In writing, we only feel included as readers when our senses are involved. As we read with our senses involved, we learn more about ourselves and others by encountering the way the others record surroundings through their senses. As writers, we have a fuller picture when we allow our characters and ourselves as speakers to employ the five senses. Whether we are writing in the first, second, or third person, showing via the senses makes for vital writing that evokes rather than explains a situation. It keeps us immersed in our experience and better able to evoke it.

The following are passages from one of my favorite novels, Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

From page 140:

And out there in the middle of the first day of August, just getting into his car, was Bill Forrester, who shouted he was going downtown for some extraordinary ice cream or other and would anyone join him? So, not five minutes later, jiggled and steamed into a better mood, Douglas found himself stepping in off the fiery pavements and moving through the grotto of soda-scented air, of vanilla freshness at the drugstore, to sit at the snow-marble fountain with Bill Forrester. They then asked for a recital of the most unusual ices and when the fountain man said, “Old fashioned lime-vanilla ice…”

“That’s it!” said Bill Forrester.

“Yes, sir!” said Douglas.

And, while waiting they turned slowly on their rotating stools. The silver spigots, the gleaming mirrors, the hushed whirl-around ceiling fans, the green shades over the small windows, the harp-wire chairs, passed under their moving gaze.  They stopped turning. Their eyes touched upon the face and form of Miss Helen Loomis, ninety-five years old, ice cream spoon in hand, ice cream in mouth.

“Young man,” she said to Bill Forrester, “you are a person of taste and imagination. Also, you have the will power of ten men; otherwise you would not dare veer away from the common flavors listed on the menu and order, straight out, without quibble or reservation, such an unheard-of thing as lime-vanilla ice.”

He bowed his head solemnly to her.

“Come sit with me, both of you,” she said. “We’ll talk of strange ice creams and such things as we seem to have a bent for. Don’t be afraid; I’ll foot the bill.”

Smiling, they carried their dishes to her table and sat.

It’s summer in the Midwest in 1928. Douglas Spaulding is 12 and his senses are alert to everything. Although the book is in third person, the narrator is usually seeing the world through Douglas’ eyes.

Notice the way the simple act of going to an ice cream parlor is a festival for the senses–first smell: Douglas goes from fiery sidewalks to soda-scented and vanilla air. Then the touch sensations: the counter at the soda fountain is “snow marble.” There are many ways to describe white, but snow is a cooling way, and what Douglas wants is a respite from the heat.

When Tom and the boy wheel on their stools, the sense of sight is well represented.

When Helen Loomis speaks (sense of hearing for the reader), our sense of taste is awakened again with the repetition of “lime vanilla ice.”

Although we don’t see the fountain man serve Tom and Douglas who are waiting, we know their dishes have arrived since they bring them to Helen’s table — no need to see them dig in; we have already dug into the scene through our senses and know the feeling of the ice on our tongues, the taste of the vanilla and lime.

And so begins a wonderful friendship between Tom and Helen. He had seen a photo of her as a young woman and didn’t know how long ago it had been taken. When he thinks of the photo, he thinks this way:

It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic chemistry, which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers.

We feel (the surprise of powdering snow) and we smell (clover breath) and we see (pomegranate red lips and a bright noon sky).

Your Turn:

It is summer for us now. Try writing a remembered or current summer scene that incorporates all of the senses and evokes a happy mood from the sense information that is in keeping with you mood or one of your characters’ moods. If you are writing memoir, for this exercise, you might decide on a scene that takes place at school, in your living room, or on a trip to a grandmother’s house or the state fair. It might be at a summer camp, while running wild in the woods, or at a favorite lake. If you are writing a scene about a character of your invention, put your character in a place they are delighted to be and that they connect to very well.

Next, something like the famous novelist John Gardner advised in his book The Art of Fiction, try describing that place or another place in the speaker or character’s history from the point of view of someone who is sad, fearful, angry or distraught.

Often, writing about something from childhood works well when you are trying to experiment with using the senses, as so much about our early lives is deeply stored in the way we received impressions.

Ray Bradbury is inventive and takes risks in his writing — he verges sometimes on the edge of sentimental, but there is such freshness in the way he puts the words together that he never goes over that edge.

So, take risks and see what happens when you intentionally involve the five senses.