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