Writing With All Five Senses
SIGHT
One of the easiest senses to include in a story is sight, because we constantly have the characters looking at things to tell the reader what they see. However, we sometimes forget the more basic parts of a scene to describe:
Types of Seeing
Little details, like the clown knickknacks on a shelf or the title of a book on the bedside table
- Lighting – dark, light, romantic, eerie, candlelit, floodlights, sunlight
- The relative messiness or cleanliness of a room or a person
- The comparative colors of items – someone could simply have “brown eyes” or they could have “warm, honey-brown pools of amber” or “flecks of gold in their shit brown eyes”
- The clashing of colors or prints
- Repetitive colors
- Furniture, particularly something oddly placed
- Hallucinations
- Paranoid / imagined visions
- Fireworks
- Various looks of intimacy – when you secretly glance at a crush, lighting up at the return of a loved one, during intercourse, during orgasm, post intercourse
- Looks of emotion – anger, sadness, joy, content, despair, depression, confusion, etc. Highly recommend looking through The Emotion Thesaurus as you try to describe emotions. The authors do a fabulous job of telling you how a person would look and act while feeling a myriad of emotions.
Character Reactions
- Widening eyes
- Squeezed or pinched eyes
- Covering eyes or forcing someone to uncover their eyes
- Shifting, rolling or averting eyes
- Winking or blinking – or unblinking
Use these links to jump to a specific page of this post: MAIN ENTRY | TASTE | SMELL | SOUND | TOUCH
Posted on October 2, 2014, in Writings and tagged inspiration, Novels, senses, writer tips, writing. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
Reblogged this on Erika for President and commented:
Nice resource!