The Sixth and Seventh Senses

Though the five senses are the most acknowledged senses, I’ve often believed that in fiction, we need to identify two more "senses" in our writing, because they affect the other senses and arouse emotion. The first is the sixth sense, meaning intuition. This arouses a sensation or gut-level concern or emotional response that something is about to happen. The second sense is that of motion. While motion is actually a blend of other senses, its descriptive passages in your stories can bring realism to your writing and add to a reader’s pleasure.

Instinct or Intuition is that internal perception that makes us anticipate something happening— either a problem or a blessing. This can affect both an internal and external response. The character can feel tense inside. He can have the eerie sensation that something isn’t right. It’s the "full-moon" feeling we laugh about when everything seems to go wrong and we anticipate things getting worse, or it could be that internal euphoria, an almost giddy feeling that something wonderful is about to happen. It can go from that "skin-crawling" sensation to the internal prickle of excitement.

Lines that might show reaction to intuition are:
A uneasy sensation settled in her stomach.
His gut tumbled on a downward plunge.
Her heart skipped like a child jumping rope.
Calm seeped through her.
Something rolled inside as if she were being watched.
Sweet anticipation waltzed through her limbs.

These reactions are not seen outwardly, but they are responses to an unknown stimulus that causes an intuitive awareness. Notice that the dynamic, specific verb helps convey the reaction. Words like tumbled, skipped, seeped, rolled and waltzed are all important to recreate this internal response.

While intuition is mainly internal, physical signs can be seen as well. Hair rose on the back of his neck can be used to show a perception that something is wrong. Gooseflesh is another or a chill coursing his body. Each of these outward signs show the character’s internal struggle.

Motion is not really a sense but it is a way to show emotion and recreate a character’s internal or external response. We know that an inner ear problem causes us to be dizzy, and this dizziness can result in nausea and other physical responses. So I think of motion as a dynamic way to add realism to the story as well as broaden characterization and arouse emotion.

Rachel drew back as Cade bolted upward while his hand shot forward to nab her arm. This line involves the sense of touch –nabbing her arm, but the action arouses both Rachel’s and the readers emotions. We see anger or frustration in action.
Motion works well as an analogy to mirror the character’s emotions or mood. She sat mesmerized by a small white butterfly hovering around the blossoms, fluttering from flower to flower before it flitted away. This image can reflect longing, nostalgia, discontent, an internal feeling of insecurity or confusion. In romance, it could reflect the hero’s fickle nature.

Using details of motion makes the story more real and helps readers visualize the scene while adding to their sensual pleasure. In this sample, Bill, the father, is dawdling over his meal. He’s tired and dreads facing another day at work. When you read this visual perception from Bill’s POV, we can see it as a comparison to his own situation, perhaps recalling the days when he was younger and had more energy or reflecting his longing to feel like a kid again. Bill watched his son gobble his cereal with the speed of a forest fire, then jump from the table and dart from the kitchen. This sentence provides readers new information about Bill or perhaps helps them to understand part of his conflict as they relate their own feelings about this topic. A reader’s senses respond to the speed of gobbling cereal and being excited to meet the day.

As you write, don’t neglect those intuitive moments in your characters’ lives, and use motion to heighten characterization as well as stimulate readers’ sense of reality in your story.

Using More of the Senses In Fiction

My last entry discussed the senses of sight and sound, but we all know we use the acknowledged five senses, so this blog will cover the last three: touch, taste and smell. Though the first two senses are the ones that we almost take for granted in fiction and in our lives, the last three are equally important and help to bring our stories to life. Because these three are more difficult to recreate and to show, you need to put touch, taste and smell into forefront of your mind so you don’t overlook them in your novels.

Touch is one that, again, is often shown by comparison. His whiskers prickled like sandpaper or She fingered the rose’s peach-fuzz petals. Touch brings to life texture as well as the reaction to the texture. The latter example could show reaction by saying, She fingered the velvety tickle of the petals thus arousing a reaction. The descriptive words that help the reader’s recollection of a particular touch and his response to it include vivid verbs and adjectives. The grating sound of fingernails on a chalkboard applies the sense of hearing, but a sensation comes to life, too. The word grating is a touch sensation. His finger nails scraped across the slate, sending chills up her arms. In this case, the word scraped shows the kind of touch and sending chills shows a response.

In the same way sights and sounds can be both pleasant or annoying, so can the other scenes. In romance, the prickle of his whiskers can arouse a positive, intimate feeling to a romantic heroine, but the chills running up a person’s arm from scraping a chalkboard can be a negative. The response of the stimuli is based on the perspective of the character interacting with the sense.

Making a story come to life means allowing the character to feel the roughness of an antique sofa’s horsehair upholstery. It means reacting to the pain of a cat’s claws imbedding in a character’s arm or leg. Touch includes the sensation of wind blowing through a character’s hair, the chaffing of a rider’s legs against his horse, the feel of a sharp knife dragging along skin. In romance, it’s the hero’s gentle touch as he runs his index finger along the heroine’s cheek, and depending on the POV, the reader can experience the reaction through the hero’s or heroine’s eyes. The reaction to the touch would be different for each.

Smell arouses a multitude of responses from the scent of aftershave or cologne, to the stench of a rotting carcus, to the biting fumes of gasoline, to the sweetness of a rose. Interesting that odors can sometimes trigger taste, probably because the nose and mouth are connected and one stimulates the other. We often notice that a bad cold can affect our ability to taste food. This results mainly because we can’t smell it. So these two senses go hand in hand.

Smells often trigger a facial response—a grimace, wince, or smile, and scents can also trigger memories and cause nostalgia. Often we connect a scent to a person or situation. Women who were the same cologne for years find the scent becoming their trademark. When a friend smell this aroma, he will think of the woman. Homes sometimes have a scent – both positive and negative. A home that is very clean might has a lemony scent or smells of polish. When walking into a house, food-aromas can permeate the environment. A home where animals reside will often smell like the animals due to their dander and hair on the furniture and in the carpet. A dank odor comes from many basements, oil and gasoline smell is found in most garages. We could pass a bakery with our eyes closed and recognize the sweet, yeasty scent permeating the air. References to aromas add realism to a novel, but these references are best used when they help to deepen character or move the story forward in some way as well as to make the story more realistic.

As already mentioned, smell is enhanced by using dynamic verbs such as reeked or adjectives, such as pungent. These words help to define the odor. Her sun-baked skin, the burning cedar, the feted garbage, all of these are enhanced by the adjective, making them more real for the reader. By adding a character’s response, you can bring the scene to life even more. Her sun-baked skin warmed his touch. The burning cedar sweetened the air. The fetid garbage gagged him.

Taste is one of the least used senses because it is difficult to recreate. We do so by using adjectives that stimulate the readers imaginations—pungent, acrid, bitter, saccharin, gamy, honeyed, smoky, sharp, bitting, cutting, tart, sour, nutty, peppery, and salty. She swallowed the bitter bile. You can think of many more. Again it is often easier to use comparison’s when describing taste. Blood filled his mouth, tasting as if he were eating nickels. The thick sweet cough syrup coated his throat.

Sometimes a character’s reaction to a taste adds deeper purpose. Her mouth tingled with the fizz of the cola. The tart lemon bite into her cheeks and puckered her mouth. When we combine vivid language, with familiar comparisons and character reaction, you can recreate many of the senses that brings your novel to life.

Earlier I mentioned I like to add two senses other senses to my list—-motion and intuition. These will be covered in my next entry.

Using The Senses in Fiction

Although I said I’d would cover characterization next, I realized that emotion and the senses have a commonality, and it makes more "sense" to talk about senses now. (Words are interesting, aren’t they?) As authors, we want to bring our work to life, and we do so with compelling characters, which means three-dimensional individuals who come to life through their actions and emotion, but it also means using other techniques to heighten the reality of our stories.

What is more real than our senses? We reaction and interact with life using the well-known five senses—sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, but in my opinion, we do have other senses, too, and those would be motion and intuition. The senses are used to heighten emotion and to draw our readers into the story through experiencing what is familiar to them, and one of those is using our sense organs, those physical parts of us that stimulate responses and memories.

It is through our senses that we experience, perceive, and comprehend everything that surrounds us. Senses are a stimulus. Helen Keller lived without hearing or sight, but she learned to communicate by using her other senses. Can you image having no senses at all? The thought is uncomprehensible since we would have no way to experience life. Senses, then, are vital to arousing readers’ feelings and interest, and a way for them to experience your story. An interesting point about the senses is they are often shown by using poetic devices which I discussed in the last blog. So let’s take a look at these senses.

Sight and sound are the two most common senses used in fiction, and they are the two senses we seem to take for granted, but we don’t want to do that in our writing. Descriptions of settings, characters and nature are common in all forms of literature. From the day he joined the medical field, his world was drab—black and white textbooks, a white doctor’s coat and traditional black bag. Now, Kate colored his world with a pink flush on her cheeks, sunlit blond hair that feel to her shoulders, and green flecks in her eyes. Here a contrast is made between a drab and colorful world by referring to colors.

The hills rolled on endlessly until the vanished as a purple haze touching the clouds. Readers want to see the room, the landscape, the appearance of main characters, but without going into details that delay the action. A brief sentence can capture the moment as well as add mood or emotion. When you use the sense, make it purposeful so that it helps to create mood, arouse emotion and/or move the story forward.

Creating sight images, you want to texture and tint the surroundings, and you do this by selecting words that capture the essence of the scene, again by adding a mood or tone to the scene. Using adjectives can help create a vivid image. The brooding landscape, the cheery room, the ornate decor, the dusty table—each of these adjectives and nouns help you to view the surroundings as well as gives you a hint of characterization or the scene’s mood. A brooding landscape provides the reader with information. He knows it will not be a comedic scene. In the same way, the ornate decor or dusty table helps reader to envision the owner’s personality, and/or values.

When you combine numerous "telling" adjectives, words like brooding landscape, choking weeds, pealing bark, dead wildflowers, we can anticipate sadness or suspense or a combination. The words activate our imagination and, along with the introspection of the POV character, will guide us in grasping the tone of the setting.

Sounds are effective in creating mood as well. From the grating of fingernails on a chalkboard to the wind whispering through the eaves or the purr of a cat, the author sets up the scene by focusing on the sounds that work to achieve the scene’s purpose. Children’s voices echoing on a hill can be a lovely sound to a woman pregnant with her first child, but if doctor’s have warned her that her child might have serious handicaps or if this woman lost a child sometime in her life, this sound could create the opposite emotion.

Sounds can be pleasant or cacophonic. Again these sounds come to life when you use a poetic device called onomatopoeia, which are words that imitate the sound they are describing. This would include words like zip, hiss, pow, sizzle, crackle, lull, tinkle, pop, whish, or boom. By repeating these words and listening to the sounds they make, you can hear the plosive Ps, Ts, Ks, and Cs of the more explosive sounds, and the softer tones of the L, Wh, H, and vowels that are more soothing and create a different image. S is the sound the sound we associate with a snake, so words like hiss helps to capture that extended S sound. The sizzle of meat on the stove works well because the S and Z in sizzle recreates that sound while the word stove re-echoes the S.

Sounds are easy to tell rather than show—a dog’s bar—but again, finding a way to show the sound is more effective. A word like howl is more onomatopoetic. So is arf. The dog danced around her feet with its incessant arf-arf. This brings the sound and scene to life.

Combining sound and sight helps to emphasize the image. The apple snapped as her teeth sank into it’s crispy pulp and the juice spray into the air.

Using onomatopoeia and dynamic verb choices, and despite hearing adjectives are as bad as adverbs, vivid nouns and adjectives help to bring the scene to life used in both sight and sound.

The final three of the five scenes—touch, taste and smell—will be covered in the next blog. Keep these final three senses in the forefront of your mind as you write, because they are more easily overlooked. Yet they can be as vivid and dramatic in setting mood, creating emotion, and bringing your story to life as the more common sight and sound.