Writing With Your Senses
Writing is all about conveying a thought or idea in such a way, that your reader feels what you feel and sees in their minds eye what you see. One easy way to write and achieve this goal is to write with your senses.
To help make this tutorial a little more user friendly, I shall pick a topic and offer an example of how to write with your senses, insuring your readers will walk through your story with you and feel many of the same sensations you are striving to tell them about.
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We have five senses:
Smell
Sight
Hearing
Touch
Taste
For each of your five senses, think about your own feelings concerning the topic of your choice, and just let your creative juices flow. I will write about RAIN and devote each paragraph to the five senses beginning with Smell and continuing through with Sight, Hearing, Touch until I end with Taste. It makes writing a little easier if you put your feelings into words using the power of your senses.
RAIN
Have you ever smelled the rain on a sultry summer night? I like to take a deep, moist breath of rain-laden air just as it rises from the dying heat of the pavement. It reminds me of dark forests and earthy ground, of life and death, of youth and old age. I like to hold the wet smell in my nostrils and keep it there for a long time, savoring the raw, gritty smell of wet earth and hot concrete. In an odd way it is reviving and refreshing yet hypnotising and sedating all at once.
I like looking out of my apartment window as silvery streams of rain run in tiny floods downwards to the black streets below. The wavering, watery sight of rain fills me with a calmness of spirit. I like to watch rain. I like to see it splash in great jets of oily spray as taxi cabs plough through it, bringing sleepy guests home from gay affairs in the dead of a warm, wet night.
And the sound of rain ....ah, such a sweet lullaby. There are very few pleasures in life to match the sound of summer rain on your roof as you slip gently into dreamland. My goodness, even Johannes Brahms must have turned green with envy while listening to the pitter-patter of raindrops of a summers eve! I shall take the sweet tapping of the raindrops all about me and my abode over any sleeping medicine on earth!
Sometimes if the urge visits me I open my window and slowly reach out my bare hand to catch a raindrop or two. In the stifling heat of a summer night, the feel of cool raindrops splashing on burning flesh is a tiny miracle for the skin. It springs to life and begins to look forward to containing my body for another day. The raindrops fill my palm and I look into a miniature lake, resting in my very own hand. A wee shimmering lake of midnight summer rain, cool and crystal clear, full of glacial secrets from the earths four corners.
Finally, before the rain overtakes my sleepy mind completely, I push my head out of the window. I raise my face into the summer sky of glittering raindrops and catch this magic gift from God on the tip of my tongue. One drop is never enough if you have tasted rain. You crave another and another until your mouth fills full and little rivulets of tingling angel teardrops run down your chin. The taste of rain is the earth itself. It is the taste of our beginnings on this huge spinning planet. The taste of rain is the taste of life. After drinking from the summer sky, on a hot sultry night, I seem to understand everything a little better.
Elizabeth Earle
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