How To Enrich Your Writing skill with All Five Senses

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 #Writer’s life

There is no gain saying in the fact that many creative writers, having a stream of flowing thoughts or ideas coming to their mind found themselves not able to write exactly what they wanted to write in one time or the other. They will grasp their writing pads or put on their laptops, ready to pouring out their mind into writing and they got stock up on the way.

Oddly enough, this could be quite frustrating. This, of course, has happened to me many times. It is not that the writer does not know what to write about or lacks the inspiration to keep the burning flame of writing alive. But sometimes, you just feel so blank… to communicate your ideas, even if you have them. How writers in this state of dilemma can forge ahead?

Today, I’m going to discuss how a writer can enrich his or her writing skills, by making use of all the five senses of human. I guess you still remember all the five senses right.  You may ask how the five senses of human can enrich my writing.

Investigations reveal that with all five senses of human can actually enrich writing. Take for example, Sight is the most obvious of the senses to invoke when depicting a scene in your written work, but your visual descriptions will benefit when you incorporate your other senses to enrich your writing.

First drafts of most travelogues are full of rich, visual detail, but often fall short on smells, tastes, sounds, and feelings. I’ve learned to add an editing round to incorporate all the senses and am constantly surprised at all the new memories that are conjured up and the rich expansion of each scene. I’ve noticed that quite a lot of nice metaphors and similes come out of this exercise, too.

Let’s look at the five senses one after the other to really appreciate how they enrich writing.

Sight

The most obvious and easiest of the senses to describe is sighting. The sight delivers on colour and texture and important aspects of scenes like landscapes, cityscapes, objects, and faces. Your visual descriptions will often benefit from the addition of another sense or two.

Smell

The sense of smell is the most closely linked with memory, and is highly emotive, as perfumers know. For example, you might transport the reader to a seaside village on a Croatian island by describing the slightly sweet, putrid scent of seaweed baking at low tide in the late afternoon sun.

Taste

Did you know that at least 75% of is taste actually formed from smell? Taste can be broken down into five areas: salty, bitter, sweet, sour, and umami, Japanese word meaning “pleasant savory taste.” So the aroma of that rotting seaweed contributes more than you might realize to the taste of the oyster you just slurped.

Touch

Unlike the other senses, the sense of touch is generously distributed all over the skin and even inside your body. With five million sensory nerve receptors (and over twenty different types of pain nerve endings) we can afford to spend a little more time on touch. Does the smell of rotting seaweed bring on a tightening of your throat, making it difficult to slip that oyster down? Readers want to know what that felt like (sort of). The feel of a handshake can reveal a page’s worth of character-building visual description. Keep in mind that the most sensitive areas of the body are your hands, lips, face, neck, tongue, fingertips, and feet.

Sound

Hearing is often described as the most important sense because it’s our early warning system. Our hearing separates complicated sounds into tones or frequencies that our minds track individually. We can follow a variety of strains of voices or instruments while also taking note of the slap of water on a boat hull, the whistle of wind through a crack in the window, the tinkle of glasses, a backfiring engine. Descriptions of sounds can backlight a scene or create drama with sudden impact.

Synesthesia

Have some fun with synesthesia, the art of assigning one sensation to another: colour to sound, smell to color, sound to smell, etc. Here’s a line from Bruno Schultz’s Street of the Crocodiles: “Adelia would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colours immediately fell on an octave lower; the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water.”

For those of you that are avid readers of James Hardly Chase’s collections, you will discover that this writer employs all the aforementioned five sense of human in all his writings. No wonder that he has the penchant of thrilling his readers with good narrative, descriptive and suspense skills.

You can become a great writer today by putting into practice what you’ve learnt in my blog post today. Share your comments here in this box. Thanks!