This is part four of the Sense Series. So far, we’ve covered sensory writing, sight and sound. Now it’s time for a bit of touching.
When we’re young, we learn about the world through touch. We put dirt in our mouths, Run our toes through the grass. Embed our hands into the dog’s shiny coat. As we grow, we learn not to touch dirty things and to keep our hands out of our mouths, but we never lose that desire to touch our world—to run our hands over objects of our desire.
Touch can be an intimate sense or not. Passive or active, depending on the person and circumstance. Think about who you would allow touch your face. This is an intimate act reserved for those you love. It would be off-putting and creepy for a stranger to reach up and caress your cheek, but when a loved one does it, it can convey so much.
Touch is more personal than sight or sound. It’s tactile. It causes us to reach out our hands to seek it. When things touch us unaware, it startles. It can be creepy or comforting. Welcome or not. Carnal or repulsive. But it is always personal. It can’t be anything else since touch is of the body.
There are two parts to touching—the act of touching something or someone and the act of being touched by something or someone. Each has its own response, physically and emotionally. Tap into those emotions in your story. How your character reacts to the feel of someone or something touching them will reveal their true feelings.
Again, try to write touch without resorting to using that word. Immerse your reader into a physical world by focusing on the textures, temperature and emotion of the touch.
Below are some examples of touch:
Wind, cold for April, chased dirt and beer cans up the grand street. Clutching her geometry book to her chest, Polly stood on the wooden step outside the door of her mother’s trailer, her ear pressed against the aluminum. The icy bite of the metal against her skin brought on a memory so sharp all she felt was its teeth.
13 1/2, Nevada Barr
Shadows grow longer, and cold air glides across the doorjamb, giving me goose bumps. I roll over gently to my side, scattering pieces of the green plastic radio I got working at Mooney’s Rusty Nickel. Little Percy slides off without complaint. I put my palms to the floor and push to my knees. My arms tremble. My heart pounds in my ears. A bloody smear on the floor marks where my head landed. I brush sticky hair off my temple, hold on to the counter, and pull up, dizzy, one hand on my baby bump. I don’t know I’m crying salty tears till they sting the cut on my cheek.
If the Creek Don’t Rise, Leah Weiss
I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt. The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling. Down below, the valley is peaceful, undisturbed. Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air. Behind me a gentle hill slopes upward and stitches itself to the mountain base. If I look up, I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess.
Educated, Tara Westover
The late-afternoon heat draped itself around him like a blanket. He snatched open the backseat door to get his jacket, searing his hand in the process. After the briefest hesitation, he grabbed his hat from the seat. Wide-brimmed in stiff brown canvas, it didn’t go with his funeral suit. But with skin the blue hue of skim milk for half the year and a cancerous-looking cluster of freckles the rest, Falk was prepared to risk the fashion faux pas.
…he loped toward the crowd, one hand on his hat as a sudden hot gust sent hems flying.
The Dry, Jane Harper
The first thing Herbert Stone noticed when the standby quartermaster woke him for the midnight watch was just how calm everything was. There was no pitch, no roll, no throb of the engine. For ten days the ship had rocked him back and froth like a baby, and her engine had lulled him with its rhythmic heartbeat. Now there was nothing. Never before, not even in port, had he felt the ship to be so silent and still.
The Midnight Watch: A Novel of the Titanic and the Californian, David Dyer