How to Use Sensory Details to Convey Character Emotion
Kate Johnston offers up some writing tips on how to use sensory details to convey character emotion in this blog post for writers.
A popular writing style is Deep or Immersive POV. This allows you to bypass the author’s voice and go straight to what your viewpoint character is thinking or feeling so that you can more deeply connect your reader to the story. Where the author’s voice summarizes, explains, reports, or justifies, Deep POV shows reasons for a character’s emotional response to events.
Deep POV uses sensory details to create internal conflict, mood/tone, external tension, setting and other storytelling elements. Once these sensory details are established, there’s no need for the author to step in and explain anything.
In this blog post, we’ll talk about how to use sensory details to convey character emotion. At the end, I provide a writing exercise to help you practice this technique.
Let’s hop to it!
WHAT IS YOUR CHARACTER’S WHY?
Sensory details can help you avoid leaning too heavily on cliches, which is an often overused crutch in writing. Cliches such as “her heart pounded” or “his palms grew wet” come to the mind easily when we’re writing scenes. While it’s certainly reasonable to have a heart pound a few times throughout your book, you want to ensure that isn’t the only physical reaction your character experiences to express their emotion.
One way to avoid writing cliches is to first understand why your character might be having a particular emotional response. Ask yourself why this character feels a certain way, here and now. Then you can make a list of all the possible physical reactions your character might express.
GET CLEAR ON YOUR CHARACTER
Deep POV allows you to use a variety of sensory details based on an individual’s specific history to get across their emotions. You can also tie their emotional reactions to the setting to help you establish reasons for their behavior in the scene.
For example, two teens are nervous about the school dance. Gertrude is nervous because the last time she went to a school dance, she kept stepping on her partner’s feet and he got angry with her. Harry is nervous because he plans to ask a girl he has a crush on to dance with him, but he’s not sure she’ll say yes.
Two very different reasons for nerves, which means these two individuals will behave differently at the dance. Gertrude might try hiding in the corner, Harry might have to summon up the courage to dance. Gertrude might watch the clock, willing it to go faster, whereas Harry might hope time slows down to give him a chance to approach his crush. Gertrude might study how kids on the floor are dancing, specifically watching their foot placement. Harry’s attention might be fixed on the one girl he wants to ask to dance. Gertrude’s anxiety might be felt in her limbs—sweaty palms and quaking knees. Harry’s anxiety might be shown through a dry mouth and stuttering dialogue.
Just through the breakdown of Gertrude and Harry, we get a sense of two very different characters who are both handling their nervousness in two totally different ways because their reasons—their WHY—are different.
THE FIVE SENSES
1.| SIGHT
Sight is the primary sense people use to absorb and observe information about the world. It’s also the easiest sense to use in our writing—but for that reason, it’s also easy to rely on it too much and ignore the other senses.
When we observe something with only our sight, our brain kicks in to interpret that information, and a decision is made instantly. This decision is based on a slew of factors including past experience or prior knowledge, values, and emotions.
We also judge with our sight. Eve sees a black cat strutting across her front yard, and she hurries to phone her neighbor Mrs. Ducie to let her know Precious escaped. Daisy sees a black cat crossing her front yard, but it’s limping, so she goes out to see if she can help it. Fred sees a black cat in his front yard and he suddenly realizes he’s laid eyes on the reason the songbird activity has dipped to an all-time low.
2.| SOUND
Sound is a close second to sight when it comes to absorbing and observing information about the world. Often, sound triggers memories and emotions, and it can provide another layer of information for your characters. When you pair sound with sight in your writing, you can build well-rounded situations.
Take that same black cat. What if the cat is yowling as it’s crossing the lawn? Eve might think the cat is afraid because it’s outside when it normally is kept inside. Daisy might think the cat is in pain because it’s limping. Fred might think the cat is marking its territory to ensure no other cat tries to horn in on the bird supply.
3.| SMELL
Smell also triggers memories, especially ones from childhood or from a specific life event. While smells become neutralized when we’re exposed to them over a period of time, we often will pick up on distinct smells when we enter a new space. Those smells can tell us something about the space and the people within the space as well as bring us back in time and remind us of something that happened.
In real life, those memories can either be critical or fairly inane. In writing, you want to only focus on the critical. Try not to bring up unimportant memories or flashbacks that don’t impact your story in a significant way.
4.| TOUCH
Touch is a great sense to bring in when you want to explore human-to-human connection, which immediately ties it to emotions. This sense can also be used to relay temperatures, textures, and safe versus danger zones. Touch is the sense that we have significant control over (obviously, the extent of control will depend on the scene you’re writing). Gertrude has no intention of touching a single person at the dance, whereas Harry wants to touch one particular person—again, it boils down to their WHY.
5.| TASTE
Taste is admittedly the toughest sense to describe. Opportunities to convey taste may not present themselves that often, but when they do, it’s a good idea to take advantage, if for no other reason than to add variety to your writing. Gertrude might stuff her face with salty corn chips while she counts down the minutes of the dance. Harry might not dare eat a thing because he doesn’t want bad breath, but he could slurp tepid, chlorinated water from the fountain to help with that dry mouth.
Your Writing Workout
Describe the following photograph using the different types of sensory imagery. (Visual = what can be seen; Auditory = what can be heard; Tactile = what can be touched/felt physically; Olfactory = what can be smelled; Gustatory = what can be tasted; Organic = internal sensations such as feelings and emotions like fatigue, sadness, excitement, thirst.)
Don't worry if you have trouble coming up with something to describe one of the senses (as mentioned above, "taste" is the most difficult to describe, and not always appropriate for the scene).
Try to convey what you see in the photograph without explicitly describing the photo.
Visual:
Auditory:
Tactile:
Olfactory:
Gustatory:
Organic:
Bonus Challenge: When you have an example for each sensory detail, try to combine them into a singular description of the photograph. Don't worry if it doesn't really make sense! That's not the point with this exercise.
photo credit: wundervisuals