In order to connect with readers, you must find a way to give readers a point of reference, and senses are a shared experience that serve as building blocks for scene setting. While I don’t suggest trying for all five, exercising all five while writing will give you a gathering to select the best details while editing your novel.
Engaging the Sense of Sight
Writing for sight is probably the sense that comes most naturally to authors. We all want readers to be able to picture the scenes in their minds. A huge array of descriptive language that naturally comes to mind is exclusively for sight: tattered, teal, tiny, twinkling.
But what you may not know is sight is the most pragmatic of the senses. People don’t think especially deeply beyond what they see. This is the reason why we value eye witnesses so much. It feels objective. So to build a realistic setting, a character should reflect upon more than how it looks alone.
Engaging the Sense of Smell
I probably don’t have to tell you that scent is the sense most closely tied to memory. Because of this, by engaging a reader’s sense of smell in the text, you can create a strong memory for them to recall later in the book. This is especially useful if minor details need to reappear later, like in a mystery novel.
However, it’s important to write the sense of smell carefully as well. Because it is so powerful to recall memories, using the sense of smell during a point where a reader is less engaged with the text can cause their minds to wander back to that memory and put the book down. Or a strong memory of their own could evoke emotions you had not associated with the smell, leading to a misinterpretation of the scene.
Engaging the Sense of Taste
Taste and smell are very closely tied together both in how humans experience them and in the language used to describe them. But a key differentiator of the two is that experiencing smell is something that happens passively (through breathing), and taste is an active sense because it requires the tongue, which is typically less exposed.
For this reason, writing about taste will keep readers thinking actively about the text, making it highly engaging content. Oftentimes authors choose to use taste only when eating or occasionally when kissing, but there are many great examples of unexpected ways to grab your audience’s attention with taste like seeing a small child put a worm in their mouth and then recoil.
Engaging the Sense of Touch
Touch is the one sense that can be felt across the whole body. As such, touch has the capability to give an all-over sensory experience, pleasurable or painful. Writing for the sense of touch can impact a reader’s experience in a big way. Even experiences clearly felt by the hand like a greasy stove or a plush hand towel can ripple through the body like chills or cozy comfort.
There are times when the touch itself is more important than how it feels, though. Reaching out in comfort to a character at the right moment can be a powerful reader experience, as can laying a hand on an untouchable prized possession. Knowing how much to describe the object versus the experience of the touch itself will change your reader’s perspective immensely.
Engaging the Sense of Sound
Finding a truly silent place in the world is uncommon, and even if they are, in fact, silent, describing the absence of sound would still be quite absorbing. To make a setting or important action come to life, sound must be there to help fill in the reader’s imagination fully. If your character is walking through an airport terminal, we should hear the muffled announcements overhead or suitcase wheels clicking along grout lines of the tile floor.
Sounds are complex to describe accurately. The first choice in a writer’s toolset is onomatopoeia: click, clack, clank, clunk. Though similar sounds, these minor changes in description carry subtext of weight, volume, tonal quality, and distance that fill a reader’s imagination more accurately. The second, similes: the pup’s cry sounded like a child in terrible pain. Though just as useful, similes carry extra subtext in either the juxtaposition or similitude of the two compared concepts.
Selecting the Best Sensory Details
Though it would be an overwhelming read a book trying to write for all five senses each time a character entered a new room, taking advantage of the one or two that best apply to the reader experience you want to cultivate can form a connection immediately.
So when you set out to describe a character, location or object, make a mental list with at least one characteristic from each sense to bring it to life. Then all you need to do is select the most effective details you come up with, and utilize your editor (internal or otherwise) to cut out the noise.