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Of the five senses, taste is the rarest in stories. The reason is that we’re not eating, drinking, smoking or falling face-first into the dirt as frequently as we are seeing, hearing and smelling the world around us.

Like the senses of sound and smell, taste ought to be reserved for moments when it can offer meaningful descriptions of an object, to raise dramatic tension or to offer insights into a character. For example, describing how an extrasolar colonist who has learned bad news suddenly finds bitter the taste of his otherwise sweet julah drink shows how the information has affected him emotionally. Unfortunately, writers too often simply describe the food a character is eating either for the gross-out factor (such as the Klingon’s gagh in “Star Trek”) or simply to find a way to get the sense of taste into their story.

Where taste and smell are concerned, sometimes you can get your descriptions to appeal to both senses. They are, after all, closely related: Humans who have temporarily lost their sense of smell due to a cold often can’t taste either. J. Chris Rock accomplishes this in his short story “Lucy” (which appears in the Aug. 2008 Asimov’s Science Fiction): “’Seriously though,’ Elgin says, his mouth full of Fritos. I can smell them, that gross wet corn mush smell.”

Tags: description, five senses, setting

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As with the scents, we’re constantly barraged with the sensation of touch, but often it goes ignored. American and Western culture prefers personal space that prevents a lot of touching, and our buildings tend to be climate-controlled, leaving us neither hot nor cold. Our furniture is designed to be soft enough that our bodies do not get sore when sitting or reclining. I’m certainly not complaining about such comfortableness, but it does challenge the writer to work for images that appeal to a sense of touch that readers can relate to.

Since touch is almost a background sensation in readers’ lives, its use ought to be reserved for moments when it can offer meaningful descriptions of an object, to raise dramatic tension or to offer insights into a character. As the sensation of touch is powerful in real life, sloppy use of it in your fictional world can wreck the story’s believability. Deftly handled appeals to the sense of touch, however, can make for a striking description that keeps the reader turning the page.

Recognizing the power of touch, author Jack Skillingstead appeals to the sense of touch in the opening line of his recent short story “What You are About to See” (which appears in the Aug. 2008 Asimov’s Science Fiction): “I sat in a cold room.” Readers used to climate-controlled buildings instantly finds the situation peculiar. The exoticness of appealing to the sense of touch further serves to pull the reader in. The line also does a good job of establishing the story’s tone, one in which our main character and the other government officials around him are never quite comfortable, as they’ve made contact with an alien whose craft crashed in the Nevada desert.

Tags: description, five senses, setting, touch

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We are surrounded by scents, but they often go ignored as people have a poor sense of smell (at least compared to other animals, such as dogs and cats). Further, in American culture most scents are suppressed; we prefer an antiseptic home, workplace and body.

For those reasons, writers rarely describe scents in a story. As with sound, when the sensation does appear in a story, it’s often to draw attention to some characteristic of an object or to raise dramatic tension.

Writers ought to find a way to incorporate at least one appeal to the sense of smell in their story, if only to make the story more real. The key is to get it purposefully into the story and not just to make the writing more vivid for vividness’ own sake.

Novelist Kevin J. Anderson appeals to the sense of smell in just such a way in his novel “The Ashes of Worlds”. The book’s opening chapter, set aboard a spaceship bridge, makes no appeal at all to the sense of smell , which makes sense as one wouldn’t expect to smell anything (other than ozone perhaps) in a setting with an artificial atmosphere. In the next chapter, the sense of smell only is implied when smoke and burnings coals are noted in the description of a tree city under attack. A scent finally is directly described to good dramatic effect after the chapter’s climax as the city’s inhabitants flee what once their homes: “Green grass smoldered around them, making the smoke burn like acid in their lungs.”

Tags: description, dramatic tension, five senses, setting

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When writing descriptions, one of the five senses that you can appeal to is sound.

We’re surrounded all day by sounds, though most of it is tuned out. When we do hear something out of the ordinary – an alarm, the crunch of metal when cars collide, the annoying repetition of a water drip – it stands out.

Likewise, most authors use sound in the same way in their stories: the sensation is often implied but only used at a moment when it can most contribute to raising dramatic tension or add to a description of an important object in the story.

Tags: description, five senses, onomatopoeia, setting

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When writing description, authors typically should appeal to as many senses as possible in their piece. Doing so can create a textual richness that makes the story more real for readers.

The easiest of the five senses to write is that of sight. It’s easy because humans are by nature visual animals. Whereas some creatures rely more on scent or hearing when interacting with the world, humans depend on their visual acuity. Our brains in part evolved to manipulate abstract imagery so well because of our ability to see in three dimensions and in color.

Not surprisingly then, appeals to the sense of sight dominate most story’s descriptions. Consider Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “Dial ‘F’ for Frankenstein”, which contains a couple of excellent appeals each to our sense of sound and even touch. But the story contains dozens of appeals to the sense of sight: “Dr, John Williams, head of the mathematics division, stirred uneasily”; “Williams blushed, but not very hard”; “’Very well,’ he said, doodling on the tablecloth”; “He squinted balefully at the fluorescent tubes above the table; they were needed on this foggy winter day”; “Overhead, the lights continued their annoying flicker, which seemed to be getting worse” and so on.

When using sight in your stories, be sure that the descriptions are apt. Clarke, for example, uses the flickering of the lights, the fog and other visual images to show how humanity is slowly losing its control of the mechanical world to what is the equivalent of a computer that has just gained consciousness. In addition, don’t limit yourself only to sight. Humans do experience the world with the four other senses at the very same time they use their eyes. Describing what your characters hear, smell, feel and taste will prevent your appeals to the sense of sight from becoming monotonous.

You Do It
Write a 100-word piece describing a science fiction landscape: a craft landing at a spaceport, a city of the 24th century, a desert world with three moons in the sky, or another setting of your own making. When done, count how many of your images appeal to sight, then sound, then smell, then touch and finally taste. Which of the five senses dominate your piece?

 

Visit my Web site about writing science fiction, Inventing Reality.

(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: description, five senses, setting

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When creating your story’s setting or explaining what your characters are doing, you’ll need to use description. Description is necessary to move along the plot, to create tone. You even can create resonance in your writing by layering description with symbolic meaning – but more on that later.

n Sight - What we can see with our eyes, as in “Counter was dim but grayly grand – lightly banded in pale pewter and salmon red, save where the shrunken Moon cast its huge gloomy shadow.”

n Sound - What we can hear, as in “The lander went ping and pop with thermal stress.”

n Smell - The scent of something, as in “As Keegan pressed a fin against the body tube, the scent of yellow glue strong in his nostrils, his uncle stopped talking midsentence, then a thump against the workshop floor sounded behind him.” (Note: This example doesn’t come from Benford; his story, as good as it was, skimped on this sense).

n Touch - What we can feel when things come into contact with our skin, as in “Their drive ran red-hot.”

n Taste - The flavor of something when it comes into contact with our tongue, as in “She took a hit of the thick, jolting Colombian coffee in her mug.”

Using as many of the senses as possible makes a scene more real. In everyday life, we experience all of these five senses at all times. Sitting in coffee shop writing this entry, I see the barista racing to and fro to fill an order, hear the hushed voices of the couple sitting behind me as they try to keep their disagreement for bursting into a public scene, taste the bitter coffee, catch a whiff of the pear-scented perfume of a woman passing my table on her way to the counter, shiver at the cold breeze from the air conditioner that is working on overdrive. In fiction, the key is to make these different senses work with one another to create tone.

When writing description, follow these guidelines:

n Make sure it serves a purpose - Any description should move along the plot, help develop characters and dramatic tension. If it’s solely being used to establish the location of the story or to indicate a background character’s actions, keep the description quick and simple.

n Avoid flowery prose simply for the sake of waxing poetic - Purple prose only makes the story campy.

n Remain cautious about offering lengthy descriptions - Descriptions in novels obviously can be longer than those in short stories. Still, the longer the description, the greater the chance that it will cause the reader to forget what’s going on in the story.

n Capture the “essence” of a place/moment/character through description - If an alien landscape is supposed to be foreboding, then describe it as such by noting the lack of water, the difficult terrain, the strange outcroppings of rock. A foreboding environment would be lush and comfortably warm.
n Use sensory details rather than internalized ones - Sensory details (green, tart, quiet, rough) are specific rather than general. Internalized details (happy, melancholy, guilty, barbaric) amount to editorializing and give no real impression of what is being described.

You Do It
Imagine a scene in which the character in your story lands on an exoworld and visits an alien city. Write 200... [More]

Tags: description, five senses, setting

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Many readers choose science fiction over other genres simply for the imaginative landscapes and the adventure of exploring these environments. These environments make up the story's setting, or where when and where the story occurs. Setting then is the story's time and the place in which the plot unfolds. Sometimes it's referred to as the “scene”.

For example, in "Star Trek: The Original Series", the setting typically is the 23rd century and various parts of the starship Enterprise, such as the bridge, sickbay, engineering and transporter room. The various locations that the landing party visits on the planet also is part of the setting.

Setting helps shape your story's color and mood. The conflicts the characters face hinge on the setting and the situations it creates for the characters. On occassion, the setting itself must be transformed as the main character resolves his central problem.

Setting is high art in science fiction. That's because the setting typically is a time and place that doesn't exist - the future, a lunar colony, a ship travleing between the stars. The challenge to science fiction writers is to create a background that is believable.

There are several ways that writers can make their science fiction setting believable:

n New devices and discoveries should not contradict what science knows today. Science fiction readers often play what is known as “The Game - they scrutinize every story, looking for scientific or technological errors. Consider Bill's critical response to my story, “Boundaries” (though I think he misread some of the story, some of his points are well taken).

n Every background detail should advance the story. If it’s not important to the story, get rid of it. Exotic detail for the sake of being exotic is unnecessary.

n Avoid explaining how the machinery works. Just show what it does. Limited explanation should be used only if it will advance the story.

n Be thoroughly familiar with setting of your story. This requires a working and researched knowledge of ecosystems and machinery before making extrapolations. Know more than the reader, but don't leave out important information necessary to the story.

n Remain self-consistent. As soon as one detail contradicts another, the story falls apart. For example, in a society lacking energy resources, the variety of food available would be limited as transportation of staples between regions wouldn't be possible. Miss that detail, however, and the setting won't seem believable.

More generally, when describing the setting, follow these basic rules:

n Give concrete details of the place. Appeal to as many senses as possible. All of us live in a world in which we constantly see, hear, smell, taste and touch. So also should your characters.

n Ask how your main character would perceive this place. Write a description of the setting from that viewpoint.

n Divide descriptions of the setting into three sections. For example, start with the foreground, then in the next couple of the sentences go the middle and at paragraph's end to the background. Or try left-center-right or sky-eye-level-ground.

Sometimes in science fiction, masters of their craft create a "meta-setting", which is when the author’s perspective colors the selection of words and phrasing used to describe a scene. A meta-setting adds texture to your writing and can help express a thematic point to your story.

You Do It

Write a 250-word description of what your house or apartment will be like in 25 years. What appliances and electronics will be there? What pictures will hang on the walls? What foods and beverages will you find in the refrigerator (or whatever it is that replaces it)? What will be the view from the windows? Try to appeal to...

Tags: five senses, scene, setting

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