Emily Hartley
Why Sight Takes Over
Most first drafts are eye-heavy. Write a scene and you will instinctively reach for what can be seen: the colour of a door, the shape of a face, the state of the weather. Sight is the sense we use most consciously when we walk into a room, and the one we assume description means.
The trouble is that sight alone produces flat scenes. A reader can picture a kitchen, but they will not feel it. Add the clatter of a dropped spoon, the smell of last night's chip pan, the sticky drag of a tabletop under a palm, and the room acquires a body. Sensory detail is not decoration; it is how you make a reader believe they are standing somewhere.
Try reading a page of your own work and marking every sense you have used. If the marks cluster in one column, you have found something to fix.
Sound: The Fastest Route to Mood
Sound is the most underused sense in early drafts, and the most efficient. A single noise can set time and place faster than a paragraph of description. A dustcart reversing at half past six tells us the hour. A radio playing in another room tells us that someone is home, and that we are not allowed to see them.
Be specific rather than general. "Traffic" is nothing. "The wet hiss of tyres on tarmac" puts the reader on the pavement in the rain. Rather than "there was music", try "the tinny crackle of a phone speaker in the next room".
- Watch your rhythm. Short, harsh sentences mimic sudden noise; longer ones suit hums, drones and distant sounds.
- Remember silence. Silence in a farmhouse at night, where you can hear the fridge, is quite different from silence in a flat above a main road.
- Avoid onomatopoeia that shows off. "Bang" is fine once; stacked noises in quotation marks become comedy.
Smell and Taste: The Shortcut to Memory
Smell reaches memory more directly than any other sense, which makes it the most powerful tool you have for character. A scent can carry an entire history without the writer needing to explain it.
The craft trick is to describe the smell through its associations rather than its name. "It smelled of lavender" is a label. "The smell took her straight back to her grandmother's airing cupboard" is a life. Where possible, tie the scent to a person or place your viewpoint character already cares about, and the reader will feel the pull without being told to.
Taste is rarer in fiction and worth chasing. It appears when a character is anxious or frightened — the copper taste of adrenaline, a dry mouth, blood from a bitten lip — but it can also be domestic and comforting. A mouthful of weak tea and a digestive biscuit. The chalk of a cheap mint.
Touch: Weight, Texture and Temperature
Touch grounds a scene in the body. Fingers are your best reporter in any setting: what they are touching, and how, reveals what the character is doing and what they are thinking. Chafing shoes and damp collars are more persuasive than an inventory of furniture.
Texture and temperature also give you free tension. A cold cup of tea left untouched says something about a conversation. A door handle that sticks in the hand raises the pulse. Write what the body feels from the inside as well as the surface: tight chest, unsteady legs, the ache that settles after a long shift on your feet.
Choosing Which Details to Keep
The temptation, once you have discovered the other senses, is to cram them in. Resist the full checklist — five senses in five tidy sentences is a common flaw in edited drafts, and it reads like a worksheet.
Instead, let the senses arrive through attention. Filter them through the viewpoint character's preoccupations: a very hungry person notices food smells two streets away, while someone who has just walked away from a row may register only noise and cold air. One or two well-chosen details per scene will almost always beat five average ones.
Watch for inherited details, too. Freshly cut grass, the smell of rain, the taste of salt water — these are default examples rather than observations. Look for the detail only your particular character, in this particular place, would catch.
Practical Ways to Practise
- Describe your journey to work using only sound, then only smell. Five sentences each.
- Take a paragraph from an old draft, delete every visual detail and see what remains. Replace two of them with details from other senses.
- Write a short scene set in a room you know well, from the perspective of someone hiding in it. Fear sharpens hearing; you will be surprised how much you notice.
- Keep a notebook of single sensory phrases — not scenes, just fragments — and read it before you write. It builds the habit of noticing.
Bring the sensory world in gradually, one or two details at a time, and your scenes will stop being pictures and start being places. The best test is simple: read the passage aloud and ask whether you can feel where you are.
