Welcome to the Sense Series. The first part was an overview of sensory writing. Now we’ll tackle one sense per week. First up: Sight.
Sight is the most common sense used in writing and the most important. Visual words and phrases bring that world to life. Through words, we recreate the world around us or invent an entirely new world for our reader.
It’s easy to use description to build a home, nation, planet without physically showing it with a photograph. The closest books come to physically showing a location is when maps are sometimes placed in the first few pages of the book to provide a reference point or when there are line drawings to accompany chapter breaks, but those are rare. Unless you are reading a picture book, sight is conveyed through words. So those words have to good ones.
Choose strong nouns and verbs. Include details. Lots of details. A bloody knife on the floor. A lipstick stain on a glass. A floating candle and flying broom. The details we share help the reader construct the world in her mind. It’s our job to provide just enough to conjure an image without being so clear there is no room for imagination. I don’t know about you, but the first time I saw the movie versions of Harry Potter I noticed all the ways in which Hogwarts differed from what I had seen in my mind while reading. This was particularly true of the Ministry of Magic. It was so different from how I had imagined it that it bothered me. That is the power of description. No matter how clearly a writer describes her world, the reader will conjure her own version of it based on the words used. My Narnia is likely different from yours. Similar, sure, but different.
No writer can capture a place completely. We give hints and cues to guide the reader, but then have to step back and let them fill in the details. When it comes to sight, we have a bit more control. We can describe the black asphalt street ending in a weedy lot. We can talk about the house that leans to one side as if tired of standing tall, its white siding now gray and dingy, its shutters hanging from a single nail. But no matter how many words we use to recreate the house we have in our head, we will never be able to recreate an exact replica in someone else’s mind. We can only hope to come close. The goal is to get the pertinent details across—the bits that help develop character and story. It is up to you to decide whether that lies in the weeds or the hanging shutter or both.
What you choose to describe matters. Whenever you include setting details, they need to reinforce the story or character development. They need to provide a firm foundation for your story and relate to what is happening within your characters. Is your character embarrassed by the state of his home or proud? Is it his house or is he squatting? Does this home relate to his backstory in any way? Perhaps this is the home of his childhood and childhood trauma. Perhaps the state of the house reflects the state of his character at this point in time. Every detail needs to count. If the house doesn’t matter, don’t describe it in great detail. Give it a cursory mention and move on.
Readers will pay attention to the details you share and expect them to be important. If they aren’t, they become loose ends or red herrings—those clues in mysteries that were included only to confuse or misdirect. If you don’t need to misdirect your reader, don’t. It’s a great way to lose them. Describe those sights that are required to bring your world and story to life, but leave those details out that don’t directly relate. Your reader is smart enough to fill in the details without a travelogue.
Remember too that sight is passive. We take in sights as we wander through the world. It takes no effort to absorb the world around us visually. They are simply there unless we engage with them or react to them. Our eyes process the images whether we are conscious of them or not. We also can escape sight. We can close our eyes to ugly things or turn away from things we do not wish to see—repressing those experiences too difficult to process or accept. Sight allows us to see the world, but that sight is also channeled through our perceptions.
Sight only matters when we filter it. Sight shows the world around us—not within us. It is only when our characters react or feel as a result of what we see that stands out. Using emotion helps readers figure out how the character feels about what he sees.
The best way to do this is to put yourself in your character’s shoes. See what he sees. Feel what he feels at the sight. Then put that into writing. If he is angry, the words you use to describe the event should be sharp and pointed. If he is sad, use softer, melancholy words. The tone should always be that of your character. Match your description to the emotion and then lay in the visual details within that emotion. The goal is to show character through setting, which means relying on your character to develop it.
TIP: Avoid the act of seeing. It is enough to describe what your character sees without including the phrase, “Jill saw the fox….” It’s enough to say “A fox ran through her yard as intent on escaping as she was.” The more you put your reader into your character, the deeper experience you will offer. Allow your reader to experience your characters point of view. What your character sees is what your reader should see. You don’t need to filter it with the act of seeing.
Below are some examples of visual descriptions for reference:
The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village. It stood on its own and looked out over a broad spread of West Country farmland. Not a remarkable house by any means—it was about thirty years old, squash, squarish, made of brick and had four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye.
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in. He had lived in it for about three years, ever since he had moved out of London because it made him nervous and irritable.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas AdamsOn the occasions I visited her she had a worn-out, extremely ugly piece of furniture with a certain curiosity value. I would guess it’s from the early fifties. It has two shapeless cushions covered in brown cloth with a yellow pattern of sorts on it. The cloth is torn in several places and the stuffing was coming out when I saw it last.
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg LarssonHe folds his scarecrow body through the window, bare feet silent on the rushes. A host desert wind blows in after him, rustling the limp curtains. His sketchbook falls to the floor, and he nudges it under his bunk with a quick foot, as if it’s a snake.
An Ember in Ashes by Sabaa TahirThe leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.
The Brutal Telling by Louise PennyThe unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
The next two examples describe a visual setting by describing what is missing. It’s the contrast of what isn’t there to show what is:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, not yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a proper hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob set in the exact middle.
The Hobbit by J. R. R. TolkienThe circus arrives without warning.
No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No color at all, save for the neighboring trees and the grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colorless world. Even what little ground is visible from the outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick.
But it is not open for business. Not just yet.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern