[Weekly] Altering senses, or changing concrete description exercise
Hey everyone!
For this weekly, I thought up a fun exercise for everyone to play around with sensory detail. Go through your most recent WIP (or whichever piece of writing you want to use) and look for any of your concrete descriptions. These involve descriptions that focus on sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch within the POV of the character. Grab as many as you want for the exercise. Then, think about the subject of the description and write a new concrete description for that subject based on one of the other senses (bonus: choose taste or touch for extra difficulty, as sight, sound, and smell are the most common ones used).
Example:
The roots move beneath his skin too, shifting like living splinters, piercing through the upper layer of his skin.
Original: sentence is mostly focused on sight and touch, going to focus on smell and sound
The roots slither beneath his skin, pierce its upper layer. Blood plinks onto the stone, and now every inhale drags in the scent and taste of iron.
New: more focused on sound and smell. It’s not beautiful, but it’s an exercise, so it doesn’t have to be.
Have fun combing your work and playing around with sensory detail. People tend to default to focusing on sight and sound in writing, with the first being the most common, so going through and rewriting descriptions to focus on taste, touch, or scent can enhance the sense of deep POV for a scene. Personally, I also think it’s entertaining to try to imagine different dimensions of sensation for a scenario too and try to really put a reader in the character’s shoes.
Some bonus questions:
If you looked through a larger piece of your writing, what sense do you tend to write about the most? Why do you suppose that is? How would the work change if your character didn’t have access to that sense?
When you move through the world, what do you tend to notice first sensory-wise about something new? What do you notice second? Or does it vary based on circumstance?
What are some interesting ways taste can be incorporated into a scene that doesn’t involve food or eating? Share examples if you can think of any unique ones from recent works you’ve read.
Feel free to share anything else you’d like on this weekly post if you have other thoughts too.