Five Senses

In April, the Book Length Project Group meeting explored our five senses:

• sight

• smell

• sound

• taste

• touch.

When we write, we want to engage the reader, immerse them in the story we are telling. We want them to forget they are reading. To do that, we can show them what a character sees and hears, but also what they can smell, taste, and touch. By using all of the five senses, we can more deeply immerse the reader in our character’s world and keep them reading.

The Book Length Project Group challenged our vocabulary by listing all the words we could find (without our search engines!) to describe each of the five senses and what they evoked for us. We also basked in this famous passage from a master of immersion:

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.” –Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

How do you immerse your reader in your story?

The Book Length Project Group meets on the third Sunday of every month at Mattie Furphy House in Swanbourne. All FAWWA members and friends are welcome. If you would like to join us, please go to https://www.fawwa.org/event