The Five Senses and Filtering

Show me your characters' experiences of the world. Do it *directly.*

This post is part of the Write With Me series. For more like this, check out the writing your novel page.

Most of our characters have five senses through which they can interact with and report on their world as they experience it. And thank goodness for that! Since that's the position most of us find ourselves in as well, experiencing our characters' interpretations of their worlds creates empathy between reader and character—a bond that, when strong enough, will keep readers turning page after page.

As writers, we decide which senses to include and when to include them, but how much of each sense is too much (or too little)? And how can we make sure readers stay firmly planted in the perspective of our main character(s)?

Let's start with a short exploration of each sense and how one might commonly incorporate them.

Sight

This is the most frequently implemented sense in fiction by a long-shot. Seriously, if you've never done this before, open a book—any work of fiction that's within your grasp right now—and turn to a random page. It shouldn't take too long for you to find an example of sight being implemented in order to describe a scene.

Now actively seek out the other four senses: hearing, touch, taste, and smell. How many examples of those do you see on that page compared to that of sight?

Probably not too many.

Sight is relied on in fiction because 1) biology, which 2) means that for most of us, it's the first sense we think to draw from. For example, let's describe the experience of entering a cave for the hypothetical hero we'll use in this post:

The cave was dark. There were long shadows growing along the walls as the light from behind her grew farther away. Stalactites grew downward like so many jagged claws.

Boom. All related to sight, all the first things that came to mind (for the purposes of this forced example, anyway). It's a stilted, cardboard-feeling example, but an example nonetheless.

Hearing

I don't have any data to back this one up, but I'd wager hearing is the second-most used sense in fiction. Imagine you're our hero back in that cave. What do you hear?

Bats chirping? The hushed rush of water somewhere? The echoey footsteps of our hero as she works her way deeper into the underbelly of the mountain?

Now think about each of those examples and what they add to the mood. Some could be creepy, some could offer promise, some could be left to interpretation depending on how the use of the other senses (or visceral responses from the character herself) help shape them.

The point is that the use of hearing alongside sight has now helped our readers feel even more immersed in the scene—something we should aim for regardless of the genre we might write.

Touch

Outside of erotica or romance, this sense has the tendency to become lost—at least where the feeling of things outside the body is concerned.

What do I mean by that, exactly? Think about writers who describe their characters' stomachs as turning, their hearts pounding, or the choking feeling in their throats. Those are, of course, implementations of touch, but they're super introspective (not that they're not important!).

A challenge I issue to myself (and to other writers!) is to put the sense of touch to work in the world beyond the visceral reactions of the perspective character.

What does the cave in our example feel like, then? Since we've heard water running somewhere, maybe the walls are damp, and our hero's hands grow moist and gritty with fine minerals as she uses her hand to guide herself along the wall. Perhaps she ditched her shoes at some point, and the cave's uneven floor has her stub her toe every third step.

With the inclusion of those touch details, now we're really experiencing the cave through our hero. But can we find even more ways to immerse ourselves and readers in this scene? Let's see what a sense of taste might add.