Writing Sensory Description, Part 2

So in my last blog post, I discussed how, often, writers neglect sensory descriptive language in their work. Keeping in mind that we have five senses--sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch--many writers fail to incorporate all or even most of these in their writing. If you remember, I wrote this for you:

Steven entered the downtown bistro where he was to meet Elizabeth. He nudged his way to the front of the group of patrons waiting to be seated and scanned the room for her.

“Can I help you, sir?” the hostess says. At that moment, Steven spots Elizabeth.

“I’m meeting someone and I see her now,” Steven says and walks toward the table, smiling at Elizabeth as he approaches.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he begins.

Elizabeth smiles warmly. “No, I’ve only been here about five minutes. It’s great to see you.”

I intentionally scripted this scene with no sensory description. I included nothing that gives the reader a genuine sense of entering a downtown eatery. Since Steven has to work his way to the front of the patrons waiting to be seated, you can infer that this is a busy place. What senses could come into play in a busy restaurant scene? What about smells? Can he pick out specific dishes or ingredients? What might he see when he scans the room? Employees? Patrons? Doing what? Is it noisy? What does he hear?

I have played with this scene to punch it up. I cheated a little by adding a short introductory description of Steven's approach to the bistro. Here's what I came up with:

Steven hunched his shoulders against the chilly wind as he approached Trish’s Treatery, a popular downtown bistro where he was to meet Elizabeth. Upon entering, he steeled himself against nasty looks and began to wiggle his way to the front of the dense flock of business men and women waiting to be seated. He emerged as though a butterfly from a cocoon, to view the bustling sight before him.

A no-nonsense hostess approached him, scowling. "Can I help you, sir?" Plates and glasses clinked, patrons talked and laughed, servers announced today's specials, and somewhere beneath it all, Michael Buble' sang "Haven't Met You Yet."

Steven leaned toward her and raised his voice to be heard above the din. "I'm meeting someone who's already been seated." Satisfied with this explanation, she nodded and returned to her reservation desk.

Servers in their pale burgundy uniforms hustled from kitchen to table and back again at an athletic pace. The air teemed with tantalizing smells Steven knew well; he could identify Trish’s signature risotto with andouille sausage, the portobello mushrooms with crab stuffing, and the grilled grouper with roasted garlic aioli. His mouth watered as a margherita pizza raced past carried by a 5-foot-tall server named Jenna who beamed with what Steven could only interpret as pride.

Scanning the convivial scene, he recognized Elizabeth’s silk charmeuse scarf before he even saw her face. Purchased in Paris when she was on a business trip with her law firm, Elizabeth wore the vibrant, spring-blossom-themed accessory year-round. Steven picked his way through the room, past the tables and diners, sidestepping as an elegant woman pushed back her chair to retrieve her clutch from the burgundy carpet beneath her seat.

As he approached her table, Elizabeth raised her eyes to him and smiled, flooding him with a warmth he had not felt since they’d separated three months earlier. The mere sight of those green eyes caused his hands to tremble.

OK. Love it? Hate It? Too much? Yes, maybe. At least I hope you agree it offers more to grab onto than the first version. I bombarded the senses--chilly wind, the crush of the patrons, the obstacle course of the dining room, voices, music, clothing colors and texture, and the mouth-watering entrees.

Enliven your writing by stimulating the readers' senses. Make them feel as though they are in each scene with the characters, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching what they are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. A short story or novel should play like a movie of the mind, don't you agree?

Writing Sensory Description, Part 1

Most requests for my editing services have been for novels and short stories, and to critique personal essays. The personal essay, which is a subcategory of memoir, is more akin to fiction that autobiography, but that’s a discussion (or disagreement) for another day.

Each writer’s style is as unique as a snowflake. But one piece of advice I find myself giving often is the ever-popular, never-to-be-forgotten “show, don’t tell.” As hackneyed as it might sound, this is excellent advice and an aspect of fictional writing that still gets swallowed in a sea of dialogue.

Authors remember to address the big elements of storytelling: characters have names, jobs, and life roles like wife or father, boss or best friend. They speak to other characters and move from place to place. They do things and things happen to them.

But often, scenes scream for greater narrative depth—descriptions of lighting and shadow, smells or odors, noises, textures, and temperature.

The irony of this “show, don’t tell” thing is, it subconsciously places the burden on visual (sight) description. Humans have five glorious senses that, under ideal circumstances, work together to give us a 3-D impression of our world.

Sight is the sense writers use most heavily because it’s the easiest. How people look, how things look, how places look—stories get bogged down with lots of looking and seeing. But this is not how the human senses operate in real life.

Consider a scene that takes place in a restaurant. A character enters, scans the room, spots the character he is looking for, and walks to the table and sits. That scene might be written like this:

Steven entered the downtown bistro where he was to meet Elizabeth. He nudged his way to the front of the group of patrons waiting to be seated and scanned the room for her.

“Can I help you, sir?” the hostess says. At that moment, Steven spots Elizabeth.

“I’m meeting someone and I see her now,” Steven says and walks toward the table, smiling at Elizabeth as he approaches. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he begins.

Elizabeth smiles warmly. “No, I’ve only been here about five minutes. It’s great to see you.”

Now, I just wrote this and it is intentionally barren of descriptive words. How could I punch this up to bring this scene to life? What would draw readers into the scene? What’s missing?

In Part 2, I’ll focus on using each of the five senses to create greater narrative depth. I will rewrite the scene implementing all five senses.

You Can Help Me

Please share your ideas for adding sensory description to this bistro scene. Besides sight, what can we do with sound, touch, taste, and smell? Write a comment to help add color, noise, odor or fragrance, texture and so on to wake this scene up.

Even George R. R. Martin Needs An Editor

Writing is a craft. You cannot learn a craft and become proficient at it without doing it again and again. I will now make a controversial statement:

Writing is a process that can only be mastered by doing it. You cannot learn to write by reading about writing. You can’t learn to write well by reading well-written books. You can only become a good writer by writing. And editing. And writing. And editing. And so on, until you’ve nailed it.

There, I said it. Argue with me, if you’d like. I welcome your point of view.

Writers Hate Editors

Writers, typically, like to write. What they don’t like is submitting their work to editors. Lots of well-known writers don’t like editors. Here is the opinion of one of the world’s most popular writers, George R. R. Martin, tongue firmly in cheek, addressing CoastCon II in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1979:

If there were no editors in the world, writers would be very happy. They would frolic and play and publish every word they wrote, and they would have lots of money and lots of sex, since they would be very famous and very charming, having never experienced rejection. Their egos would fill up the world, their books would be everywhere, and they would mate furiously and produce lots of little writers….

Martin is joking. I think. No, I know he is because he goes on to praise editors and lament that their importance in the writing process never garners them credit or notoriety. Or lots of sex. (His opinion, not mine.)

Writers Need Editors

Martin’s tongue is still in his cheek, but less so, with this observation:

…editors can indeed be a source of frustration and anguish in a writer’s life. In most cases, that is not due to any active malice on the part of the editor. Often as not, the real villain of the piece is the publisher, but editors are the hatchet men, out there on the front line, and they are the ones who are forced to deliver the bad news and bear the accompanying karmic weight. Editors also are the source of most rejections, and writers hate rejections…

Writers and Editors Need Each Other

This is my favorite part of his speech:

A good editor tries to figure out what the writer was trying to do, and helps him or her do it better, rather than trying to change them into something else entirely. A good editor doesn’t insist or make changes without permission. Ultimately, a writer lives or dies by his words, and he must always have the last word if his work is to retain its integrity.

Yes, Mr. Martin, you’re right. That is what a good editor tries to do. At least, it is what I try to do. I refer you to an earlier blog post of mine, Editor & Writer, A Team:

I am not your enemy. I gain nothing by sabotaging your work. Excellence in the content and quality of your work is as much a reflection on me as it is on you. I ask that you receive my comments and suggestions in the spirit of fostering teamwork, and allow my editing skills to complement your writing.

What are your thoughts on the relationship between writers and editors? What experiences, good or bad, have you had? I'd love to hear from you.