Making Sense of Your Writing–Part 2

March 31, 2008 by Chris
Filed under: Writing Tip

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Sensory detail only begins with your sense of smell. Taste, another sense linked closely to smell, can also create powerful associations in your reader. In my current work, “Murder To Order”, I use the sense of taste to bring the reader closer to my story. In one scene, my protagonist and detective, Jack Hunter, is cooking dinner for his visiting daughter. He’s at the stove, sauteing mushrooms for a steak dinner, would-be chef that he is. His daughter, Cali, joins him. The scene is set in sensory detail. You can smell the mushrooms cooking. Yum. When Cali tries one, you can almost taste the mushrooms with her and react to her observation that they need a little salt. Perhaps more so than smell, taste provides intimacy, sharing of food perhaps, sharing of the sensation of eating. All in all, it is a great way to bring your reader to the table, as it were.

Of course, tastes can be good or sometimes not so good. Jack is a former cop. His sensory experiences could fill a book. When he imagines the scene of the crime, he can smell and taste the metallic sense of blood in the air. Experience has given him the sensory clues and their associations. Again, as with the sense of smell, the associations that readers bring with them as they react to your sensory observations are powerful, adding a bit more to your work than you can add yourself.

Photograph by WordRidden

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