Episode 35: How do you get your reader to really FEEL what you’re trying to get them to feel? It’s the opposite of what you might think. Today we explore the importance of writing from the senses.

SHOW NOTES:

As I mentioned in the intro, today’s show idea comes to us from writer Alan Heathcock and a resource he shared with us way back in Episode 6. As he was finishing his award-winning collection of short stories called VOLT, he codified his collection of writing advice into what he called the “27-Tenets-of-Fiction-Writing.” One of them that stood out as particularly interesting, though, was Tenet #7 which reads: FEELING is communicated through the senses. Communicate through images, sounds, scents, and textures, not through words. You will primarily communicate through images. I think this is one of his most insightful tenets for a couple of reasons. First, if we’re not trying to communicate feelings to our reader, then what are we really trying to do? Get our reader to FEEL something should be the highest purpose of our art, shouldn’t it?  And secondly, I think he points out how we go about trying to get our audiences to feel entirely backwards. I’m going to try to boil Alan’s wise words here down to even more simple language so we can begin to get our minds fully around what I think he’s saying here: Emotions are transmitted to readers through the five senses. He seems to be suggesting that it is not through clever or overwrought plot lines, not through lines of dialogue or seeing the furrowed brow of a character. Those elements play a role, for sure, but they are not the part of writing that is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to emotion.

Rather than explore what is being claimed here from an academic standpoint, I’d rather tell you about an experience I had a few days ago with my Creative Writing class. I had been thinking about this concept of transmitting emotion through the senses and ended up kind of making up a writing activity on the spot that actually worked really well to illustrate the point. Here’s what we did. I took my class in to observe another class in progress. They were playing some kind of Pictionary-type game so it was a little chaotic, but those kinds of environments are nice for this kind of writing. Then I simply had them write for five minutes about what they saw, what they felt, what they heard, what they tasted (if anything!), and what they smelled. Basically it was a five senses exercise. They couldn’t write a story, couldn’t create characters, couldn’t do any of that. They were just recorders of the details they experienced in that place for that period of time. After writing for awhile, we came back to the classroom and I had them switch papers with another classmate and pretend that they had just found this writing on the ground somewhere–like they no longer knew who had written it or where they had been. Their assignment was to read the description and try to infer what kind of emotion the writer was experiencing or what kind of mood the writer was in when they had written it. I didn’t know what to expect from this little experiment, but the results were pretty profound, at least for me.

I traded my writing with one of the students and what I found was not just a list of details. I mean, it WAS, because that’s what I’d asked them to do, but, in the process of reading and interpreting it, it became something different. It became a STORY with a full range of emotional experience. She started out describing the students as “bright-eyed” with their “minds alive.” It felt very positive and upbeat, and I started to build this character in my head–someone looking on the bright side of life and feeling very positive. An upbeat person. But then, almost immediately, the tone changed. Suddenly she was focused not on the group as a whole but on one particular student who was off by themselves a little bit. The mood I assigned to the writer shifted a little bit. She wasn’t completely happy and positive. Something about her had drawn her attention to this solitary student and I began to understand the writer as perhaps a bit lonely herself, simply because that’s what she had noticed in the room. The next description was of the desks creaking and the chalk drawings “crumbling” off the walls. These two loaded details, creaking and crumbling, felt decidedly negative, especially with all the positive things that were probably around that she could have focused on. The chalk drawings, after all, are very bright and vivid and fun, but she noticed the way the chalk was crumbling off of the board and collecting on the floor.  As the mood and emotion of this character I was building in my mind, I naturally created a story around her. This was not someone who was simply just bright and bubbly. This was someone desperately TRYING to see the positives of the world around her, but was constantly being pulled back into the darkness because of whatever she was going through at the time. The really cool part is that, when I talked to the writer about this afterward, she told me that I was dead-on right about her emotional state that morning. Simply by listing details–what she noticed first and the particular words she chose to describe it–she was giving me a window into her emotions. She didn’t have to come right out and tell me how she was feeling, but she basically did simply by showing me the world as she saw it. In fact, if she HAD told me how she was feeling, I probably wouldn’t have “heard” it as loudly as I did by being able to put myself in her shoes and see and experience what she was seeing and experiencing. And I was fully engaged in the process as a reader. If she had announced her emotional state at the beginning of her writing, I would have disconnected from it because there was no longer a puzzle to solve, and these kinds of little subtle puzzles are exactly what readers come to books to experience. They want to play a role. They want to figure things out and put things together. They want to be able to discover for themselves how someone feels by the way they are viewing the world and the things they are paying attention to. It’s a powerful kind of magic that only exists in writing prose. You don’t get access to this kind of thing in film or plays, or at least not to the same extent that writers of prose do.

So here’s the hack. Here’s how to use this in your writing. Or at least here’s how I’m using it in mine. Maybe it works for you and maybe it doesn’t. When I’m drafting, I often purposefully write really terribly. I know that the detail work of a story requires more intense, slow, methodical thought that I can give as I’m just getting the bare bones of an idea down on paper. It’s common for me to write something terrible like “Mike was angry about what Martha said” or “Phil was feeling disconnected from society.” Sentences like these will never see the light of day, of course. Their doing all the work for the reader and leaving them entirely passive, and that’s when readers disconnect and put your book down. But I’m really doing is leaving placeholders for me to go back and fill during revision. When I’m revising and rewriting, and I come across one of these heavy-handed announcements of emotion, I know it’s a sign that I have to slow down, put myself in the shoes of that particular character, and spend some time seeing the world and the setting the way they would see it. Would this character, who is feeling lonely and isolated, notice the vast blue sky overhead, or would they instead focus on the single tree left standing in an area of clearcut forest. You don’t even have to say something like “he felt as lonely as that isolated tree left standing in a swath of clearcut forest.” Your reader is smarter than that. They’ll do the work of interpreting how that character is feeling simply based on what he or she noticed. Now, they won’t do this consciously, but none of us really do. But we’re hardwired to solve little puzzles like this. We get a little boost of adrenaline every time we do. We’re doing it constantly in our real worlds and can easily bring those same skills to bear in a work of fiction.

I recommend you actually try this little game and see what you learn from it. You don’t really even need more that one writer to do it. Just go somewhere where there are people around or things are otherwise interesting, and write what you see as descriptively as you can. Don’t try to tell a story or be overly emotional. Just document. Then ask someone–anyone–to read it and infer what mood the writer is in. They’ll be able to do it, and you’ll discover the way seemingly innocuous, tiny details can be interpreted with real emotional impact and weight.

And the key here is in the details. Get away from talking about what everybody sees… the sky, the clouds, the grass, the road. Live in the tiny things. Live in the things th