, mood, characters, and even conflict.
1. Do it with verbs. Verbs can evoke the sense in all sorts of ways, but they’re particularly well suited to the tactile, to yanking, fizzing, tugging, as well as the auditory, bubbling, echoing, pulsing. Keep a list of interesting verbs in your notebook or find a way to generate a list to play with: a group related to a particular profession, perhaps, preferably one that depends on the senses. Cooking verbs are more interesting than desk-sitting verbs, for example: fricassee, fillet, mince, chop, simmer, poach, and my favorite, chiffonade (to roll herbs in a tight cigar and cut into 1/8 to 1/16 inch ribbons).
2. Strip away filters. If you are writing from an attached point of view, either first or third person, you do not need constructions like “he smelled the cherry blossoms” – instead, “the smell of cherry blossoms filled the air” or “hung in the air” or whatever verb you like, preferably one that yanks on yet another sense. Those unnecessary constructions intrude on the space between the reader and the text, which should be filled with the vivid evocation of the story in the reader’s head, and not a bunch of words.
For example: He smelled cherry blossoms coming from the window.
is (in my opinion) much more interesting as: The smell of cherry blossoms washed in through the window.
That’s anchored much more deeply in your pov character’s consciousness than the first sentence. It allows the provision of a more interesting verb, “washed.” Both of those provide a closer connection to the sensory detail. If you want to dig even further into the character’s consciousness, you might delve into the memories he has of the smell, what feelings it evokes in him (terror, lust, or want are often good ones to use and help develop a character like nobody’s business) or what it tells him about his surroundings that he didn’t know before.
3. Go for the gut, the emotional, the upsetting. Next time something disgusts you, take long enough to get the details down, the oily sheen of rot as it dissolves underneath your touch, the way the smell of durian stuffs itself into your nostrils, the exact configuration of what lies in that toilet. Do the same with the bad and shameful in your history, the things that paralyze you, the inescapable physical details — the way your skin feels hot during a panic attack, or the quiver you can’t fight out of your voice and the way it echoes at the pit of your stomach. Put them on the page and you will be making a story that grabs the reader and tells them something true.
Writing exercise: a meal is one of the most evocative things you can evoke. Write a meal that you loved or hated and include the conversation that swirled through it, letting the diners’ voices tell a story within the table’s landscape.
I effectively agree and try to write this way, but I think there are writers with excellent prose styles who engage the sentences while not really following the guidelines? I’m thinking specifically of numbers one and two. I think they’re good techniques, but I feel like sometimes I see them being used in critique as doctrinaire.
One thing that I tell my students is that any teacher who is saying that their approach is the only way is full of shit and should be punched in the nose. Heh.
I do think it’s better to write and know what guidelines you’re violating than to violate them unwittingly. If nothing else, it helps you to anticipate and answer the reader’s objections.
Great points! What I like best is what you say in point two: Sensory details work best if they’re part of the story, giving or triggering necessary information, and not there simply because, hey, there happened to be a cherry tree outside.
Point Two was exactly what I needed today. I’m editing and trying to tighten and I wasn’t sure where to start. Now I’m watching for her interference: She smelled, She wondered if, She realised that. Gone, every one.
When you’re tightening, there’s a great little book called The 10% Solution that is really handy. It’s the only writing book that I buy and give to people, and it’s handy for both fiction and nonfiction.
Found it. I’m working on a re-write and I wanted to re-read this post. But while searching for it, I’ve come across a heap of interesting advice: N+7, plotting and replotting, Dorothy Dunnet. Just wanted to say, thank you so much for posting all this wonderful advice.
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5 Things To Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs
A frog on a hosta leaf - which is more green? Your first three paragraphs need to arrest and intrigue your reader.1. Engage the senses. You don’t have to hit every sensory stop – but it sure helps. Vivid visuals are great, but they are even better when backed up with visceral, precise taste or touch or sound.
2. Hint at the conflict. The majority of great stories provide the reader with some clue to the conflict driving the story within the first three paragraphs. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of Kelly Link’s marvelous “Travels with the Snow Queen”:
Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you. You enter the walls of the city early in the evening, when the cobblestones are a mottled pink with reflected light, and cold beneath the slap of your bare, bloody feet. You ask the man who is guarding the gate to recommend a place to stay the night, and even as you are falling into bed at the inn, the bed, which is piled high with quilts and scented with lavender, perhaps alone, perhaps with another traveler, perhaps with the guardsman who had such brown eyes, and a mustached that curled up on either side of his nose like two waxed black laces, even as this guardsman, whose name you didn’t ask calls out a name in his sleep that is not your name, you are dreaming about the road again. When you sleep, you dream about the long white distances that still lie before you. When you wake up, the guardsman is back at his post, and the place between your legs aches pleasantly, your legs sore as if you had continued walking all night in your sleep. While you were sleeping, your feet have healed again. You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn’t really count, does it.
Holy cow, talk about grabbing the reader with bravura and effortlessly stuffing them full of story. Second person is such a wonderful and reckless choice and it works here in a way not all second person narratives do. There’s physical pain, the bare bloody feet, and sensory beyond the visual with lavender and high-piled quilts and pleasant aches. And beyond that there is both an external conflict, the enforced journey, the drive in her dreams, and an internal conflict, a shame that, because the narrator is so careful not to look at it, makes us achingly aware of its existence: You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn’t really count, does it. (The rest of the story is even better, and Link’s collection Magic For Beginners is worth picking up for its craftsmanship as well as the enjoyment its fabulous stories offer.)
3. Display your command of language. It’s worthwhile for a writer to think about poetry, and all its devices like assonance and alliteration, metaphor and allusion, internal rhythm, even meter. Save scraps of speech that you like, stud those paragraphs with wonderful things and spend with wild abandon from your store, because this is the make or break moment, when your reader decides whether or not to continue. You cannot lavish enough attention on your reader in the form of these paragraphs.
Look at how Carol Emshwiller’s “All of Us Can Almost…” begins, with a fancy hook made of punctuation attached to the title, like an elaborate latch on the door opening into the story:
…fly, that is. Of course lots of creatures can almost fy. But all of us are able to match any others of us, wingspan to wingspan. Also to any other fliers. But through we match each other wing to wing, we can’t get more than inches off the ground. If that. But we’re impressive. Our beaks look vicious. We could pose for statues for the birds representing an empire. we could represent an army or a president. And actually, we are the empire. We may not be able to fly, but we rule the skies. And most everything else too.
That conversational tone doesn’t come easily – it’s beautifully wrought, wonderfully precise.
4. Intrigue the reader while establishing the rules. Thomas M Disch’s “The Wall of America” sets the tone, narrative distance, and time frame (now to near future) while establishing a question (what’s the Wall?) that makes the reader want to keep going:
Most people got more space along the Wall than they could ever use, even the oddballs who painted leviathan-sized canvases they couldn’t hope to sell to anyone who didn’t have his own airplane hangar to hang their enormities. But if you did work on such a scale, you must have had money to burn, so what would it matter if you never sold your stuff? The important thing was having it hung where people could see it.
5. Use interesting, active words. You can never go wrong with this. Here’s James Tiptree Jr. at her best, full of poetry in “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!”:
Hot summer night, big raindrops falling faster now as she swings along the concrete expressway, high over the old dead city. Lightning is sizzling and cracking over the lake behind her. Beautiful! The flashes jump the roofs of the city to life below her, miles of cube buildings gray and sharp-edged in the glare. People lived here once, all the way to the horizons. Smiling, she thinks of all those walls and windows full of people, living in turbulence and terror. Incredible.
All of these count in titles too. Here’s an exercise: write down ten first sentences or titles, playing with one of these concepts in each. Then pick the most promising and go write that story.
Recently — or perhaps not so recently — much has been made of women writing science fiction. Often it’s coupled with a complaint about “PC” behavior stifles creativity or how leftist writing “has no new ideas.”
Hmm. Speaking as an unabashed leftist and someone lacking a penis, which may bias me somewhat, in my experience the opposite is true. I find much more interesting stuff in those who are willing to question the status quo, rather than simply write fiction using the same old stories, but this time with lasers! or infinity drives! or whatever. As Patty Jansen put it recently in her blog post, “There are girl cooties on my spaceship — on women writing hard SF,” “There are many younger readers out there who do not want their SF with sauce of sexist golden age nostalgia.”
To talk about this, though, I need to mention a book I’ve been recently reading, David Zindell’s Neverness. It’s a terrific book with some amazing writing in it. Here, for example, is a passage from page 23, which I love for its ability to seed in information about societal structures while describing a crowd:
“We received our pilot’s rings late in the afternoon of the next day. At the center of Resa, surrounded by the stone dormitories, apartments, and other buildings of the college, the immense Hall of the Ancient Pilots overflowed with the men and women of our Order. From the great arched doorway to the dais where we journeymen knelt, the brightly colored robes of the academicians and high professionals rippled like a sea of rainbow silk. Because the masters of the various professions tended to cleave to their peers, the rainbow sea was patchy: near the far pillars at the north end of the Hall stood orange-robed cetics, and next to them, a group of akashics covered from neck to ankle in yellow silk. There were cliques of scryers berobed in dazzling white, and green-robed mechanics standing close to each other, no doubt arguing as to the ultimate (and paradoxical) composition and nature of the spacetime continuum, or some other arcanum. Just below the dais was the black wavefront of the pilots and master pilots. I saw Lionel, Tomoth and his brothers, Stephen Caraghar and others that I knew. At the very front stood my mother and Justine, looking at us — I thought — proudly.”
Great stuff, yeah? And at the same time, I find the book puts me, as a female reader, in an odd position. The women in the book so far are either relatives or love interest, and their defining characteristics seem somewhat odd: the male protagonist’s mother’s defining characteristic is that she’s chubby from eating too many chocolate candies, while much is made of his aunt’s sexual rapacity.
In a novel, often the main point of view is our lens for the book. If the book were a first-person shooter game, this is the character one maneuvers through the game. Women are used to having this male perspective imposed on them; we’ve been reading those narratives ever since we started reading.
And so we hit passages like this, a quote from the fictional A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh, before Chapter Four begins:
In the beginning, of course, there was God. And from God arose the Elder Ieldra, beings of pure light who were like God except that there was a time before their existence, and a time would come when they would exist no more. And from the Elder Ieldra arose the Ieldra, who were like the elder race except they had substance and flesh. The Ieldra seeded the galaxy, and perhaps many galaxies, with their DNA. On Old Earth, from this Godspeed evolved the primitive algae and bacteria, the plankton, slime molds, worms, fishes, and so on until ape-Man stood away from the trees of the mother continent. And ape-Man gave birth to cave-Men, who were like Men except that they did not have the power to end their own existence.
And from cave-Men at last arose Man, and Man, who was at once clever and stupid took to bed four wives: The Bomb; The Computer; The Test Tube; and Woman.
That passage makes my mind explode a little, and not in a good way. Certainly one can argue that Zindell is simply replicating the structure of other creation myths from human history. But others have pointed out why things like using “Man” to refer to the human race overall is problematic (for an excellent overview of that and related issues, see Dale Spender’s Man-made Language) and those problems exist in this passage and are totally unquestioned.
Which is odd, because in many ways Zindell’s book is less obtrusive about this sort of thing than many examples. A few years ago, I read an Asimov story where the spacemen did various important things — and then returned to their white-picket surrounded houses on the moon, where their Stepford wives were waiting. That seemed like a crappy future to me. It still does. Other examples abound.
Why do we read? To escape, perhaps. To put ourselves in a different head for a while. To compare our experiences with that of others. To learn what it is to be human. And if those different heads, those experiences are narrowed down to only male ones, it seems…problematic at best.
My first “real” science fiction novel was a book my father brought back from a trip, Samuel R. Delany’s The Fall of the Towers. I must have read that twenty or thirty times. In that book, there’s a female character I can identify with, Alter. There’s plenty of women, doing all sorts of things, including being a villain. It feels, if I might dare to use the word when talking about speculative fiction, more “realistic” than the Zindell world.
I’m reminded of a passage from Kelly Link‘s “Travels With the Snow Queen,” one that I often use in class. Here it is:
“Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are breadcrumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you.
There is a map of fine white scars on the soles of your feet that tells you where you have been. When you are pulling the shards of the Snow Queen’s looking-glass out of your feet, you remind yourself, you tell yourself to imagine how it felt when Kay’s eyes, Kay’s heart were pierced by shards of the same mirror. Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.
Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren’t easy on the feet?”
That last line is brilliant. Because suddenly Link turns around and with that salutation, “Ladies,” directly calls out the fact that so many narratives presume a male reader. That line turns the convention on its head and puts male readers in a situation female readers are well acquainted it: provided a point of identification with the story that doesn’t “fit” the reader in terms of gender.
An interesting aspect of this discussion is the insistence that men don’t read books by women – which may or may not be true, depending on the factors you’re looking at. Is it that men are by nature unsuited to this demand that one put oneself in a skin that cannot, by its nature, actually belong to you? Surely that cannot be true of all male readers.
Women are not a monolithic group, any more than men are. You cannot pick out one individual and insist that they represent all human experience. This is in part the appeal of reading – that we are experiencing something other than ourself, that we are putting on a costume and seeing what it looks like to strut around inside that skin for while. Perhaps this is a second possible reason why some men refuse to read fiction by women — they find that particular costume so demeaning or one that they feel they have so little in common with that it’s not worth the investment of reading time.
Let me confess a guilty secret: when I was a pre-teen I read all the Destroyer books, a men’s adventure series written by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir. You could find them easily in used bookstores, and by my estimate, I read over a hundred of the 145 in the series. They were awesome. They had great banter and interesting adventures, and their approach to sex was (and now that I think about it much later as a writer, this is actually a really interesting narrative choice) that Remo, a white practitioner of the ancient art of Sinanju, could drive women to absolute ecstasy with the equivalent of a touch to the elbow, a process that seemed to become increasingly boring to Remo over the course of the series. Due to the powers given to him by Sinanju Remo could, by my recollection, scale sheer walls, fake death, act as a human lie-detector, run silently (and faster than most humans) and, of course, kick utter total absolute ass in a fight. He was also rendered helpless by ingesting a hamburger, because his body had been purified by the brown rice and water diet of Sinanju to the point where it couldn’t deal with any other foods.
Much of the book’s pleasure was the dialogue, particularly the banter between Remo’s instructor in Sinanju, an ancient Asian man named Chiun, and Remo, who didn’t particularly appreciate things like not eating hamburgers or enjoying sex. Another was the crazy plots, which were as pulpy as they come. (I also read a great deal of Doc Savage, but will save the Man of Bronze for some other essay).
The point, now I have maundered fondly about the books for a bit is this: those books would seem to be the equivalent of a preteen boy enjoying Regency romances, which is something that, at least when I was growing up, would have gotten him heartily mocked by most of my fellow Midwestern teens. But that never bothered me, and I don’t remember ever feeling like I should feel embarrassed for reading them.
It seems to me there’s an odd thing that happens to male readers. We (all children) begin with a mix of viewpoints in the form of fairy tales. It’d be interesting to see what the gender breakdown is, reading level by reading level (think about Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys for an example later on), because it seems to me that it skews more male when we hit what has been defined as the classics (See Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing for some reasons why this happens).
At the same time, there’s an age point — for me it was around thirteen — where there’s a lot of pressure to act (if not think, perhaps) as the “right” gender. A lot of that’s coming from mainstream media but there’s plenty of other sources and to my perception men get just as much pressure, if not more, in a way that denies them a lot of emotional structures while giving them a number of advantages.
From an early age, women read protagonists with a male skin. Actually, we live in a world where the assumption of a male skin is pretty unrelentingly forced upon us: by electronic media like movies, television, and radio, by the Internet, by advertising, by education. And when we experience things aimed at us as women, often they seem to be there to force us into a particular definition of femininity.
Certainly men lose out on this social structure as well. Look at Raj in the Big Bang Theory to see what is marked as aberrant in a male: not just skin color, interestingly enough, but enjoyment/appreciation of fine cuisine, emotional sensitivity, and an non-sexualized appreciation of female company. The patriarchy is a structure that does advantage men, but it is a double-edged sword (Freudian overtones intentional) in that it denies them many things allowed to women: a greater freedom to express emotions (although that comes with implications that it’s a sign of weakness); appreciation of some of the sense-based aspects of life; the ability to be colorful in dress and wear make-up (though that seems to be eroding). And we’re all seeing body images that don’t match our own, particularly in a culture that teaches us bad dietary habits and offers plenty of cheap fast-food. Instances of young men with eating disorders have risen dramatically, for example.
Science fiction is the literature of “what if?” It seems bizarre not to realize that different viewpoints are going to have new and interesting what ifs that may have been overlooked in the past. I have hopes for speculative fiction: that it will continue to diversify, to expose us to new and interesting viewpoints in a way that makes them “us” rather than “other.”
17 Responses
Fascinating. Thanks, Cat. I’ll be coming back to this.
I effectively agree and try to write this way, but I think there are writers with excellent prose styles who engage the sentences while not really following the guidelines? I’m thinking specifically of numbers one and two. I think they’re good techniques, but I feel like sometimes I see them being used in critique as doctrinaire.
I totally want to take your class. 😀
One thing that I tell my students is that any teacher who is saying that their approach is the only way is full of shit and should be punched in the nose. Heh.
I do think it’s better to write and know what guidelines you’re violating than to violate them unwittingly. If nothing else, it helps you to anticipate and answer the reader’s objections.
Great points! What I like best is what you say in point two: Sensory details work best if they’re part of the story, giving or triggering necessary information, and not there simply because, hey, there happened to be a cherry tree outside.
You might as well make that cherry work!
Point Two was exactly what I needed today. I’m editing and trying to tighten and I wasn’t sure where to start. Now I’m watching for her interference: She smelled, She wondered if, She realised that. Gone, every one.
Thank you!
When you’re tightening, there’s a great little book called The 10% Solution that is really handy. It’s the only writing book that I buy and give to people, and it’s handy for both fiction and nonfiction.
I’ve heard it mentioned before. It’s time for another amazon delivery anyway! 😉
Hello, Cat.
Found it. I’m working on a re-write and I wanted to re-read this post. But while searching for it, I’ve come across a heap of interesting advice: N+7, plotting and replotting, Dorothy Dunnet. Just wanted to say, thank you so much for posting all this wonderful advice.
I’m so glad it’s useful! 🙂