Christina Hamlett is with us today with some thoughts on using the five senses when we write. Sensory details can make your prose come alive and your poetry sing.
USING YOUR SENSES TO INSPIRE CREATIVITY
By Christina Hamlett
Are your own senses holding you back from producing your best writing? The following exercises are all about putting them to work in ways you might not have imagined.
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SMELL
Memory and smell are deeply intertwined, an imprint relationship starting at birth but diminishing as we age or if olfactory receptors are impaired by disease. The brain’s ability to associate smells with emotions, events and people is why the faintest whiff of perfume, cookie dough or burnt rubber can transport us to the past and trigger memories of a lost love, Grandma’s kitchen, or a car accident we were lucky to walk away from.
How does your neighborhood smell? Take a long walk and breathe deeply, making note of the various aromas emanating from gardens, garbage, industrial sites, bodies of water, restaurants and playgrounds. Compose flash fiction stories in which each scent is associated with a character or event.
Follow that nose! With the exception of fresh seafood, coffee blends and certain fruit, you probably don’t pay much attention to supermarket smells. For this exercise, have a trusted friend blindfold you and walk you through the aisles of a grocery store. Each time a distinctive aroma hits your nostrils, describe how the scent makes you feel. Next, remove the blindfold and visit the aisles which sell packaged/canned goods as well as cleaning supplies. Assess whether the label designs/colors influence your expectations of what a product smells like (i.e., do you assume a detergent in a yellow box will smell like lemons). Create a series of advertising slogans in which scent is the key “hook.”
Non-Scents. Many elements such as colors, emotions and household appliances defy olfactory association. For each of the following, describe its attributes in terms of a smell: grey, warm towels, clouds, melancholy, jewelry, tax returns, superstition, red, mist, microwave.
TACTILE TECHNIQUES
A. Feeling a hooky coming on? The art of a convincing call-in to tell your boss you’re under the weather is all in the right staging. It’s more than just having props within reach which make you repeatedly sneeze; it’s about working up a breathless, heated sweat, plunging your hands in ice water for 45 seconds, and donning your rattiest bathrobe. Whatever you can make your body feel will manifest in the way you describe your symptoms to a listener.
B. Borrow a page from Halloween. Have a friend set out bowls containing cooked pasta, crumpled potato chips/crackers/cereal, buttermilk, mud, mashed potatoes, grapes, seaweed, a wiglet, wet sponge pieces, a cold lumpy soup, wet socks, cottage cheese, candy corn, mashed bananas, gummy worms and rubber bugs. Wearing a blindfold, put your hand into each bowl. Give your imagination free rein to envision something horrifying (i.e., a bowl full of squishy eyeballs). Write a flash fiction story based on the most lingering of these tactile sensations.
C. Put on a silk blouse/shirt and soft pants, sit in a comfy spot, and compose a short romantic scene. Next, put on something scratchy and too tight, sit in a straight-back wooden chair and rewrite the scene. Experiment some more by writing the scene in a room that’s too cold, followed by one that’s too hot. Write barefoot – first by wiggling your toes into a deep plush rug, then by putting your feet in a box lid full of gravel.
A MATTER OF TASTE
There’s a reason it’s called “comfort food.” Whether it’s a favorite sandwich, pasta, a pot pie, meatloaf or a bowl of oatmeal, comfort foods are those which evoke sentimental thoughts, are easy to prepare, relieve physical ailments (i.e., chicken soup), or lower the emotional stress of a broken heart, a bad hair day, or feelings of guilt from overspending. Interestingly, studies have shown that what triggers the craving for a comfort food differs between the sexes—men being drawn to it because they’re feeling positive and women because they’re feeling negative.
A. Write down your favorite comfort foods. Describe your earliest memory of each, including who fixed it, the occasion, setting, what kind of plate, what you drank, and what the weather was like.
B. Barring allergies or food restrictions, commit to expanding your culinary margins by trying one new food each week and distinguishing the individual flavors that comprise it.
C. For each of the following, assign a musical instrument which best captures its personality: baked potato, carrots, gelatin, steak, bran muffin, popcorn, fudge, champagne, tofu, marmalade.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?
Your ears serve two important functions: to let you hear/distinguish sounds and to assist in keeping your balance. Hearing is believed to be the last of our senses to go—a useful tidbit to remember if you’re in the presence of someone who’s unconscious. Hospitals have no shortage of stories in which patients who awakened from a coma could recall everything their visitors said, including secret confessions and fractious debates about how to divvy up the estate.
A. Mute the sound on your TV and watch a show you’ve never seen before. How do you use the visuals you’re observing—body language, facial expressions, backdrops, recurring colors and patterns—to figure out the plot, the relationships and what’s being discussed? Watch the show a second time to evaluate your accuracy. Make note of how the inclusion of music and sound effects influence the mood, especially in a horror film.
B. Put in a pair of earplugs at a noisy park. (Be mindful of personal safety, of course.) Write a flash fiction piece about a character who can no longer hear birds singing, children laughing, dogs barking, or people playing sports.
C. Write a letter describing a concert experience to a recipient who has never heard music.
SEEING IS (SOMETIMES) BELIEVING
Vision is generally considered the most complex of our senses because of the volume of data it receives and processes to enable us to distinguish colors and shapes, judge distances, navigate in different levels of light, and recognize familiar sights. Although the majority of information we have about the world tends to come to us through our peepers, the eyes can also play tricks on us through mirages, mistaken identity, and brain-teaser optical illusions.
A. If you always sit in the same spot at your dining room table, on the couch, or in your home office, switch things up for a week and sit in a different chair. How many things do you notice from this alternative perspective? How does your dog or cat see the world? Spend half an hour crawling on the floor, then write down your observations.
B. Close your eyes. Using a tape recorder, describe every detail about the room in which you’re sitting. Then review how many you left off the list, possibly because you’ve seen them so often you no longer “see” them at all.
C. Sit with your back toward the TV and listen to a show with which you’re not familiar. Write down your impressions of how the characters look, what the setting is, and what time of day based on a strictly auditory experience.
Former actress and director Christina Hamlett is an award-winning author whose credits to date include 46 books, 266 stage plays and squillions of articles. She is also a script consultant for stage and screen and a professional ghostwriter. www.authorhamlett.com.
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