(I said we were going to talk about the five senses, but I suddenly remembered I needed to explain a couple more things on the road to sensory details.)
1. Immersion: It’s All in the Details
In Volume 2 of Writing Craft, I talked about how immersing the reader was like brainwashing them using good details, consistent worldbuilding, and a convincing narrator or point of view character. Then I said we would talk about how to do all that later. (Volume 2 was about explaining what we’d be talking about later, then demonstrating that there was a whole world of things to talk about!)
We have arrived at the point where we will be going in depth about details, starting with elements that are relatively simple and straightforward, so that as things get more complex, we’ll have a simple, shared language to help sort out complexities.
Volume 3 of Writing Craft is about details, but as you read it, please consider how the information is presented.
If I has started this volume with a sentence like “The opening line of your book sets the tone of your story,” does that help you as a writer? Does it provide insight on its own?
Does it help you weigh the opening line of your story as likely to set the tone, or not likely to set the tone?
Does hearing that line make you feel more knowledgeable, successful, or accomplished as a writer?
Nevertheless, sorting out what makes a good opening line is part of my goals for this volume. I want you to feel like you have insight into what makes a good opening line, whether a given book has a good opening line (or at least has an opening line that you might want to steal from), and whether you have written a decent opening line for your story.
I cannot accomplish those goals by writing “The opening line of your book sets the tone of your story.”
Likewise, you generally cannot accomplish the goals of your story by starting with action, heartfelt drama, or—and this is more common than I would have guessed before I started editing—extreme pain or disgust.
Generally, in order to accomplish the goals of your story, you have to immerse your readers in the world of your story. (And not drive them out of it!)
Ironically, you cannot start with pure action if you want to write a story that gets your readers’ heartbeats racing.
Action is when a character does any action, however small, that affects the outcome of the plot.
If you want a real eye-opener of a writing exercise, pick up a book by an author who has had a long-term (20 year+), successful (bestselling) career, and see if they start with action or detail (and, if they start with detail, whether that detail is of strong pain or disgust).
Go on, pick a writer that is known for their action!
Here’s a hint: if a sentence that seems to be action has “is” or “was” in it, not an action being taken by a character in that moment, but one that was begun in the past.
Sensory vs. Summary
There’s a big note I have to make before we get much further. We will be mainly talking about two different types of detail.
One is sensory detail, or detail that you can obtain from the senses. (More on that in Section 2, Writing from the Five Senses [and More]). Examples of sensory details are Saguaro cactus, scarlet, screech, smoke, sweet.
The other is summary detail, or detail that summarizes what the senses gather—that is, detail that comes from the intellect and not from the senses. Examples of summary details are house, road, shrug, nod, sat.
It is surprisingly difficult to separate those two types of details in order to talk about them! This is because reading is not, itself, a sensory detail that you get directly from your eyes or ears or fingertips (although you input the characters themselves from those senses), but an act of the intellect, or rather the imagination.
Everything you read is necessarily filtered through your intellect.
You can write a sentence like, “She caressed his silken forehead,” and not be able to literally feel that skin. The reader can imagine what silken skin is like, but cannot literally feel that skin without their intellect getting involved on some level.
So making a distinction between sensory and summary detail isn’t going to be pure, because all sensory details are overlaid with the intellect at some level. That’s just the nature of reading.
However, and ironically so, because the human brain is complex, the distinction between sensory and summary details is actually physically important!
The parts of your brain that deal with sensory inputs (and spatial relationships, and usually faces and emotions) are older and better developed than the parts of your brain that deal with your intellect.
That is to say, minty goes to different parts of your brain than pen does.
The parts of your brain that make a story immersive are the parts of your brain that get triggered when you describe details that directly involve the senses, spatial relationships, and (usually) faces and emotions.
Your intellect is always involved when you’re reading. But you can override your intellect by invoking the more primal parts of your brain by using sensory, spatial, and facial/emotional details.
Here’s an exercise:
Think of a childhood home. Do you remember what it smelled like?
Now think of the address of a school you once attended. What was it?
Probably the smell of a childhood home is easier to remember for you than the address of a school (unless you have a poor sense of smell, in which case subsitute another sense!).
Now put yourself in a reader’s position.
Imagine your favorite character’s childhood home. That childhood home may not have been mentioned in the book. Can you imagine what it might have smelled like?
Now imagine for that character a school they once attended. Imagine that the author gave the street address of the school in a previous chapter. What would the street address be?
Probably the smell of the character’s childhood home is easier for you to imagine (or remember) than the street address of their school.
Summary details are hard to remember! Please remember that fact when asking your readers to remember vital information from previous chapters.
(Okay, now we get to move on to sensory details…!)