The Secret to Creating a Story Experience

By Joni M. Fisher @authorjonimfisher

Stories, when beautifully written, become experiences. Readers follow along with or become the hero and take in the story world through their senses. As if in a dream, readers suffer, fall in love, doubt, panic, fight, and rejoice as if the struggle is their own. Readers separate themselves from their reality to dive into a different world. How many of us have been to Mitford, Manderley on the coast of Cornwall, Narnia, and Rivendell?

Sensory description is the secret key to opening new worlds. Humans experience life through the senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. So does the hero. By accurately showing the story world through the hero’s senses, we invite the reader to experience the hero’s journey, step by step, in his interactions with other characters and his environment.

Here are a few examples from J.R.R. Tolkien from The Lord of the Rings:

                 They pass into utter and impenetrable dark, deeper than Moria, where even the                                    memory of light and color fades.

​The air is still, stagnant, and heavy, like walking in a black vapour that seems
almost to press on them and bring a kind of blindness of the mind.

​SIGHT AND SOUND

Which senses do you easily recreate? Descriptions of what the hero sees establish the time and place. However, if sight is the dominant sense, the story might feel like watching a silent movie. Examine your chapters for sensory descriptions. Are you overlooking other senses? Does your scene include background sounds like seagulls, waves lapping against docks, and tugboat horns? Each season in the same setting has unique sounds and sights.

SMELL AND TASTE

Certain scents trigger memories. Campfire smoke, perfume, pizza, Kindergarten paste, freshly mown grass, suntan lotion, paint, formaldehyde, disinfectant, and freshly baked cookies. Smell is linked to the sense of taste. There are Icelandic dishes called Hákari (fermented shark) and Surströmming (fermented herring), which have such strong odors that most people gag before they can even try them. Does your story offer opportunities to describe taste? Does your hero eat? Does he have a refined palate, or is he a meat-and-potatoes eater? Gourmet magazines offer amazing descriptions that evoke the sense of taste. Hemingway described a fruit’s sweet, grainy texture without naming it.

TOUCH

The sense of touch includes temperature, texture, pain or comfort, and more. Of the senses, this one is the most interactive between characters. When authors capture the essence of a sensation, it creates intimacy with the reader. Be genuine and observant in descriptions to make the thing or sensation being described feel familiar.

OTHER SENSES

Other lesser-used senses include time, balance, direction, and intuition. Have you mastered applying these in your story? The passage of time is unique to the individual and the situation. Waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles and walking through a park might take an hour, but that hour will not feel the same. A sense of balance for an athlete isn’t the same as it is for an elderly person navigating icy stairs. Does your hero have an innate sense of direction, or does he rely on GPS and landmarks to travel familiar routes?

Intuition, or a sixth sense, could be attributed to the subconscious mind processing details the
conscious mind overlooked, such as opening a door and realizing it should have been locked.
Some call this a warning from the Holy Spirit. Can you describe the sensations of being watched,
or followed, or lied to without labeling them?

Employing figures of speech with sensory details deepens the description while elevating prose
into poetry. Usually, the quotable parts of a book contain a metaphor, a simile, or another figure
of speech. I recommend that writers become as familiar with figures of speech as musicians are
with scales.

A masterful use of sensory description can involve combining the senses as in synesthesia. For
example, a man whose voice sounds like chocolate, or someone wearing a loud shirt. The
overlap of sound and taste, sight and sound, can evoke symbolism and make a simple description
memorable. Remember the Skittles ad? Taste the rainbow.

Pay attention. Do field research. As an instrument-rated private pilot, I understand aircraft
navigation equipment, but to write a story set on a trawler, I had to research, consult experts, and
experience boating firsthand to get the details right. If practical, experience what your character
does or extrapolate from your experience. If your character handles a gun, why not get a shooting
lesson so you can accurately describe the weight, recoil, and sounds of the weapon? Immersive
research shows in the specific, accurate sensory details you use to draw the reader into a
believable story experience.

Joni M. Fisher writes contemporary stories featuring friendship, family, faith, and crime. A member of the American Christian Fiction Writers and the Florida Writers Association, she also served on the Southeastern University Arts and Humanities Advisory Board. Her fingerprints are on file with the FBI.

Visit Joni on her website: https://jonimfisher.com/