Foreshadowing and Establishing Conflict

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’m holing up and working hard on the sequel to Beasts of Tabat. I let myself have July 1 off because that was a travel day, but yesterday I managed 5k words, though that last half was like pulling teeth. This morning I got up and sat down without checking e-mail and got 1000 out of the way. My goal is 25k each week until the middle of August, which should see me with Hearts of Tabat in a decent final draft, several stories I’ve promised to people completed, the YA novel further along down the road, and perhaps even some more of Exiles of Tabat (book 3) drafted. I will be teaching while here — tomorrow is the first section of Writing Your Way into Your Novel.

To keep myself honest, I’ll be posting word count and WIP excerpts.

So, yesterday:
Word count – 5k
Hearts of Tabat current word count – 82184
SFWA time – hour and a half on call plus e-mail plus skim thru discussion boards

From Hearts of Tabat, an early chapter, still in rough draft form.

This is what a riot looked like. Pink velvet darkened to plum by spilled punch, and flickers of angry firelight glistening on the sticky surface. Two shattered windows, broken glass spiderwbs in reverse, light from the aetheric lamps hanging over the street outside washing in, acitinic blue white over the parquet floor that had been Benarda’s pride, two hundred and thirty different kinds of wood, each dedicated to a different Trade God, zebra-striped bits of southern wood like dappled petals around her boots, as though she trod on clots of dirt-streaked snow, chips of mammoth ivory salting the petals in tiny white freckles.

A punch bowl, shattered by the first brick that had come in, landing soundly in the middle beside the overturned table, sending punch and bits of curved luster-glass everywhere, a great puddle of liquid changing the colors of the woods beneath them, tinting them dark and rose.

Two paintings askew on the walls, others lying on the floor in a jumble that drew the eye as much as their subject matter, impious and arresting, the torches that had set the rioters outside afire. Someone must have known what the paintings would be like, must have tipped people off, organized the crowd.

There. Marta’s eyes, glittering hate at Adelina across the room. Gods, even now the woman would rather hold her grudge against Bella rather than worry about keeping herself alive.

This is what a riot sounded like: angry shouts coming in through the windows, drowning out the frightened whispers all around Adelina (“Was that Bella Kanto who just went out? Of course I knew she’d be here.) Benarda somewhere behind the scenes, ordering someone else to do something, it was unclear what. The woman’s best chances of keeping her gallery further intact had just walked out the door in order to stand down the crowd, which had grown from the few dozen that had been here when she and Bella had first arrived, immediately after the now-absent Duke’s speech

This is what a riot smelled like: smoke and sweat and alcohol and all the mingled pomades and perfumes ““ who was still wearing vetiver, that went out last season? And what was that intriguing cinnamon and musk blend, was that an actual edge of rum in it or some remnant of the punch?

That was what a riot felt like: Leona’s small fingers in Adelina’s own, Bella’s tiny cousin and the center of all this clamor breathing hard, the gasps and gulps of air she took in when stressed.

Adelina’s own pulse beat fists against the hollow of her throat, pressed tight fingers behind her brows every time the streetlight struck her eyes, hammered at the pit of her belly, unnerving her.