What you see is table stakes

In Novelist's Boot Camp--both the book and the workshop--we teach that your prose can be much more powerful if you leverage the intimacy of the senses. In fact, we have a Boot Camp Drill both in the book and the workshop that we do to practice this. The central idea is that by including many different senses in your descriptions, you truly show and not tell.

But I want to take that idea one step further. Given that TV is visual, that movies are visual, that billboards are visual, that even the Internet is visual, I've come to believe that if a writer gives a visual description of an event, action, character, and so on, it's just not enough to just show. As writers, we compete with powerful visual media, and we compete at a disadvantage. Camera crews and special effects folks can present in a half-second an image that it would take us pages to describe. Yet that's what many of us tend to do--take photos or play movies of our stories in our heads, and then replay them on paper. Then we often wonder why the picture has greater impact than words describing a picture.

So we can't just "show," because simply replaying our story-movie on paper is by nature second best, and because our readers are bombarded with images daily. They're desensitized if not totally numbed. Visual description is expected, but that description just gets you to the table. To be in the game, you have to do more. And we can't do what videographers do, because we're writing, not making a video.

What we can do, and with greater impact, is to invoke the other senses. Here we writers have the upper hand over our visual-media brethren (and sister-thren). We can invoke the sense of taste, touch, smell, and sound in ways they simply can't. Moreover, our readers may be numb to visual stimulation, but they're still receptive to input from the other senses.

Poets and songwriters do this. Consider these lines from Meat Loaf's "You took the words right out of my mouth,"

It was a hot summer night and the beach was burning
There was a fog crawling over the sand
When I listen to your heart I hear the whole world turning
I see the shooting stars
Falling through your trembling hands
You were licking your lips and your lipstick shining
I was dying just to ask for a taste
We were lying together in a silver lining
By the light of the moon
You know there's not another moment
Not another moment
Not another moment to waste

You hold me so close that my knees grow weak
But my soul is flying high above the ground
I'm trying to speak but no matter what I do
I just can't seem to make any sound
And then you took the words right out of my mouth
Oh-it must have been while you were kissing me
You took the words right out of my mouth
And I swear it's true
I was just about to say I love you
And then you took the words right out of my mouth
Oh-it must have been while you were kissing me
You took the words right out of my mouth
And I swear it's true
I was just about to say I love you

Now my body is shaking like a wave on the water
And I guess that I'm beginning to grin
Oooh, we're finally alone and we can do what we want to
The night is young
And ain't no one gonna know where you
No one gonna know where you
No one's gonna know where you've been
You were licking your lips and your lipstick shining
I was dying just to ask for a taste
We were lying together in a silver lining
By the light of the moon
You know there's not another moment to waste...


I'm incorporating this into my next word-snapshots for the piece I'm working on now, and I'd offer that you might do the same with your writing. Such a technique not only makes for more interesting writing, it also makes you truly stop and smell the roses, or taste the kisses.