THURSDAY’S TIP’S: WRITE SENSATIONALLY

REMEMBER TO BRING ALL
THE SENSES TO PLAY

THURSDAY’S TIP’S: Write sensationally!

“Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.” -  Janet Fitch

Today, I took Janet Fitch's advice, I read through my wip in search of setting. Keeping Hal looking around him was the order of the day. I found that although I’d remembered to tell the reader where Hal was I was over-reliant on the sense of sight.

Apparently, there are more than the five senses that could be used to add depth to the readers understanding: 

•  Sight

•  Taste

•  Touch

•  Pressure

•  Itch

•  Thermoception:  Ability to sense heat and cold. 

•  Sound: 

•  Smell: 

•  Proprioception:  This sense gives you the ability to tell where your body parts are, relative to other body parts. 

•  Tension Sensors:  These are found in such places as your muscles and allow the brain the ability to monitor muscle tension.

•  Nociception:  In a word, pain.  There are three distinct types of pain receptors: cutaneous (skin), somatic (bones and joints), and visceral (body organs).

•  Equilibrioception:   The sense that allows you to keep your balance and sense body movement in terms of acceleration and directional changes. 

•  Stretch Receptors:  These are found in such places as the lungs, bladder, stomach, and the gastrointestinal tract. 

•  Chemoreceptors:  These trigger an area of the medulla in the brain that is involved in detecting blood born hormones and drugs - the vomiting reflex is linked to this one.

•  Thirst

•  Hunger

•  Magentoception:  This is the ability to detect magnetic fields

•  Time:  This one is still being debated but experimental data has conclusively shown humans have a startling accurate sense of time.

Using senses more traditional than fascinating, and considering the speed at which the writing needed to flow, I dripped in sensory information that added to way the reader would picture the setting.

The sensory information adds depth to the ambience - moving the reader on from an understanding of a river in general, to this river in particular.

I think the adjectives provide the ambient overview but the verb provides the sharp spotlight that highlights the details.

I read somewhere that three sections designed to bring depth to how the reader relates to the environment is enough. 

ARE YOU HAVING A SENSATIONAL EVENING?