In today's Round Robin Blog we will talk about using the senses to put your readers right into the heart of your stories.
For several years now, I’ve been judging a great writing contest that I believe in because you don’t just fork over your money and submit your work, then either win or not. Instead, whether published or unpublished, you get the rubrics with your scores in ten different areas of importance and comments or suggestions. No writer on the planet knows everything so even a multi published author might glean a new hint or idea, and unpublished, aspiring writers find out what worked and what didn’t work so they can go back to polish the piece before submitting it for publication. One of those areas of discussion is description, so I’ve had a few months now of reading a variety of new and not so new author’s work and experiencing how they have put me into the scene to experience what their characters are experiencing.
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One of the biggest problems I see with some writers (some that are already published even) is the desire to see everything, and thus the temptation to write in the Omniscient point of view. Omniscient can be a great point of view when well done, but far too often, the reader is left feeling like they are watching a movie rather than experiencing it. TV and movie producers are careful to set the scene authentically, but the big problem is that you are outside watching, no matter how well done. The advantage of a book is the reader can “feel” like he or she is smack dab in the middle of the action. It is the difference between telling and showing, which we’ve discussed before. Telling doesn’t engage the reader as completely as showing.
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What a movie or television show cannot do is make you FEEL what is going on. You can’t feel the heat of a raging fire, or the frigid cold of a blizzard. You can’t smell the salty tang of fog, or the sweet scent of flowers. You can see the wind pulling at a character’s hair or clothes, but you can’t feel it. The senses we are all most aware of are: Smell, taste, hearing, vision/seeing, touch and also pain. There are two more that can come into play that we often overlook: Proprioception and vestibular. Proprioception is our awareness of our bodies in space. This sense is what causes your stomach to lurch when the elevator begins and abrupt descent, or the feeling of gravity, which most of us don’t pay much attention to unless we are piloting an airplane doing crazy maneuvers or living at the space station. Vestibular is another one we mostly ignore and that’s an awareness of how our bodies move, a heart racing in fear or perhaps our stomach growling with hunger. For this blog we will just address the first five.
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It's easy to “tell” the reader that the air is crisp with the arrival of a winter wind. We might even tell the reader that our character shivered with the sudden cold. But the reader will feel that better if we put them in the scene: for instance: She hunched her shoulders as a blast of icy air shoved its way down her collar and every muscle in her body trembled at the intrusion. Can’t you just feel your own shoulders tensing in sympathy?
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Likewise, we could tell the reader that the scent of fall was in the air, with piles of burning leaves in the gutters as families raked up the colorful masses from their front lawns. Or we could suggest that: Colin’s eyes smarted as a gust of wind blew the smoke into his face. We’ve all experienced such an event, maybe not with fall leaves, but around a campfire, or watching a controlled burn, or a house fire, so we sympathize with Colin. We know how it felt.
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We could say Sam fell hard and bit his tongue, tasting the blood. But what if we told it like this? Sam slammed down on the ice. It had been years since he’d last gone ice skating and he’d forgotten how hard ice was, or how shocking the blow to a tailbone that came abruptly in contact with it. Then the coppery taste of his own blood told him he’d bit his tongue as well. Which of these two descriptions puts you into the scene best?
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How about, her lover’s touch was gentle, almost too gentle, as opposed to: his fingers traced a shivery line from her chin down to the tip of her breast, setting off tiny flares of desire that made her ache for more.
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Who knew the cymbals would be right behind my head when the player clashed them together with a loud reverberation? Or: It felt like the damned cymbals were inside my head, crashing into my brain and echoing out through my ears.
Another sound most of us can relate to is that of a crashing car. An author taking the easy way out might say the speeding truck smashed into the parked car with a sickening crunch of metal on metal. But a good writer might get into the down and dirty with: No way that kid in the speeding truck could have lived through that sick sounding collision with the parked car. Screeching tires burned hot against brakes applied too late. Metal scraped against metal gouging deadly gashes along the way. Then came the splintering shatter of breaking glass, a hiss of steam venting from the overtaxed engine and finally the dead silence when all motion stopped. Of course, the writer could go on to add the smell or sight of the crash.
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And never forget the "little" sounds that set the scene. The gentle eddy of water along the shore of a lake. The crickets chirping on a walk home in the dark. The sizzle of bacon frying. The drip of faucet your character has been meaning to fix but never gets around to, or the creak of unoiled hinges. The cluck of hens on a farm, or the coo of pigeons in the city. The constant sound of traffic sets the scene near a highway. If there are horns tooting, perhaps it's a city. In the country, it's the lack of all those sounds - a quiet that lets the sound of the crickets be heard. It's those little sounds we grow so used to hearing we fail to notice them until they stop that set the reader firmly in that place and time.
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Smell might be one of the harder senses to show the reader. We’ve all read about the sweet smell of roses, but what IS that sweet smell. We all know what chocolate chip cookies smell like, too. But how to describe a scent. One of my high school English teacher asked us to describe a scent in 500 words for his first homework assignment. I honestly wish I still 
had a copy of that paper. I got an A+ after being certain I’d fail. I described the scent of sheets fresh off the line. Of course, in today’s world not many American’s could relate to that anyway given we all shove our sheets in dryers and the only scent is whatever the dryer sheet we add has been imbued with. Romance writers love to describe a hero’s cologne as having a musky odor. In all honestly, that doesn’t really turn me on, but it takes all kinds, I guess. Telling about an odor would use words like acrid, pungent, sweet, putrid, minty, or flowery, 
so showing a scent requires more comparison. The smell of fresh baked bread might be yeasty, but if you’ve never smelled yeast, or fresh baked products raised with yeast, that kind of leaves you with a big blank. But how about this? The kitchen had a clean, 
slightly sweet, yeasty aroma that somehow smelled warm, like you were inhaling a blanket on a cold winter day. Chocolate chip cookies might have a sweet, sugary, vanilla scent overlaid with rich hints of chocolate that always made your mouth water. Rain might have an earthy smell to it. Fog might have a damp, salty tang. And a campfire might have hints of pine in the smoke.
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And then there’s pain. In the ER they always want you to describe your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. But there are so many variations. To just tell a reader that his head ached, or his stubbed toe throbbed, is telling. How about if the author told you his headache felt like those cymbals crashing inside? Or if it felt like his head was in a vice? Or it hurt so bad he thought his eyeballs must be bulging? Does that give you a better idea just how much his head hurt? Or that toe that throbbed. If the writer instead told it like this: “God damn it!” Damned box in the wrong place. I’m going to kill that kid for leaving it there. I hopped on the other foot, unable to put weight on my injured toe for several minutes and even then the stabbing pain shot up my leg like a knife.
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It is always important to set the scene with great description and most authors get this. We are great at describing a dark and spooky cemetery or the clatter and bustle of the hallway in a school when the bell rings with images that bring the scene to the reader’s mind. But adding the senses draws them right into that noisy hallway with chattering classmates, the crash of books in lockers, locker doors being slammed shut, the scent of someone’s week old gym shorts when a locker is opened. The same goes with the cemetery, with the creak of bare branches rattling or scraping together, long inky dark shadows crossing your path, or the hoot of an owl. The next time you consider doing it the easy way, ask yourself, do I want to tell the reader what it looks, smells, feels, sounds or tastes like, or do I want to find a way to make those senses come to life for them?
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Anne Stenhouse
Connie Vines
Helena Fairfax
Bob Rich
For several years now, I’ve been judging a great writing contest that I believe in because you don’t just fork over your money and submit your work, then either win or not. Instead, whether published or unpublished, you get the rubrics with your scores in ten different areas of importance and comments or suggestions. No writer on the planet knows everything so even a multi published author might glean a new hint or idea, and unpublished, aspiring writers find out what worked and what didn’t work so they can go back to polish the piece before submitting it for publication. One of those areas of discussion is description, so I’ve had a few months now of reading a variety of new and not so new author’s work and experiencing how they have put me into the scene to experience what their characters are experiencing.
One of the biggest problems I see with some writers (some that are already published even) is the desire to see everything, and thus the temptation to write in the Omniscient point of view. Omniscient can be a great point of view when well done, but far too often, the reader is left feeling like they are watching a movie rather than experiencing it. TV and movie producers are careful to set the scene authentically, but the big problem is that you are outside watching, no matter how well done. The advantage of a book is the reader can “feel” like he or she is smack dab in the middle of the action. It is the difference between telling and showing, which we’ve discussed before. Telling doesn’t engage the reader as completely as showing. 
What a movie or television show cannot do is make you FEEL what is going on. You can’t feel the heat of a raging fire, or the frigid cold of a blizzard. You can’t smell the salty tang of fog, or the sweet scent of flowers. You can see the wind pulling at a character’s hair or clothes, but you can’t feel it. The senses we are all most aware of are: Smell, taste, hearing, vision/seeing, touch and also pain. There are two more that can come into play that we often overlook: Proprioception and vestibular. Proprioception is our awareness of our bodies in space. This sense is what causes your stomach to lurch when the elevator begins and abrupt descent, or the feeling of gravity, which most of us don’t pay much attention to unless we are piloting an airplane doing crazy maneuvers or living at the space station. Vestibular is another one we mostly ignore and that’s an awareness of how our bodies move, a heart racing in fear or perhaps our stomach growling with hunger. For this blog we will just address the first five.
It's easy to “tell” the reader that the air is crisp with the arrival of a winter wind. We might even tell the reader that our character shivered with the sudden cold. But the reader will feel that better if we put them in the scene: for instance: She hunched her shoulders as a blast of icy air shoved its way down her collar and every muscle in her body trembled at the intrusion. Can’t you just feel your own shoulders tensing in sympathy?
Likewise, we could tell the reader that the scent of fall was in the air, with piles of burning leaves in the gutters as families raked up the colorful masses from their front lawns. Or we could suggest that: Colin’s eyes smarted as a gust of wind blew the smoke into his face. We’ve all experienced such an event, maybe not with fall leaves, but around a campfire, or watching a controlled burn, or a house fire, so we sympathize with Colin. We know how it felt. 
We could say Sam fell hard and bit his tongue, tasting the blood. But what if we told it like this? Sam slammed down on the ice. It had been years since he’d last gone ice skating and he’d forgotten how hard ice was, or how shocking the blow to a tailbone that came abruptly in contact with it. Then the coppery taste of his own blood told him he’d bit his tongue as well. Which of these two descriptions puts you into the scene best? 
How about, her lover’s touch was gentle, almost too gentle, as opposed to: his fingers traced a shivery line from her chin down to the tip of her breast, setting off tiny flares of desire that made her ache for more. 
Another sound most of us can relate to is that of a crashing car. An author taking the easy way out might say the speeding truck smashed into the parked car with a sickening crunch of metal on metal. But a good writer might get into the down and dirty with: No way that kid in the speeding truck could have lived through that sick sounding collision with the parked car. Screeching tires burned hot against brakes applied too late. Metal scraped against metal gouging deadly gashes along the way. Then came the splintering shatter of breaking glass, a hiss of steam venting from the overtaxed engine and finally the dead silence when all motion stopped. Of course, the writer could go on to add the smell or sight of the crash. 
so showing a scent requires more comparison. The smell of fresh baked bread might be yeasty, but if you’ve never smelled yeast, or fresh baked products raised with yeast, that kind of leaves you with a big blank. But how about this? The kitchen had a clean, 
And then there’s pain. In the ER they always want you to describe your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. But there are so many variations. To just tell a reader that his head ached, or his stubbed toe throbbed, is telling. How about if the author told you his headache felt like those cymbals crashing inside? Or if it felt like his head was in a vice? Or it hurt so bad he thought his eyeballs must be bulging? Does that give you a better idea just how much his head hurt? Or that toe that throbbed. If the writer instead told it like this: “God damn it!” Damned box in the wrong place. I’m going to kill that kid for leaving it there. I hopped on the other foot, unable to put weight on my injured toe for several minutes and even then the stabbing pain shot up my leg like a knife. 
It is always important to set the scene with great description and most authors get this. We are great at describing a dark and spooky cemetery or the clatter and bustle of the hallway in a school when the bell rings with images that bring the scene to the reader’s mind. But adding the senses draws them right into that noisy hallway with chattering classmates, the crash of books in lockers, locker doors being slammed shut, the scent of someone’s week old gym shorts when a locker is opened. The same goes with the cemetery, with the creak of bare branches rattling or scraping together, long inky dark shadows crossing your path, or the hoot of an owl. The next time you consider doing it the easy way, ask yourself, do I want to tell the reader what it looks, smells, feels, sounds or tastes like, or do I want to find a way to make those senses come to life for them?
Our April Round Robin Blog Hop asks the question: What is your favorite point of view to write or read and why? 
I’m going to start with 3rd person Omniscient because it’s my least favorite. Here we have a narrator telling the story. The only advantage is that the author and reader can see into other heads and know what all the characters are thinking. Like God, way above the fray but looking down and knowing what everyone is doing at the same time. But the downside to this is that it distances the reader from the characters because it removes the immediacy of emotion. The reader is not looking at the world through the eyes of any specific character, thus the reader never gets close to the character. Another disadvantage is that it takes away some of the suspense. If the reader knows what everyone is up to, it removes the unknown and takes away some of the adventure and suspense. Another thing that authors who write in omniscient point of view tend to do is use phrases like, “little did he know . . .” or “It would be the last thing he ever saw.” Now the surprise is totally taken out of the picture because the reader already knows what’s coming next. No need to dive right into the next chapter because the there’s no suspense left. 3rd person Omniscient is very like the difference between SHOWING the reader what’s happening and TELLING them. Telling is less immediate. Less emotional. I’m old enough that I remember when news reporters told us the news without a slant. I had NO idea Walter Cronkite had a liberal point of view because he just told us what happened. No embellishment, no emotion, no opinion. Just the facts.
Often an author will show more than one character’s POVs in different chapters or scenes – this isn’t what 3rd person omniscient is. Let’s suppose the story is told first from Joe’s point of view, where he is eager to propose to Mary. He’s wearing her favorite shirt and putting on cologne which he usually doesn’t wear, so the reader senses how important this is for him and can’t wait for her to say yes. But then the author lets the reader into Mary’s head and she’s trying to figure out how to let Joe down easy, or she’s thinking of a different man and now the reader is heartbroken for Joe and wondering how this is going to work out. Or maybe the reader understands that Mary is sorry she knows she’s going to hurt him, but she just doesn’t love him that way. Seeing this issue from inside the two main characters’ heads puts the reader right there, feeling what they are feeling and closer than someone like God telling it from above. This distance is why I personally don’t enjoy either writing or reading in omniscient. I want to be in love, feel fear, triumph, sadness etc. I want to be IN the head and heart of the character. I want to be as surprised by what’s coming next as the character is. 
So, that leaves us with 3rd person limited and 1st person. Most writers seem to prefer 3rd person limited. Limited simply means you tell only one point of view at a time, but from the character’s level rather than the narrator who sees all. You can only see, think, feel or hear what that character is seeing, thinking, feeling or hearing. That’s 3rd person limited. Now the text would read: Joe put on Mary’s favorite shirt. She always told him his blue eyes looked bluer with that shirt and tonight he needed everything on his side. He added after shave that he thought she might like and took one last look at himself in the mirror. “Okay,” he said to himself. “Time to get it done.”
I enjoy reading both 3rd person limited and 1st, but if I have a favorite, I’d have to admit to liking 1st person best. It feels more immediate. I AM that character, feeling, seeing, experiencing all the things the character is feeling, seeing and experiencing. But that’s just me and 3rd person limited can draw the reader in just as firmly. The biggest disadvantage of 1st person is that you never get into the head of other characters (in most cases – more about that later.) It takes a really skilled writer to let the reader think and feel what non point of view characters are feeling, or thinking. One my all-time favorite books (long before the series on Starz and who doesn’t love Sam Heughan?) is Outlander. Diana Gabaldon told that story in the first book of the series entirely in 1st person from Claire’s point of view, but she was a master at revealing Jamie’s thoughts and emotions via ‘tells’ that Claire grew to know well. He had a habit of tapping a finger against his thigh when he was agitated or in disagreement for example. And the dialog also revealed much of what was going on in his head. As the series got longer and the cast of characters longer Gabaldon began to add other points of view, but that first book was a master of how to write 1st person and still let the reader in on other character’s feelings, experience and thoughts. 
3rd Person limited Point of view is the more common option and perhaps a little easier to write. And, well done can draw the reader in just as firmly as 1st person does, but for all the point of view characters, not just the main character. The disadvantage here, is actually less a disadvantage as a pitfall new writers often fall into – Head-hopping. Most authors change points of view when a scene or chapter changes and stay in that person’s head for the duration. About the only time this really needs to switch is if it’s a romance. And then only in a really critical scene like the first time they make love. The reader is eager to know how both parties are reacting to this life changing event, but it has to be done carefully so the reader is pulled into the other head without realizing it. If the change is abrupt or feels wrong, the reader will be scratching their head and stopping to go back and see who was feeling, or thinking this particular emotion or thought. Head-hopping, the pitfall, is when the author constantly jumps from one head to the other and the reader is never sure who’s thinking or feeling what. It jerks the reader out of the story trying to figure it out. And jerking the reader out of the story is never good. It also tends to distance the reader from either character much like 3rd person omniscient does. Head hopping is not just thought or emotion, but also action. 
Example: Joe went down on one knee in spite of the old football injury that still hurt sometimes. This is how it’s supposed to be done, and he was determined to do it right. Crunch time. How to say this without sounding trite?” Mary sighed, not sure how to break it to this man kneeling in front of her. “Will you marry me?” His hopeful look said it all. Joe’s heart thundered in his ears. Amazing that Mary couldn’t hear it trying to pound its way out of his chest. 
One last thing I’d like to add before sending you off to see what other authors think about the whole Point of View question. There are a few writers who have done both 1st and 3rd limited in the same story. I just recently tried it with the first book in my new series. A whole new challenge but I was happy with the result. I’m sure when I sit down to start my first round of edits I’ll find a raft of mistakes, but that’s what edits and rewrites are for. In this novel, I have two stories being told. The first is in the present day and my heroine is my main character. I’ve told her part in 1st person. The other main character in the present time is Sam. (It is a romance so there is a hero of course.) I’ve told his chapters Sam’s 3rd person limited point of view. The second story is historic and told partly from the heroine’s point of view in 3rd person limited and partly through the letters sent home to her from the hero who is fighting in Europe in WWII. I preface every chapter with a heading. Kenzie – Present Day, Sam – Present Day or Hannah 1943 (44, 45 and 46) In this way the reader knows right at the start whose point of view they are seeing this chapter from and I don’t deviate, so I never lose the reader along the way. Telling two stories in two eras necessitated me having a chapter heading to orient the reader anyway. 
