by Lazarus Black
The human body can experience more than 12 senses.
This is not a how-to.
The human body can experience more than 12 senses. Years ago, children were taught about less than half of them: Sight, Hearing, Touch, Taste, and Smell. But there is also Temperature, Pain, Hunger, Emotions, Energy Levels, Imagination, Proprioception, and many more. But not all humans are alike in how they experience these, either in intensity or complexity.
Some humans are color-blind or blind and others deaf. I have terrible life-long allergies, so my sniffer is awkward in that it can't smell huge varieties of scents, but those I can impress me greatly (either with pleasure or disgust). My wife has prosopagnosia, which is also called Face-Blindness, and she cannot remember human faces when she looks away from them. People with eating disorders have very unique experiences with Hunger. People with anxiety disorders and bipolar disorders and adhd and autism have unique experiences with Emotions. And there are people with no ability to imagine sights or sounds inside their head.*
So, who do you write for?
Well, first and foremost - write for yourself. However, if you want to reach the most readers, you have to write for the majority of readers. And that means writing for all of the senses, all of the time.
Some of you, like me, will groan at this, because one or more of your senses are more limited than average. I struggle to write scents in my stories because I don't know what many things smell like - and if I do - they bring too strong of an emotion with them. 5-15% of all readers (depending on the study) consider Smell to be the most important sense in their body. I know several writers who feel this way. But I do not. Any written passage that tries to describe to me anything pleasant about the smell of grass or vegetable matter will disgust me because I only associate those scents with the misery of my allergies. I feel left out of the pleasant experience and wish it was different. Knowing that 10%-ish of all readers need clear scents described in the story forces me to figure out where, when, and how to do that at a very logical level. If necessary, I will have to defer to what I've read elsewhere by people I hope have better experiences than me.
A color-blind author may not be able to see the color red, for example, without describing red objects like blood and many lipsticks. It's too visceral a color for the vast majority of readers.
My wife is professional (and rather famous) artist. When she draws faces, she dedicates most of her time to perfecting faces from model reference - and it pays off. She is known around the world for her ability to present the most subtle emotions and complex thoughts in her characters, other artists are not as obsessed with representing.
According to David Wolverton, a world-renowned author, editor, publishing consultant, professor, and writing instructor, around 70% of all readers are primarily visual. That means, they prefer visual stimuli over the other primary senses, and even seek out that stimuli from written text. Not providing that stimuli essentially alienates 70% of all readers from your story. Yes. 3 of every 4 readers will put your story down and never come back.
And yet, I have met many an aspiring author - and even a few supposed writing "teachers" who refuse, deny, and even blatantly argue against including visual descriptions in any story... That literally does not make any sense. People with average (even above-average) senses drastically outnumber those with limited senses. And even someone with a limited sense in one case can have a different exceptional sense. My sniffer may be broken - but I am an exceptional visual processing including hyperphantasia (hyper-acute imagination).
One might surmise that opponents of sensory content have some issue with them. I admit that I have complained numerous times about having to write smells in stories out of pure frustration. Any inherent difficulty to overcome is quite daunting. But they might also be simply frustrated with the addition of visuals because the quantity of words interrupts their sense of pacing. In either case, they are failing their story. Put in the work. I even wrote a brief lesson plan on how to do it titled Writing Effective Visuals. And I really and truly wish someone would write one about Smells for me, because it is so hard.
About 20% of readers prefer audial stimuli, but that is the easiest to satisfy because not only is all dialogue audial, the written word itself is audial (every letter stands for a sound).
But the other senses need to be present, too. When is your character hungry? When are they dizzy and disoriented? When are they exhausted or manic? When are they hot or cold? How are they sexually aroused? Okay - maybe avoid details about using a bathroom, but you should get the point.
There are books and website out there with long lists of vocabulary words to describe senses, but they can be misleading.
I read one story where the male protagonist longed for his ex-girlfriend. In the final scene, he heard a knock at his door and opening it revealed his estranged love "smelling like sex". The protagonist instantly swooned and invited her in and they made up on the spot.
Does anyone else see the multiple problems in this description? 1. "Sex" is a very unique smell involving various pungent body fluids, gases, hormones, and lubricants. It is not normally considered as "pleasant" as florals or baking spices. 2. If she smelled like sex, that means she had just had sex with SOMEONE ELSE either very recently, or hadn't bathed in some time since. In neither case would a reader expect the protagonist to swoon wistfully about that. And those contradiction throws readers (at least, it threw me) out of the story. Obviously, the author meant to describe sexy scents that reminded him of their romance. But that's not how it was written.
As a person with scent description difficulties, this issue is one of my biggest fears as a writer. I don't want to make that mistake myself, and so I work extra hard to overcome myself and get everything right.
You will automatically write to your own preference. Visual writers will include detailed descriptions. Smelly writers will includes complex scents. Audial writers will design and entire soundscape. But you can't just do your preference because readers are more broad-spectrum.
And their are writers who will refuse to do the work. You should not be one of them. There is no legit argument for omitting them.
A reader who prefers one scent over another is more likely to just gloss over the text describing what they aren't interested in, while simultaneously becoming irate at a story that hamstrings their preference or insults it by its omission.
In conclusion, if anyone ever tells you "less description" of any sensory experience in your story, walk away. They just don't want to have to skip over section of text they don't appreciate and are trying to manipulate you to favor their preference. But it is guaranteed that they are a minority in the world, no matter how many of them sit in a small room at the same time.
Good luck!
Related Blog: Writing Effective Visuals - https://www.lazarus.black/blog...
* Aphantasia (no visual imagination), Anauralia (no auditory imagination), and "not having an inner voice" are different conditions with different percentages of the population affected. Complete Aphantasia, not being able to visualize images in one's mind, affects around 0.5% of the population while 1-2% of the population are hyperphantasic (have exceptionally vivid and keen visual imaginations). The bell curve for it skews heavily towards people having visual imaginations (twice as many people are hyperphantasis as aphantasic) – leading to 70% of the population reporting that they prefer visual stimuli over all the other senses. The other conditions are more difficult to report on. Anauralia is still under study and I'm not as versed in it, but Lack of Inner Voices are so poorly studied, papers claimed anywhere between 25%-75% of the population being affected. (Which leads one to suspect poor/skewed research.) But out of all this, it is clear that writers with Aphantasia are in an unfortunate minority that will have to work much harder than others to appeal for their audience.