Sensory Detail

Icing on the Cake:

In the last blog, I focused on the core of how to make a story, answering the question of so what?  In other blogs, I talked about the importance of characterization.  And these aspects are truly key to a great piece of writing.  But once you have these features down, other aspects of the story become important and can help develop the core meaning.  One of these is sensory detail, just the right amount of sensory detail.  Every word in writing should be intentional.  No word, if possible, should be wasted.  Once one has the basics down, one has the luxury of considering how to make the words and, thereby, the entire piece come alive.

When "Beautiful" is not Beautiful:

Some sensory detail makes the story vivid and meaningful.  One can write, "I smelled a flower."  There's nothing wrong with that.  But we don't see the flower nor do we smell it.  "Flower" is just a word.  Some people would want to rush in and add a descriptive word like, "I smelled a beautiful flower."  Yet you'll notice the description still stays flat on the page.  "Beautiful" means something different to everyone and in every situation.  In fact, in brain studies, they've seen how words reach different points in the brain, depending on the listener.  To one reader who has had strong emotional connections to that word, the word "beautiful" can trigger an emotional receptor.  To someone else, it simply hits the intellectual part of the brain.  One can't even guarantee it means what you want it to mean in the mind of your reader.

The Power of Specific Description: 

So let's get specific and add a visual adjective.  "I smelled a red flower."  Now, we're getting somewhere.  Red can have various connotations, depending on context.  If it's a story about love, red carries the suggestion of passion.  If it's a story about morbid topics, red carries the suggestion of blood and death.  If it's a story about anger, that anger can be emphasized by the red flower.

But this flower can become even more interesting if we give it a better description than just the generic word "flower."  Let's call it a rose.  Granted, a red rose is, by default, a cliche.  If it's a man offering a woman a single, red long-stemmed rose, we all know that this means the man romantically loves the woman.  But it still suggests to us a specific odor, color, meaning.  "I smelled a red rose" gives us a vivid image.  If we, then, put it in an intriguing context, we smell it and, more importantly, understand its symbolism.  If I write "I smelled a red rose, its thorns pricking my fingers," the reader gets more than odor and obvious symbolism but touch as well and something beyond that: we get questions.  The reader feels just a hint of intrigue.  Why does this person let the thorns prick her/him?  There's a sense of pain that perhaps suggests just a little beyond the physical.

Context:

The context becomes particularly important here.  Let's say a single, lonely woman grasps the rose that is still on the bush, desperate to feel something, anything, since she's numb from rejection.  She longs for the passion implied by the rose on the bush, but it's someone else's rose.  She can't have it.  She presses it to her nose until the thorn digs into her thumb.  That's an image that gets at the human condition, at the so what?  It's no longer quite cliched.  Or let's say a woman gives the man the rose.  What does it mean now?  She's in power in the relationship.  Does he accept her dominance?  Now, we've got the cultural expectations surrounding gender involved.  Let's say a woman comes along, grasps this rose, allowing the thorn to prick her, sniffs it deeply, and crushes it in her hands then drops it to the ground, stomping it with her high heel.  Now we see anger.  We see frustration.  The description becomes a key symbol, part of the action.  It's not there just to be pretty.  Even a cliched description ceases to be cliched with an intriguing context.

Example:
Here is an example from After the Dream, my first novel.  Julia is a physically and emotionally scarred woman who is overweight and underconfident.  This scene occurs sometime after the end of an abusive marriage of several years when she is giving dating another chance.  She has been set up on a blind date by her sister.  She's waiting in a restaurant for that date:

           I [...] shredded the edges of [a] violet rose, the signal [my sister] set up to show I was the one.  I wondered which picture she had shown him [...]
            Just then, Nathan, my date, entered.  It felt like time stood still.  [... He had b]rown, almost black hair.  Eyes the color of a wading pool.  Perfect cheekbones.  Olive skin.  Tall but not too tall.  It was like looking at a painting of my vision of perfection.  I wanted to hug my sister. 

            He stepped in and glanced down at the violet rose then looked at me and back at the rose.  His face assumed the expression [my young daughter] made in the presence of a spider, and he started to edge backward.  And then I wanted to slap my sister.  She must have shown him my college picture. [... H]e looked back at me.  His face scrunched up as if he smelled something foul.  “Um… never mind.  I … uh… I just remembered I need to go somewhere… else.” 

            “What’s wrong, Nate?” I asked, standing up.  “Are you sick?” [...]

            “Just… not my type,” he muttered then turned around and bolted for the door.  

            [... I] fled, the damaged violet rose sitting abandoned on the table. 

Here, the purple rose represents her identity, her sense of self.  At the beginning of the scene, she hopes the rose will come to represent the traditional meaning of love at first sight.  Instead, due to the man's violent reaction to her appearance, it becomes a symbol of her loneliness and the pain she experiences from the encounter.  The word "violet" comes to suggest violent as in his violent rejection of this woman.  The rose is not merely decorative.  Its description serves to enhance the emotional context of the situation.

Avoiding Purple:

Just as a caution, there is such a thing as too much sensory detail.  It's great and even a great idea to appeal as often as possible to all senses.  However, there is a limit.  When the description becomes purple prose, becomes so dense it slows down the narrative or poem, it drowns out everything else.  There is a balance.  For instance, I read a novel with a very simple plot that was bogged down on every side by unnecessarily dense description.  I ceased to care about either character or story when the location became the main character.  It's fine to write, "She smelled the red rose."  However, it may be a bit much to write, "The curly-haired blonde woman with a tight dress and hips that swished as she walked sauntered confidently over to the mahogany table, picked up the long, drooping stem of a richly crimson rose and allowed its intoxicatingly rich odor to envelop her."  What details are we supposed to notice as readers?  Do I care more about the woman and her hair and dress or the rose or the table?  It's impossible to tell.  The description takes over the sentence, drowning out all meaning.

Conclusion: 

Description, along with every other word in the text, should serve the purpose of driving the plot and enhancing the characters.  If the description detracts from either of those purposes, it should probably be cut.  It's up to the writer to decide a balance that brings out but does not drown the meaning.  Character and story are the keys.  Everything else should only serve to develop those central features.