Writing Active Setting Book 1: Characterization and Sensory Detail

by Buckham, Mary

  One or two sentences max and a reader is in Cuba, Istanbul, or Mexico City. When we smell fake leather boots, burnt or moldy earth, plastic, sweat, and hot straw, we add to those smells an image of run-down neighborhoods, stray dogs, a city that’s a working-man’s world, because we fill in the blanks based on what we smell.

  Scents can evoke memories so strongly. I love the smell of lilies whereas my mother detests the same smell because they remind her of her mother’s funeral. Have you ever been overwhelmed in a new location because everything is new and different and the scents are what finally cause you to be overstimulated to the point you walk away with a pounding headache? Some scents mean pleasure — baking cookies, the smell of a new book, the warm scent of a babies’ skin when you nuzzle their heads. Others evoke just the opposite response — the musty smell of damp basements, strong perfume in a small elevator, moldy bread.

  Don’t think that adding sensory detail means adding pages and pages of words and do remember to be specific. It smelled nice or of summer flowers doesn’t tell the reader much and the words are not working hard enough for your story.

  Note: Make sure that your sensory details are specific to the Setting of your story and filtered through a specific POV character’s awareness.

  Watch how mystery writer Nancy Pickard quickly orients a reader as to Setting by focusing in mostly on sounds in this paragraph.

  Students looked up at us curiously from inside their classrooms as we walked past. Teachers’ voices jarred the air, like different radio stations turned up too loud. Somewhere a couple of locker doors slammed shut, and everywhere there was that smell that only schools have and that echoey sound and that odd slanting light in the halls.

  –Confession – Nancy Pickard

  Did you find yourself thinking about your own school environment and being tugged into the place quickly by the sensory details?

  This is the power of adding sensory details to Setting description. Readers quickly find themselves deeper into the Setting. They can feel themselves there on a three-dimensional level vs. simply a visual level. If Pickard had chosen to remain only on a visual level, see what she might have written.

  Students looked up at us curiously from inside their classrooms as we walked past. There were lockers on both sides of the long hall and a scuffed linoleum floor. Overhead were fluorescent lights, most of them off in the middle of the day, but a few flickering.

  Okay, but not great. We as readers are seeing what the POV character sees of the Setting, but we’re not in the Setting the way sensory details can pull us into the Setting.

  Now let’s look at how T. Jefferson Parker uses sensory details to describe the scene of a crime:

  She noted that the table had been set for two. A pair of seductive high heels stood near the couch, facing her, like a ghost was standing in them, watching. The apartment was still, the slider closed against the cool December night. Good for scent. She closed her eyes. Salt air. Baked fowl. Coffee. Goddamned rubber gloves, of course. A whiff of gunpowder? Maybe a trace of perfume, or the flowers on the table — gardenia, rose, lavender? And of course, the obscenity of spilled blood — intimate, meaty, shameful.

  She listened to the waves. To the traffic. To the little kitchen TV turned low; an evangelist bleating for money. To the clunk of someone in the old walkway. To her heart, fast and heavy in her chest. Merci felt most alive when working for the dead. She’d always loved an underdog.

  –Red Light – T. Jefferson Parker

  The above description does not stop the reader, but orients them deeply into the where, who, and what of the crime and characters in one powerful paragraph. Parker doesn’t just describe the apartment space clinically, but layers in strong sensory details and the effect is to pull the reader more deeply into the scene. We’re standing there with the detective, hearing what she’s hearing, smelling what she’s smelling, feeling the texture of the gloves on her hands. The reading experience has changed from simply looking at the Setting to being in the Setting.

  Here’s another great example:

  The come-and-get-it smell of espresso welcomed her. Fall Out Boy was playing on the stereo, “Hum Hallelujah.” Lieutenant Amy Tang stood at the counter, fingers double tapping, waiting for her order.

  –The Memory Collector – Meg Gardiner

  How many sensory details did Gardiner manage to slide into the reader’s awareness in three very short sentences? What is amazing is that the author could have painted a visual picture alone — “She entered the coffee shop, which looked and smelled like a million other coffee shops, and saw the Lieutenant waiting for her.” But Gardiner went deeper with her writing and placed the reader into the scene, not with an overload of visual prompts, but with a smell and two sound prompts. What Gardiner managed in the three sentences above was to anchor the reader into the new space through the senses. We all know the smell of a coffee shop and by reminding the reader of that specific scent, the reader “smells” that place, and can instantly put themselves there.

  What about the sound prompt? What does that do? Is it okay that the reader doesn’t know the band? Can you still get a sense of Setting by the POV character’s reaction to the music playing? What if you change the band’s name to something more well-known — Sex Pistols or Coldplay? Or Chuck Mangione or Frank Sinatra? Just by changing what the reader mentally “hears” in this coffee shop you change the reader’s experience of it.

  Here’s another example of sensory detail. Tess Gerritsen writes bullet-paced thrillers that rarely showcase a whole paragraph of detail so when she does the reader pays attention, knowing that this Setting matters:

  The school bell clanged, calling the students in from recess. He stood calming himself, inhaling deeply. He focused on the fragrance of fresh-cut hay, of bread baking in the nearby communal kitchen. From across the compound, where the new workshop hall was being built, came the whine of a saw and the echoes of a dozen hammers pounding nails. The virtuous sounds of honest labor, of a community working toward His greater glory.

  –Ice Cold – Tess Gerritsen

  In the above example the reader can smell and hear and almost taste as well as see the growing community, but the Setting description did more. It placed the readers into a scene that might not be familiar to them, as in they have not personally lived in such an environment, but the different sounds are very familiar and have strong connotations. A school bell’s ring, the scent of baking bread, hammers and saws at work; all are sounds that are industrious, pleasant, and denote a certain amount of comfort. This environment might sound idyllic, but proves anything but to many of the individuals living there as the story unfolds. From ideal to hellish the reader will remember what this place sounded like and contrast it to what’s revealed later in the story.

  LAYERING POV AND SENSORY DETAILS

  Sound sensory details can enhance a story in so many ways. We’ve been focusing on how to use Setting description to reveal character earlier, but we also need to pay attention that we’re describing the sensory details accurately through a very particular set of eyes. Think of New York City’s Times Square, or the heart of any other large city that is alive with sounds. The awareness of those sounds will change depending on where the POV character is coming from, what they are doing, and how they are feeling.

  After a long frustrating day, standing in Times Square can be like nails scratching down a chalkboard on your nerves. But if you’ve landed a dream job in a city you feel is your city, the sounds of this tiny speck of space can be seductive and empowering. On the other hand what would you hear if your young child has just wandered off? Or if you were looking for a runaway teenager last seen hawking himself in Times Square? What might you hear in these few blocks?

  The place hasn’t changed at all, and neither have the sounds, but how the author relates those sounds and threads them through their descriptive details would and should change to pull and anchor the reader in the character and the story.

  Here is a smal
l snippet from a debut story that is described as mesmerizing and evocative, which it is. One of the reasons is the use of sensory details. This passage takes place in 1942 in Seattle, right after a Chinese boy’s first date with a young Japanese girl. The POV character loves jazz and that love is something he shares with his home city of Seattle, the time frame of the story, and his new Japanese friend. It also creates a distance between himself and his very traditional father. Watch how the author uses those facts to weave meaning into the sensory details here.

  But first we’re going to start though with a hypothetical rough draft:

  [First Draft] Henry left his bedroom and walked down the alley.

  What do you think? Do you know where you are? Any sense of the city surrounding him?

  [Second Draft] Henry left his bedroom and walked down the dark alley near where he’d been in the Jazz club earlier.

  Better but still pretty blasé. If we were reading the book we’d mentally orient Henry to where he’d been earlier on the evening, but not much else. We’re not in his skin walking down this alley.

  [Final Version] Henry left his bedroom window up, feeling the cool air come off the water. He could smell the rain that would be coming soon and hear the horns and bells of the ferries along the waterfront signaling their last run for the night. And in the distance he could hear swing jazz being played somewhere, maybe even the Black Elks Club.

  –Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet – Jamie Ford

  Are you as the reader in Henry’s skin now? The above was a nice scene ending that creates part of the evocative feel to this book. Let’s look closer at how:

  Henry left his bedroom window up, feeling the cool air come off the water. [Anyone who lives or has visited an ocean-side locale can really feel the temperature drop in the evening. Here Henry is in an apartment building in Chinatown, only a few blocks from the shores of Seattle’s Elliott Bay so this small sensory detail adds a lot.]

  He could smell the rain that would be coming soon and hear the horns and bells of the ferries along the waterfront signaling their last run for the night. [Again a very specific Seattle sound and one that places this story in that city versus a different ocean-side locale.]

  And in the distance he could hear swing jazz being played somewhere, maybe even the Black Elks Club. [This location is where he had been with his friend. The memory of a sound here layers a lot in the story and ends the scene on a very sensory detail.]

  Watch how Nevada Barr uses contrasting sensory details to show the reader where Anna, the POV character currently is and also to bring home vividly the difference between where she has lived in the past and the effects on Anna:

  Closing the door quietly behind her, Anna paused a minute to breathe in New Orleans in spring after the rain. In the mountains and deserts of the West there would be the ozone and pine, sage and dust — scents that cleared her head and the vision made the heart race and the horizon impossibly far away and alluring.

  Here spring’s perfume was lazy and narcotic, hinting of hidden things, languid hours, and secrets whispered on breath smelling of bourbon and mint. In Rocky Mountain National Park, the clean dry air scoured the skin, polished bone, and honed Anna’s senses to a keen edge. Here it caressed nurturing flesh with moisture, curling wind-sere hair. It coddled and swathed till believing in dreams and magic seemed inevitable.

  –Burn – Nevada Barr

  If the author in the last excerpt had chosen simply to describe the scents of New Orleans this would have been good sensory detail, but by using the sensory details in contrast to where she’d been, and obviously loved, to where she was now the reader received so much more — a strong sense of characterization and an awareness of being someplace mysterious and sensual and possibly a little dangerous. In Texas and New Mexico where Anna has lived and worked in earlier books in this mystery series, she was very much in her comfort zone. This new Setting in New Orleans, the extra-sensory overload is making her dreamier, less sure of herself. The author has shown the reader that the POV character is feeling out of her depth through Setting description.

  Here’s another example of sensory detail adding so much to the page. In this paragraph three characters have escaped from a French prison in an historical romance novel. The POV character is a French woman; the other characters are English spies, enemies of the French woman. See how the author threads in sensory detail as well as foreshadowing complications in a paragraph that’s mostly Setting. This passage is the POV of one of the English spies and it is he that starts the dialogue.

  Her night vision was extraordinary. “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Stop trying to see, English. Listen instead. The night is telling stories all around you. The Rue Berenger lies ahead …. Oh … fifty paces perhaps. The baker on the corner is even now baking bread. One can smell that. Rue Berenger runs east to the bridge, to Paris, where men in your profession likely have friends. Or you go uphill to the west, and you will come after a time to England, where you have even more friends, beyond doubt.

  –The Spymaster’s Lady – Joanna Bourne

  Now what if Bourne decided to use only a visual Setting? The prose would be as dry as someone reciting directions — go straight ahead until you reach the bridge and keep going till you reach Paris. Ho hum. No scent of bread wafting on the early morning air.

  Taste is not often the first sensory detail one latches onto when writing Setting, but it can be powerful nonetheless. Think of taste like a fine herb used judiciously by a master chef — a little can go a long way.

  Here’s an example of sensory detail involving a tactile description implying taste among other senses that’s set deep into a novel and used to quickly orient the reader to a new location. The taste, tactile scent is implied by the quality of the air, and what’s in the air that can be tasted on the tongue.

  India — bleating animals wandering the streets, car horns blaring, dust mingling with masses of people, wrapping one in a blanket both suffocating and irritating. The monsoons had not yet broken the dry heat; an air of expectancy choked human and animal alike.

  –Invisible Recruit – Mary Buckham

  The intention of this Setting description was to let the readers know the characters have arrived in India, but I did not want to spend a lot of page space describing things or buildings or images. The intention was to anchor the reader in the fact that the characters were now in a totally alien (to them) environment and to set the emotional feel of that change. How many sensory details did I use? Can you pick out sound? Taste? (dust) Feel? (blanket of dust and dry heat) and smells? (animals and dust again) Two sentences and then back to the action of the story, but the reader is now in India instead of simply seeing India.

  When you think of touch in a Setting, think of one’s whole body and not just the fingers or the hand. Don’t tell the reader that it’s ninety degrees in the shade if you can show characters fanning themselves and blotting perspiration from their faces. If your character has grown up in dry heat the first time they travel to a location dripping with humidity their whole body can be gob-smacked with the change. Standing on an ocean beach you could feel warm, moisture-laden breezes or salt-tainted blasts of frigid, damp air — two very different beaches shown simply by touch and feel.

  Instead of telling the reader your character was exhausted and crawled into bed can you show his or her emotional state by what he or she feels? There’s a world of difference between finally creeping under the security of a well-loved eiderdown comforter on a cold night and falling into a creaking bed and yanking a scratchy, flimsy, paper-thin blanket over your shoulders that then exposes your toes to the freezing air.

  Don’t worry about sensory details in your first draft as you’re juggling choreography, characterization, and so much more, but definitely think sensory in your revision process.

  WAYS TO BRING OUT SENSORY DETAILS

  Think in terms of which sensory details a POV character would notice in the particular Setting at that pa
rticular time.

  Note: The smallest sensory detail can evoke a change in the emotional state of a character. We all know this instinctively, but using this simple technique can reap big rewards by deepening the reader’s understanding and empathy for/with the POV character.

  * Change the time and emotional state of the POV character and you should see a difference in which sensory details are being noticed.

  * Use the sensory details when you first change a location, open a chapter, or to indicate a shift in the emotional state of the POV character. An example might be listening to specific music at the opening of the scene. What can be soft and relaxing at the beginning of the scene can be lonely and low-energy at the end of the scene.

  Texture is so very often overlooked in Setting, but can act as a metaphor or quickly orient a reader to the time of day, a change in location, or share more information about the POV character.

  The bottom line is that sensory detail can enhance your Setting descriptions and thus the readers’ experience of your story in so many ways.

  ASSIGNMENT

  Using Sensory Details to Enhance Setting

  PART 1:

  Place yourself in either a familiar Setting or a new one, but someplace you feel comfortable closing your eyes. [Note: Do not do this assignment while driving a vehicle.] Now see if you can describe the following: