Senses

lick the reader all over, soaking him with spit

Next, writers should understand that it’s much easier to make readers have sensory experiences than feelings or ideas. Whenever possible, writers should use that to their advantage. An essay on democracy will benefit from descriptions of flipping switches inside voting booths; and geometry texts are digestible when the reader can imagine putting on running shoes and sprinting around the circumference of a circle.  As much as you can, evoke sounds, sights, tastes, touches, and smells. Punch and pinch the reader; fill his nostrils with urine or the scent of cherry pie; rub him all over with wet paper towels; tune his inner radio to cool jazz or static; sprinkle cinnamon on his tongue… Sometimes you can evoke sensations by raw description: explaining what an object or scene looks like, smells like, etc. Sometimes you can animate a non-sensual abstraction via metaphor: “She raged, accusing him of one thing after another. Each accusation was like a firecracker detonating in his sinus cavities.” Humans have a sixth sense, which is just as evocative as the famous five—and I’m not talking about ESP. I’m talking about our kinetic sense, our sense of movement. Verbs that move are always strong: push, pull, kick, bend, straighten, leap, stretch, roll, amble, crouch, sprint… You can use them literally (“The penguin waddled”) or figuratively (“I toppled her argument”). 
time for show and tell

Writing teachers sometimes say “show don’t tell.” It’s not a bad heuristic for beginners, but it’s oversimplified. I prefer to say, “Earn the right to tell.” Telling—as in explaining rather than evoking—is harder for readers to relate to than the sorts of sensory data I outlined, above. So if you have something to tell, make sure that you’ve either prepped the reader by helping him picture (smell, etc.) the scene or by quickly following your telling with a sensory picture that illustrates it.  The show is the setup; the tell is the punchline. The tell is the thesis; the show is the proof. Example of showing and then telling: 
My girlfriend kept drinking all my beer. She would hog the remote control and force me to watch hours of ‘Sex in the City.’ She packed my suits into boxes and filled my closets with her dresses, jackets, and sweaters. She insisted on smoking inside, and my apartment still reeks of nicotine. She was a selfish bitch, and that’s why I broke up with her. The last sentence is telling, but I earned the right to tell from my earlier sentences that showed.  Example of telling and then showing: 
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him… This famous opening, from Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” starts by telling and then, to anchor the idea into the reader’s brain, switches to showing. You don’t always need to formulaically tell first and then show or show first and then tell. What you need to do is just keep in mind that we sense easier than we understand ideas—and that we understand mostly through sensing. So by all means tell. Just make sure your telling is linked to sensations. Also, keep in mind that “showing” means evoking. If you’re wondering whether “It was raining” is showing or telling, ask yourself whether or not itevokes the sensation of rain. I don’t think it does, do you? Try something like “the rain soaked through his shirt, plastering it to his chest….”  And keep in mind this excellent advice from novelist Chuck Palahniuk:
In six seconds, you’ll hate me. But in six months, you’ll be a better writer.
From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs. These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.
The list should also include: Loves and Hates.

... Until some time around Christmas, you can’t write: Kenny wondered if Monica didn’t like him going out at night…”
 
Instead, you’ll have to Un-pack that to something like: “The mornings after Kenny had stayed out, beyond the last bus, until he’d had to bum a ride or pay for a cab and got home to find Monica faking sleep, faking because she never slept that quiet, those mornings, she’d only put her own cup of coffee in the microwave. Never his.”   
Instead of characters knowing anything, you must now present the details that allow the reader to know them. Instead of a character wanting something, you must now describe the thing so that the reader wants it.
  Instead of saying: “Adam knew Gwen liked him.”
  You’ll have to say: “Between classes, Gwen was always leaned on his locker when he’d go to open it. She’d roll her eyes and shove off with one foot, leaving a black-heel mark on the painted metal, but she also left the smell of her perfume. The combination lock would still be warm from her ass. And the next break, Gwen would be leaned there, again.”
  In short, no more short-cuts. Only specific sensory detail: action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling.   — http://litreactor.com/essays/chu...   

write sensually and you can forget most other rules

If you commit to evoking sights, sounds, smells, tastes, movements, and textures in the reader’s brain, you can quit sweating the small stuff. For instance, you’ve probably heard that strong verbs and specific nouns are better than adverbs and adjectives.  This isn’t necessarily true, but it often turns out to be the case—not because modifiers are bad, but because it’s easier to evoke sensations via concrete, easy-to-grasp objects and actions. If you write, “he looked at her quizzically,” that’s harder to instantly picture than, “he cocked his head” or “he furrowed his brow.” Don’t worry about adjectives and adverbs. Just work to evoke images and other sensations. Make your images strong and specific. 

Should I avoid using idioms in my writing?

You can’t. In fact, you used two of them in your question: “avoid” means to step out of the way of a physical obstacle. Yet you used it to mean “refrain from a behavior.” You also referred to idioms being in writing, as if prose was a container. You used both “avoid” and “in” metaphorically, and those particular metaphors are idioms of the English language. Idioms are so bound up with the way we write and think, they’re unavoidable. Without using them, you’d be incapable of expressing many ideas. The real trick to writing is make it sensual. Always aim to make readers see, touch, taste, feel or hear something*. We’re sensual creatures, and we have a hard time grasping concepts we can’t sense. This is just as important in non-fiction writing as it is in fiction. If you’re writing about geometry, make readers imagine peddling around the circumference of a circle or taking a shortcut across its diameter. If you write sensually, you can forget about many other rules, because they’re all groping towards sensuality, anyway. For instance, “show don’t tell” is just another way insisting that you tickle the reader’s senses. Don’t just tell him it’s raining. That doesn’t make him feelwet. Evoke, for him, the nasty feeling of soaking, stiff jeans and waterlogged sneakers. This goal, sensuality, is also why people advise against cliches. Due to overuse, they have lost their power to evoke. When you tell me every cloud has a silver lining, I don’t see clouds, silver, or linings. It just becomes a single word in my brain: everycloudhasasilverlining. Idioms are fine, as long as they evoke sensations or don’t hamper something else from evoking sensations. —

• Or trigger the kinesthetic sense. Make the reader feel as if he’s tumbling, tottering, climbing, swaying, or floating… 

I recommend The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Stephen Pinker; Politics and the English Language by George Orwell, and Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold by Arthur Plotnik. Read the last one last, as it’s about how to intelligently break the “rules,” and it’s worth knowing what they are first.

When I write, I imagine I’m a chef. My goal is to serve the reader a meal of words, sentences, and paragraphs—some sweet, some salty, some sour, and some bitter. If the reader only understands that a particular sentence is bitter, I’ve failed. I only succeed if he actually puckers up his mouth and winces.

There are no rules, except to do everything in your power to cause the reader to experience: make him feel something or force an idea to pop into his head—and make him hear the pop.

Nothing is forbidden, unless it blunts the experience. If breaking a “rule” strengthens the experience, you should break it. I might start an an essay about my cats this way:

“Fur. Everywhere.”

Mrs Sparks, my third-grade English teacher would tut-tut until she sounded like she was worshiping a dead Egyptian, but I think “Fur. Everywhere” creates an experience.

Let me give you some more examples: say you’re writing about the terrible conditions in a New Jersey prison. “The toilets are filthy” gets an idea across, but it doesn’t force the reader to lick the toilet water.

And if he doesn’t do that, he’ll probably forget my article five minutes after he’s done reading it. Humans don’t retain ideas; they recall sensual experiences. (Which means we need to take extra care to make non-fiction ideas sensual. When writing about Trigonometry, take your reader for a stroll around the circumference of a circle.)

(When drafting this post, I originally broke the last two paragraphs differently: “… but it doesn’t force the reader to lick the toilet water. And if he doesn’t do that, he’ll…” But then I realized that the “licking” part would be stronger if I let it breathe. So, I added a paragraph break after it. Always, always, I’m trying to strengthen the flavors for the reader.)

How about this? “No matter how many times you flush the toilet, the water is always brown.” I tried to use a verb the user could imagine himself doing: flush. And I did my best to evoke an image: brown water.

Every “rule” ties in with this goal of bombarding the reader with an experience. Why worry about grammar and spelling? Because this is distracting: “He bang his fase against the desk.”

That’s a strong image, but, as I read the sentence, I momentarily wonder why the writer used “bang” instead of “banged,” and why he misspelled “face.” Those thoughts, even if they’re gone in a heartbeat, dull the effect. The bang is less painful than it could be, worthy of one Tylenol at most and probably a children’s Tylenol at that.

Why “avoid adjectives and adverbs,” as some rule-based books advise? Because they’re (often) hard to visualize, and what we’re not visualizing, we’re not seeing. Compare “He walked carefully and quietly” with “He tiptoed.” Which is easier to see?

Why avoid the passive voice? Because it’s harder to visualize “mistakes were made by me” than “I made a mistake.”

I’m not suggesting you toss modifiers out the window and banish the passive to Siberia. My point is that, rather than worrying about rules, you should have a goal in mind: what do you want your reader to experience? Use words and grammar to make him experience it! Remove obstacles that hinder that experience!

How can I avoid clichés in my writing?

Good writing is sensual. I don’t mean sexy (though good writing can be sexy), I mean that it tickles the five senses. Sensual writing is the best way to reach people, because humans are sensual creatures. Humans live through their senses. When marks on paper evoke sensations, the effect is magical. Clichés suck, because they don’t make us see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. They fail because they’re too familiar. When people read “every cloud has a silver lining,” they probably don’t imagine a cloud or see the color silver. They don’t imagine running their fingers up and down a lining. Instead, it’s as if the whole phrase is a word: everycloudhasasilverlining. It’s a label for an abstract idea. What’s the abstract idea? That bad things have good sides to them. (“Bad things have good sides to them,” while not interesting, is better than “Every cloud has a silver lining.”) If you want to evoke that idea with a metaphor, what are some images you could use? Images that aren’t trodden flat? Try brainstorming: “Every case of strep throat is an excuse to eat ice cream.” “Too bad mama died, but that black suit I’m wearing to her funeral sure is slimming.” Rather than avoiding clichés, which is a negative act (and thus hard to achieve), try working to make your writing as sensual as possible. As a side effect, clichés will wither and die. When I write, I go through each sentence (often each phrase) and consciously ask if I’m evoking an image: am I making the reader see a dead fly? hear the tink tink tink of a xylophone? Smell urine? Taste soup that’s so hot, it burns his tongue? Run his fingers up and down some corduroy pants? The trick is specificity. Don’t worry about being original, just be specific. What, exactly, are we supposed to see, hear, smell, touch or taste?

The Way Forward In Fiction Writing 101, we learned that each element must move the story forward. I agree with this, but, on it’s own, that dogma is too simplistic. What does it mean to move a story forward? You can move “King Kong” forward by saying “… and then the ape climbed the Empire State building, reached the top and was killed by airplanes.” If we can step forward with a sentence or two, why waste our time with ten minutes of movie, ten minutes in which only learn a few facts? A story is only a story if we move forward in a satisfying way. A trip to Paris isn’t fun if we’re blindfolded the whole time we’re there.

To understand why “Just the facts, ma’am” doesn’t work, imagine moving a dinner forward by saying “Salad, then steak and potatoes, then desert,” without actually serving any food. That doesn’t count as “moving forward.” We haven’t earned the right to proceed to the second course until we’ve tasted the first.

Tasting is sensual, and there’s the key. Humans are sensual creatures. If we haven’t seen, heard, felt, smelled or tasted a thing, we haven’t experienced it. If we haven’t experienced it, we can’t move forward from it. Narratives aren’t simply about moving forward; they are about moving forward from one sensual experience to the next.

When we sensualize our stories, we aren’t adding spice to them. Sensation isn’t spice; it’s the world. It doesn’t sit on top of the world. It IS the world. In the world, nothing is general, abstract or featureless. There is no such thing as love. There is only the specific love that Charlie feels for Sarah. And Charlie is not a man. He’s a specific man with flaking skin on his shoulders, from a day at the Coney Island beach. And we hear the clack, clack, clack of Sarah’s heels on the bathroom floor, which is what makes her an actual woman.

We can infuse our stories with sensuality in many ways, the two main ones being via specific details about what’s actually happening and metaphor:

1. He rubbed his palm over the gnarled surface.

2. The ship was bigger than four ocean liners laid end to end.

It’s not enough to say “It was a really big ship.” That doesn’t move the story forward, because “a really big ship” is a cheat. It’s like claiming you’ve actually given your son a birthday present when you’ve given him socks. Any kid will tell you socks don’t count as a present (nor does “money for college”). It’s like skipping to sex by saying “foreplay” instead of actually kissing an caressing. We have to earn each forward step by sensualizing the moment we’re currently in.

There are a couple of traps to look out for: the first is cliche. “Cold as winter” isn’t sensual, because we’ve heard it too many times. We read it as coldaswinter, and it doesn’t spark any sensation in our brains. “Colder than a witches tit” is just as bad. Does anyone actually picture Margaret Hamilton’s nipples when they read it? (And if they did, would they get a sensation of coldness?) No. It becomes colderthanawitchestit in their brains. This is why we need to continually search for new, surprising metaphors and details. We can’t evoke the hero’s strength by mentioning his rippling biceps, but we may be able to do it by mentioning that he lifted a hospital bed as if it was a child’s cot.

The other trap is over-sensualizing. Imagine never being able to get to dessert because the chef, unsure that he’s really earned the right to move on from the main course, keeps serving you more and more steak. Imagine having to stop and examine each pea in a side of peas and carrots. Enough already! And some aspects of the meal aren’t really parts of the meal. They’re just scaffolding to make the meal possible. The smudge on the wine glass might be memorable, but it’s gratuitous if the point of the experience is the Pino Noir.

So how do we know which details to sensualize and which to just report in the abstract. Is it okay to say “He pulled the letter out of the mailbox,” or do we need to describe the mailbox’s rusty hinges? That’s where a lot of the artistry comes in. It’s an aesthetic judgement writers have to learn to make, and most improve at making it over time.

One key is to think about which elements are the actual plot points and which are the glue that holds those points together. Say the key points are that the hero hears the mailman drop letters into the box, reads one of the letters and learns his brother has died. The fact that he had to extract the letters from the mailbox isn’t a plot point. It’s glue. It may be necessary to include it, so that the reader knows that the fictional world follows the same rules as the real world (in which mailmen stuff letters into mailboxes). Another clue is that the character doesn’t need to remember it. When looking back on the moment, years later, he’d probably talk about the letter that changed his life. He wouldn’t necessarily recall pulling it from the mailbox.

With these glue-like elements, the first decision is whether we need to include them at all. Can the reader infer the mailbox from the items on either side of it, the mailman and the reading-of-the-letter? If it must be included (for the story to make sense or for rhythmic reasons – maybe we want to build up suspense by pausing before the hero reads the letter…), can we add a sensual details without slowing down the narrative? Glue shouldn’t necessarily be included without sensual details. We just want to make sure that such details don’t slow the momentum or make the glue more important and memorable than we want it to be. If we answer all these questions in the negative, then we’re free to relate the glue – the mailbox – as a naked fact, as just a mailbox.

If it’s unimportant but necessary scaffolding, sometimes even the slightest detail is clutter. Is there really a point to “brass doorknob”? Maybe it should just be “doorknob.” IF the doorknob needs to be sensualized, it probably needs a detail more stirring than “brass.”

That which we sensualize will affect the reader – it will titillate him, scratch him, stroke him or rub him the wrong way; that which we abstract will link two sensual details together. Link as quickly as possible. We need forks in order to eat, but the meal is about the linguini, not the cutlery.

Write sensually. I started to discuss this, above, when I wrote about evoking images. You want to do more than that: you want to evoke senses. Humans are sensual creatures. I don’t mean we like sex – though we do. I mean we experience via seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. The more you evoke these senses in your prose, the stronger it will be. This is especially true if you’re writing about abstractions. We have a hard time thinking abstractly, so the more you root your text in sensual, earthy, fleshy details, the better.

Metaphors will often help you here, as in “She wanted to steal his love, like a thief snatching someone’s purse, clutching it to his chest, and running for dear life.” Stealing love is an abstraction. The point of most metaphors is to render the abstract in concrete form.

I like to go through my draft and sensual it up. I say, “Okay, that’s two paragraphs without an image, sound, smell or touch. What can I do to add some sensual spice?

Sensuality

Here’s a extract from George Orwell’s essay, “Inside the Whale.” It’s not a particularly exciting passage, certainly not one of Orwell’s best. But note even in at his driest, Orwell makes regular appeals to the sensual, which I have bolded, below. Here, we dip into the piece just after Orwell has quoted from a pastoral poem, which is what “it” refers to in the first sentence.

It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does the bubble always burst? To answer that question one has to take account of the external conditions that make certain writers popular at certain times. Housman’s poems had not attracted much notice when they were first published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a single generation, the generation born round about 1900?

In the first place, Housman is a ‘country’ poet. His poems are full of the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, ‘on Wenlock Edge’, ‘in summer time on Bredon’, thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies, the wild jonquils in the pastures, the ‘blue, remembered hills’. War poems apart, English verse of the 1910-25 period is mostly ‘country’. The reason no doubt was that the rentier-professional class was ceasing once and for all to have any real relationship with the soil; but at any rate there prevailed then, far more than now, a kind of snobbism of belonging to the country and despising the town. England at that time was hardly more an agricultural country than it is now, but before the light industries began to spread themselves it was easier to think of it as one. Most middle-class boys grew up within sight of a farm, and naturally it was the picturesque side of farm life that appealed to them–the ploughing, harvesting, stack-thrashing and so forth. Unless he has to do it himself a boy is not likely to notice the horrible drudgery of hoeing turnip, milking cows with chapped teats at four o’clock in the morning, etc., etc. Just before, just after, and for that matter, during the war was the great age of the ‘Nature poet’, the heyday of Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson. Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’, the star poem of 1913, is nothing but an enormous gush of ‘country’ sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem ‘Grantchester’ is something worse than worthless, but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period felt it is a valuable document.

What Orwell understood, consciously or not, is that it’s dangerous to allow too many non-imagistic words to come between imagery. You can certainly discuss abstractions, but you must earn that right. A chapped teat or two will help the reader digest a sentence about the class system. Of course, in good writing, sensual details aren’t gratuitous: they’re not spoons full of sugar to help the medicine go down; they’re the means through which ideas are spread.

Notice that Orwell both uses literal imagery, such as “thatched roofs” and imagery as metaphor, such as “a sort of accumulated vomit from the stomach stuffed with place-names.” This is the chief purpose of metaphor: it allows you to link the abstract to the concrete. It’s an amazing human invention, because it ensured that with skill, you can express the most abstract ideas—even mathematical ideas—with sensual hooks that snare hungry parts of the brain.

Orwell evokes sounds (“tinkles”), sights (“wild jonquils”), possibly smells (“wild jonquils,” again, and “accumulated vomit”), textures (“chapped teats”), flavors (“milk”), and movements (“hoeing”, “stack-thrashing”). He, like Shakespeare and most of the writers we call “great” seems to naturally think in images. We can’t all be gifted that way, but we can all—via re-drafting—shove our writing in a sensual direction.

And because we evolved to be tribal, huge sections of our brains are devoted to social processing. If an idea isn’t connected to people (or something people-ish), we tend to ignore it. Luckily, almost anything can be turned into a character. Even the slightest amount of anthropomorphism, such as “Information wants to be free,” aids comprehension

Orwell also understands that we are social creatures, and so, when he’s not tickling the senses, he’s name-dropping, gossiping, judging, and doing all the other things we’ve learned to do in our tribal lives:

Here’s are some instances of literal social writing:

“Housman’s poems had not attracted much notice when they were first published.”

“Most middle-class boys grew up within sight of a farm …”

Here’s an example anthropomorphism:

“… the light industries began to spread themselves …”

What can I do to better capture emotion in writing? How can I capture the feeling and express it fully? How can I improve my redaction skills?

Originally Answered: What can I do to write better? You can’t directly convey a feeling with prose. In fact, it’s hard to directly convey a feeling with any form of communication, though perhaps music gets close. In any case, if you’re feeling sad, you can’t shuttle your sadness into the reader’s head by simply writing “I’m sad.”

Instead, focus on the physical and sensual. How does “feeling sad” manifest itself in your body? Do you shiver? Do you feel a dull ache in your stomach? Do tears run down your cheeks? Do you go numb?

In prose, even those sensations may be too weak to spark similar sensations in the reader. The solutions – the writer’s best friends – are descriptive detail and metaphor. A tear dropping into your coffee is easier for the reader to feel than a tear running down your cheek. It’s a more specific detail, especially since we all know tears run down cheeks.

Here’s a metaphor: “It felt as rusty spikes had lodged themselves in my stomach. Even the slightest move made me wince.” Good metaphors grab the senses, forcing the reader to feel.

I wrote more about sensual metaphors here: Marcus Geduld’s answer to How can one learn to speak in metaphors or pictures?

Use these same techniques to write about why you’re sad (or why you’re feeling whatever you’re feeling). There’s a story behind your tears. Tell it.

But make sure you include sensual details. “My husband left me” doesn’t leap from your heart to the reader’s, because there are no details to affect the reader’s senses. “Husband” sparks only the most generalized image; “left me” is a generalized verb phrase. How about “The day Charlie left me, I sat on my side of the sofa and stared at the space he used to occupy on the other side”?

For many people, training themselves to think in sensual details is hard, but it gets easier the longer you do it. So, as others have said, write every day. Make a first draft, not worrying about details. Then go back and make it more sensual. Go through it sentence by sentence, asking yourself it there’s a detail or metaphor you can haunt the reader with.

Here’s George Orwell, “writing about his feelings” without writing about them at all (except for a mention of guilt towards the end). Notice that it’s mostly description. And yet you get a very strong sense of how he felt:

Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian’s (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier. Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating. For my part I did not need to be told it was a crime. Night after night I prayed, with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers, ‘Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please God, do not let me wet my bed!’, but it made remarkably little difference. Some nights the thing happened, others not. There was no volition about it, no consciousness. You did not properly speaking do the deed: you merely woke up in the morning and found that the sheets were wringing wet.

After the second of third offence I was warned that I should be beaten next time, but I received the warning in a curiously roundabout way. One afternoon, as we were filing out from tea, Mrs Wilkes the Headmaster’s wife, was sitting at the head of one of the tables, chatting with a lady of whom I knew nothing, except that she was on an afternoon’s visit to the school. She was an intimidating, masculine-looking person wearing a riding-habit, or something that I took to be a riding-habit. I was just leaving the room when Mrs Wilkes called me back, as though to introduce me to the visitor.

Mrs Wilkes was nicknamed Flip, and I shall call her by that name, for I seldom think of her by any other. (Officially, however, she was addressed as Mum, probably a corruption of the ‘Ma’am’ used by public schoolboys to their housemasters’ wives.) She was a stocky square-built woman with hard red cheeks, a flat top to her head, prominent brows and deep-set, suspicious eyes. Although a great deal of the time she was full of false heartiness, jollying one along with mannish slang (‘Buck up, old chap!’ and so forth), and even using one’s Christian name, her eyes never lost their anxious, accusing look. It was very difficult to look her in the face without feeling guilty, even at moments when one was not guilty of anything in particular.

‘Here is a little boy,’ said Flip, indicating me to the strange lady, ‘who wets his bed every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you wet your bed again?’ she added, turning to me, ‘I am going to get the Sixth Form to beat you’.