(Sensory details! Ta daaaa!)
Paying Attention: Sensory Details
In order to understand the difference between a sensory detail and a summary detail, we have to talk about how a reader’s mind tends to work. How we notice and remember things is vital to understanding how to write sensory details. It’s also important for deciding when not to use sensory details, which we’ll cover in the Summary Details section that follows.
The Elements of Verisimilitude
“Verisimilitude” is the quality of being realistic without being real, in fiction. (Other arts have words for this quality, but in fiction the term “realism” already got used for something else, a literary movement. Also, the word sounds like “very-similar-to,” and writers tend to like puns.)
In fiction, the word tends to imply the quality of a work of fiction that allows the reader to escape their reality and enter into the reality of the book on some level.
Books that are high in verisimilitude tend to help their audiences escape reality.
What helps an audience escape reality are elements that trigger primal areas of the brain, so powerful that they override the logical sense of reading letters on the page.
Some of those elements are pretty big elements, like characters that readers can resonate with, plots that make them respond emotionally, and surprising twists and turns.
Verisimilitude covers everything on the microscopic end of overriding the logical parts of the brain, particularly when it’s related to setting and not voice, pacing, or dialogue.
In order to dig into the elements of verisimilitude and convince the reader that they’re in another world and not their ordinary lives, we have to know what overrides logic and rationality.
Sensory Details
In order to override the logical and rational parts of the brain, the first, most basic technique is to use sensory detail.
Here’s an example of sensory detail:
The dog’s fur was smooth and wiry as the boy lay his head against the dog’s side. The dog panted happily, its warmth radiating through its body. The boy put his arm around the dog’s shoulder and brought up his knees to the ends of its paws, feeling the rough pads against his skin. The dog smelled like the lake. The boy tasted tears rolling down the back of his throat, salty, gummy. He was still slightly dizzy and nauseous. The dog’s breath slowed, and it put its head down between its paws.
Writing sensory detail seems obvious; all you have to do is write what a character would see, hear, smell, etc.
However, as we are writing, it is all too easy to slip into logic and rationality, and write things like:
The dog looked happy as the boy curled up next to it, seeking comfort.
In the second example, there are no sense details. There is nothing wrong with it as a sentence, but it will never accomplish the purpose of bringing the reader into the story world and convincing them that it has the same quality of real-ness that the real world has.
Work that does not contain sensory detail does not perform one of the main tasks of a story: to help a reader escape their current lives. A story without sensory detail on some level can entertain the reader with the plot and introduce them to the characters, but it cannot build a world the reader can escape to.
Keep in mind that different genres have different expectations of which details matter and how they should be presented.
A thriller will have a lot of details, but they will be given efficiently, so as not to interfere with the pacing and plot. Historical fiction will have a truly impressive amount of details, so many that they can derail the plot and characters, so the reader can immerse themselves in the time period they’re reading about.
Regardless of genre, all fiction relies on sense details in order to take the reader out of their own world and into the world of the story.
Writers try to skip writing sense detail out of a desire to get on with the plot, or to write down characters’ conversations before the writer forgets what the characters were going to say, or to “just write down the movie in my head.”
When those things happen, the details get left out. The reader will not have the same experience that the writer does, because the writer built details inside their own heads—but only wrote down the characters’ actions and words.
One way to check for good details is to search for the words “look” “felt” “saw” “heard” “thought” and similar. Those words indicate that the details have been left out! They are words that “sum up” the details.
He looked like hell.
She felt sad.
I saw the door open.
I heard the gun fire.
I thought about her face.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with those sentences! But they miss an opportunity to bring the reader into your world, and, as a writer, that is literally your job.
His face was sticky with blood, the skin around one eye swollen and bulging shut.
She stared down at her feet, feeling dizzy and slow, her body rocking involuntarily.
Two shadows formed at the bottom of the closet door, growing larger as the stranger approached. A slit of light appeared between the door frame and the creaky old panels of the door.
The crack echoed across the wide field, starting out high in pitch and lowering into almost the sound of distant thunder.
Her face had been round and soft, made of wrinkled silk, slightly stained, worn thin.
Adding good sensory details and not letting yourself slip into summary details adds a lot of power to your work.
There are times you will want to sum things up, but we will discuss how to use summary detail later. When you see words that flag a misuse summary detail (look, heard, felt, thought, etc.), pull out the statement and re-describe what something actually looked, felt, or sounded like.
Writing good sensory detail is a lot of extra work when you’re not used to it; I’ve heard a lot of people say that it slows down their writing speed for a while and that it increases their word count in a big way.
Writing the sensory details won’t slow you down forever, but it will probably increase the length of your work.
In genres where fast pacing is important, you can reduce the number of details you write, but the details you do write have to be precisely selected to bring the reader into your world.
When in doubt and trying to give an efficient sense detail, go with smell, taste, or touch. Few writers use those details well, and they are details that build a very instinctual perception of reality quickly.
For example, “The dog was brown” is a much less efficient way to build a sense of verisimilitude than “the dog farted”!
(Next time: we start on emotion!)