Using all the Senses

We’re encouraged to use all the senses in our writing:  sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. 

I’ll let you into a secret. At school, we had one English lesson each week called ‘Prose Writing’ – and I hated it! I didn’t want to write descriptions of ‘A Summer Meadow’ or ‘A Storm at Sea’ using the five senses.  I wanted to write about PEOPLE – what they said, what they did and, even more importantly, how they felt.

Maybe I should have tried harder in those Prose Writing lessons, because I still struggle with descriptive writing – and with using the five senses. I don’t consciously think about using the 5 senses when I’m writing.  If they’re there, it’s instinctive, rather than planned.

I think the so-called sixth sense can be equally important.  Hunches, suspicions, 'gut' instinct, intuition, even foreboding and premonition, can play a big part in creating suspense in a novel. 

For me, there’s another sense – emotion.  The heroine’s emotion when the hero kisses her is far more important to me than what his lips taste like or the smell of his aftershave. Her inner reaction to his anger or his sweet-talk matters more than what his voice actually sounds like or what music is playing in the background.

The reader knows what the senses are. She (I say this because romance readers are usually women!) has probably held a man’s hand, smelt his aftershave, heard his laughter, seen his frown or smile, and tasted his lips. I can leave a lot of that to my readers’ imaginations, I don’t need to spell it out for them with adjectives or similes. What I want is for them to FEEL the character’s response to all these things and that’s where I concentrate my energies.