By Jessica Handler
Stop what you’re doing, and pay attention to your senses. How your fingers feel on the keyboard, or your feet on the floor. What about sound? Is your playlist going (and what’s on it?) or is that a trash truck grinding away on the street? Does your mouth taste like this morning’s coffee or tea, or is there a half-dissolved mint or cherry or lemon or eucalyptus cough drop on your tongue? When you inhale, are you enjoying the scent of that last autumn rose in a pitcher on your desk, or did you catch a whiff of something questionable in the fridge? When you look away from this essay, what do you see elsewhere in the room?
With every action, you’re focusing your attention on those same five senses we learned as children: touch, sound, taste, smell, sight.
There’s a grounding exercise used in mindfulness practices and in therapies called the “five-four-three-two-one” technique.
Identify five things I can see in this moment
Four things I can touch
Three things I can hear
Two things I can smell
One thing I can taste.
This technique centers my scrambled thoughts when I’m anxious. Inventorying my five senses turns my attention to the small things I’m missing.
When I use a version of this same exercise in my writing, I uncover a level of sensory detail that makes a character authentic. An authentic character (and that’s me if I’m writing memoir or essay, and someone else if I’m writing fiction or narrative nonfiction) is a memorable character. Not all the senses are required in this writing exercise. For example, if we are sighted, our habit is often to rely on sight in descriptive writing. Try breaking that mold by introducing a character by their scent, or describing the sound in a room, rather than the appearance.
Identifying sensory detail is also a pathway to figurative language. Metaphor, derived from the Greek metaphora, which means to carry or transfer, is a form of figurative language. Metaphor allows a writer to carry deeper meaning with sensory image.
What does joy taste like? For me, it’s apples (which is weird, because I don’t particularly like apples, but I certainly like joy.)
What about fear? For one of my students, fear tasted of celery. Writing about a past moment of fear, he was able to allow us to inhabit that with him by describing a specific, unique trait in a memorable passage about a physical reaction to fear.
My novel The Magnetic Girl is my imagined story of the real-life theater career of 19th century vaudeville performer Lulu Hurst. Hurst’s stage act involved “lifting” men in chairs and “throwing” people with electricity she convinced them was transmitted through her fingers. It wasn’t until I literally tried my hands at her tricks (she called them “tests”) and sensed for myself how she used her balance and timing to accomplish these feats that I was able to write those scenes in a way that felt genuine.
My memoir, Invisible Sisters, engaged my senses differently. Revisiting the corridors of the children’s hospital that was so much a part of my family’s life when I was growing up, I saw the yellow striped privacy curtains I’d forgotten and smelled the plasticky scent of medication in the hallway. My muscles knew right away how to find the patient elevators: take a right at the gift shop.
It’s an odd thing to encourage writers to get out of their heads. Writers think up plots, we think when we research, we think when we read. But we live in bodies, and those bodies rely on the senses we have.
So stop what you’re doing, and pay attention to your senses. What you’re feeling right now can bring your character to life on the page.
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Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize, the memoir, Invisible Sisters, the craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss, and the forthcoming novel, The World To See. Visit her at her website.
Join Jessica for a 90-minute live webinar, where we’ll explore how acclaimed memoirists and essayists approach emotionally charged material—and how you can apply their techniques to your own work. Looking Back, Moving Forward: Writing About Grief, Loss & Trauma is hosted by CRAFT TALKS June 25th at 1PM ($15 Early Bird, regular $25). Find out more/register now.
