Creative writing requires that we create experience through our words. We can’t just say a day was amazing, or it was depressing, or that a character felt ecstatic about something without our readers becoming disengaged. If we do that we have created distance between ourselves as writers and our material and, eventually, between the story and its readers. Robert Frost is misquoted as saying, “No discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader.” In actuality he said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” either way, though, when we use sensory details, those images that appeal to the five senses, we are working to discover the depth of our stories. Sensory experience is never summary or abstraction. Our senses allow us to be in the world of a story. Sensory detail leads us as writers, and next leads our readers, to achieve felt discoveries because experience is embodied in what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.

The famous fiction writer, John Gardner, writes in The Art of Fiction that:

Discovering the meaning and communicating the meaning are for the writer one single act. One does not simply describe a barn, then. One describes a barn as seen by someone in some particular mood, because only in that way can the barn—or the writer’s experience of barns combined with whatever lies deepest in his feelings—be tricked into mumbling its secrets.

“Tricked into mumbling its secrets.” This is worth remembering when we write. We must slow time down to perform this trick. We must let ourselves and our readers linger in what fills the senses in our scenes. We must trust that the unconscious mind, the mind that is not directed by us but flows through us, can and will choose sensory images that will build the experience the story wants to evoke. We must trust that if the organizing part of our mind (that always wants to sew things up and make us run from the mess we are getting into) misdirects us to the wrong images, we will eventually hear that in revision. We must trust that we can write past that protective critic to allow what I call the “design mind” to do the choosing. The design mind can be a shy mind when the orderly mind intrudes. To me writing is kind of war, or at least, especially as we begin, a kind of skirmish, between the brains. I rely on sensory details to win the battles since sensory details are not the organizing mind’s forte and that brain soon tires and lets go. Then we are in flow as writers.

“No amount of intellectual study,” Gardner writes, can determine for the writer what details he should include. If the description is to be effective, he must choose his boards, straw, pigeon manure, and ropes.” Gardner illustrates this point with an exercise. Describe a lake, he instructs, from the point of view of a man who has just committed a murder. He says not to mention the murder. What if you were to next write a description of the same lake by a man who has just fallen in love and not reveal that he has fallen in love? Try it. Same lake, different information taken in through the senses yields different experience and different truths in human experience.

Gardner reminds us that when we use sensory details, our stories have verisimilitude, the sense that something is authentic and true, allowing us, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared, to commit a “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment” and enter the author’s accounts as if we are living the action and thoughts ourselves. The details are the “roots hooked it seems into the universe,” Gardner says, “or at least into the hearts of human beings. Somehow the fictional dream persuades us that it’s a clear, sharp, edited version of the dream all around us.”

Is there a more beautiful way of speaking about what makes fiction important, compelling, satisfying, and sometimes more true than what we experience daily? It is ironic, I think, that in writing it is the details that we see, hear, taste, touch and smell, but so often do not allow to register deeply in our ongoing lives, that matter greatly for getting at the felt experience we savor in stories.

In the little book Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Carlson illustrates the act of “describing the barn” and the writer’s “experience of barns combining with whatever lies deepest in his feelings” this way: “I want to see what is going to happen to my character. My credo is: just follow, approach the unknown with simple knowns, stay in the physical world, figure what could be earned by what has gone before.”

Carlson calls the details of the physical world his story’s “inventory.” He says that it “would be a mistake to make our characters too capable of understanding and articulating their own condition.” Instead, the writer’s job is to “create a real truck, a real bucket of suds, a heavy wet rag (the corner of a towel), the smell of water on the warm cement driveway.” In a story called “The Governor’s Ball,” the narrator is taking a mattress to the dump. There, Carlson describes the moment of discarding the mattress: “The dump, lying in the lea of the Kennecott tailings mound, was strangely warm. Throwing the debris onto the mountain of trash, I could smell certain sweet things rotting, and my feet warmed up a bit. By the time I swept out the truck, it was full dark.”

Carlson explains that the outer story is the motor of a story and the inner story is the freight. The job of the outer story is to become a convincing vicarious experience for the reader” and “the inner story is always about the complicated interplay of the facets of the human heart.” He says he isn’t going to worry about the freight because if he is careful in writing about the vehicles, the weather, and the next physical thing, the contours of the inner story will emerge.

Trust the physical world and the details that appeal to the senses; then your story’s discovery, truth and purpose will arise.

In The Art and Craft of Storytelling: A Comprehensive Guide to Classic Writing Techniques, Nancy Lamb illustrates the way in which sensory details allow the storyteller to avoid exposition and keep the reader in the story by taking the time to integrate information with character.

Instead of “The pungent scent of the baking bread penetrated the house,” she says to consider, “The pungent scent of the baking bread penetrated the dusky corners of the house, reminding Marianne she hadn’t eaten since morning.” Your story itself is “a living, organic entity. It breathes, it smells. It touches and it tastes. Your job is to feed these senses, to keep them alive amidst the challenge and conflict and turmoil your hero must confront.”

To encourage your focus on sensory images, make lists of specific images of what you hear, taste, smell, touch and see from where you write. Next, write about memories triggered by some of these images. Be sure to include what Ron Carlson calls “inventory,” the specific details in the memory—names of streets, objects, activities, clothing, among so many others. Doing this exercise will help you establish and exercise the habit of including sensory details in your stories’ scenes. Lamb says that “For reader and writer, too, sensory details awaken sleeping thoughts and feelings, allowing our imaginations to exist in two places at once…Specific sights, sounds and sensations evoke memories of other times and other places—memories we can use to create stories that move beyond authenticity and into the heart of truth.”

When we write with images that come in through our senses, we give ourselves a substrate, a place where the subtext, or, in Carlson’s terms, the inner story is germinating and reaching toward the sun. We listen to the sensory images to find out what that inner story is. Here is a passage from a short story I wrote in which a middle-aged woman has a fantasy about being lovers with her young, college-aged tennis instructor. In this passage she has been waiting a while for her practice partner to show up and hears music coming from a small building nearby:

She walked instead toward the piano music and stood in the open theater doorway. She could feel the sun’s warmth on her back as she watched the young man move his long fingers over the keys. Bertha thought he was probably the same age as Steve, her Saturday morning tennis instructor at home. She felt again the softness of Steve’s hand over hers when he coached her on her grip.

Bertha had fallen in love with Steve the very first time he’d touched her. She’d vowed not to get her grip right just to have Steve caress her hand again and again as he showed her the proper way to hold her racket. She went home and purged her pantry of Cheez Whiz and all the crackers with tropical oil in the ingredients. She called Jenny Craig in hopes of losing thirty pounds and went out to Rite Aid to find a proper system for aging skin, a bottle of blue toner, a pump container of cleansing cream, and moisturizer with sunscreen.

The sound of the piano music, the length of the player’s fingers, the unspoken sensuousness of those fingers on the keys, trigger Bertha’s memory of Steve’s touch as he teaches her to hold a racket correctly, and her action of cleaning specific items out of her pantry.

The exercise I suggested will help you to limber up for accessing specific sensory images and details in your writing. Again: make lists of specific images of what you hear, taste, smell, touch and see from where you write; write about memories these images trigger for you.

Here are two short passages I wrote for a recent presentation on the power of specific sensory images. When I began to organize the presentation, I had in mind only that I needed to demonstrate the use of specific images. When I read them now, I see how the images resonate with one another and build a mood, not one I was consciously reaching for, but one that happened as I kept my senses on the characters and the occasion I had put them in. I am pleased to have taken Ron Carlson’s advice to “just follow, approach the unknown with simple knowns, stay in the physical world, figure what could be earned by what has gone before.”

“Get off that butt of yours right now!”

There was something I had never heard in my mother’s voice.

I looked at the apron she wore, the holes I poked my fingers through when it hung on its hook by the stove. I wondered at the basket she carried, its handle over her wrist, though it seemed heavy in the damp fog that filled our kitchen, the door to the garage still ajar. She was about to cry. I didn’t want to hear that.

I listened to the coffee on the burner, perk its last perk.

I used sound imagery to open a scene (dialog), texture and weight imagery (the fog, the basket), and visuals (holes in the apron, basket handle over a wrist, door ajar) to draw the setting and situation before closing the scene with another sound image, the perk. The substrate grew from something new in the mother’s voice, holes in an apron, wonder about her carrying a heavy basket over her wrist, a damp fog, and a door ajar, to making me place an important word before perk, the word “last.”

And the holes are not just holes, but holes the speaker fiddled with, sticking his finger through them. Why is the door ajar? What has happened before the mom yelled her command to her offspring? I don’t know yet whether this child is a boy or a girl. I don’t know what has pushed the mother to the last straw, but I have (and I hope an eventual reader will) curiosity about finding out.

I also wrote this passage to demonstrate using sensory imagery to describe a character through a narrator’s eyes:

My grandmother’s voice cracked when she said hello. She asked if I wanted orange juice with her back turned so I couldn’t say no. The Chinese cabinet along one wall stood on legs that seemed too spindly to hold it up. The smell of hard-boiled eggs hung in the air. The juice tasted of too much water. I wiped my lips with the rough woven napkin she offered.

And here again, I listen to where the images are building that inner story substrate: a cracked voice, back turned, cabinet on spindly legs, hard boil egg smell in the air, diluted juice, rough napkin. Oh, my, I think, this is not a comfortable place for the I to be. Why does she have to be there? What has brought her there? Why is the grandmother like that? Will the grandmother soften as the story proceeds or not? What will happen inside the I as the story proceeds? I want to find out as I write, and I trust that images that appeal to my ears, eyes, nose, tongue and skin will help me know my story’s direction.

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When you write, let sensory images lead you. When you revise, find the places where you summarized instead of using images and dig back in there to unearth sensory images that encourage readers’ willing suspension of disbelief and make your story an experience of authenticity and truth.