September 24, 2018 • 29 mins
Want to make your readers feel something real? It’s not about telling them—it’s about showing them in the right way. In this episode, we dive deep into how to craft immersive, emotional moments in your writing using sensory details, inspired by Alan Heathcock’s 27 Tenets of Fiction.
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(00:00):
Welcome to the inside creative writing podcast.
The weekly discussion of craft and technique for
writers of fiction and creative nonfiction.
And now here's your host,
writer and educator,
Brad Reid.
Episode 35.
How do you get your reader to really
feel what you're trying to get them to
feel? It's the opposite of what you might
(00:21):
think. Today, we explore the importance of writing
from the senses.
Welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing podcast.
My name is Brad Reed, and I am
so happy that you're spending part of your
day with me today talking about the craft
of writing.
It's a topic that I love exploring with
(00:42):
you, and I appreciate so much the feedback
you send me through the website at bradreedrights.com.
I really value your suggestions and ideas for
the show, so keep those coming.
The topic of today's show comes from a
listener who was listening back over the show
archives
to one of our most popular shows. It
was an interview with writer and writing teacher,
(01:03):
Alan Heathcock.
And he asked a question about one of
Alan's tenets of writing good fiction that he
shared with us on that show.
The question related to techniques to get your
reader to feel
what it is you want them to feel
in a scene. So that's what we're going
to be exploring today. It's a topic I
just covered with my in person creative writing
(01:24):
class, so it's fresh in my mind.
But it's also a technique that I think
we can be constantly improving. So I'm looking
forward to the opportunity
to go even deeper with it today with
you.
If you haven't checked out the companion website
to this podcast,
I encourage you to take a look. You're
gonna find a bunch of great resources and
(01:44):
information over there, including all of our free
to everyone Patreon resources,
ways to get in touch with us here
at the show, and links to subscribe and
rate the show. All that good stuff you're
gonna find over at bradreedrights.com.
Alright. Onto today's topic, and it's all about
the feels.
(02:13):
As I mentioned in the intro, today's show
idea comes to us from writer Alan Heathcock
and a resource he shared with us way
back in episode six.
As he was finishing his award winning collection
of short stories called Volt, which if you
haven't read, you should definitely check out.
He,
codified his collection of writing vice into what
(02:35):
he called the 27
tenets of writing good fiction. Now you'll still
find a link to that document in the
show notes for that episode if you wanna
go back and take a look at all
of
them. One of them that stood out as
particularly
interesting though was tenet number seven, which reads
like this.
Feeling
is communicated
through the senses.
(02:56):
Communicate through images, sounds, scents, and textures,
not through words.
You will primarily communicate through images.
And I think this is one of his
most insightful
tenets for a couple of reasons.
First, if we're not trying to communicate feelings
to our reader,
then what is it we're really trying to
(03:17):
do? Right?
Getting a reader to feel something should be
the highest purpose of our art.
And secondly,
I think he points out how we go
about trying to get our audiences to feel
entirely backwards.
I'm going to try to boil Alan's wise
words down here to even more simple language,
so we can begin to get our minds
(03:38):
fully around
what I think he's trying to teach us.
And here's how I'm gonna boil that down.
Let's simplify it to
emotions are transmitted to readers
through the five senses.
He seems to be suggesting suggesting that it's
not through
clever or overwrought plot lines. It's not through
lines of dialogue or seeing the furrowed brow
(04:01):
of a character.
And now all of those elements do play
a role for sure, but they're not
the part of writing that is doing the
heavy lifting
when it comes to translating emotion.
So rather than explore what's being claimed here
from an academic standpoint, I'd rather tell you
about an experience I had a few days
ago with my creative writing class.
(04:23):
I'd been thinking about this concept of transmitting
emotion through the senses, and I ended up,
kind of making up a writing activity on
the spot that actually worked really well to
illustrate that point. So here's what I did.
I took my class in to observe another
class in progress,
and this other class was playing some kind
(04:44):
of Pictionary type game. I'm not even sure,
why why they were playing it, but it
was a little bit chaotic. Right?
Which is actually a nice environment for the
kind of writing that I was asking them
to do.
So I simply had them write for five
minutes about what they saw, what they heard,
what they felt,
not emotionally, but with the with through touch,
(05:06):
what they tasted,
if anything. None of them licked the walls,
so none of them wrote about how it
tasted,
and write about what they smelled. Right? Basically,
it was a five senses exercise using all
your senses
document
the environment.
So I told them they couldn't actually write
a story. They couldn't create characters. They couldn't
do any of that. They were just recorders
(05:29):
of all of the details that they experienced
in that place
for that brief period of time.
So after writing for a while, we came
back to our own classroom and I had
them switch papers
with another classmate and pretend that they had
just found
this piece of writing on the ground somewhere.
Right? Like, they they didn't know who had
actually written it or where that person had
(05:50):
actually been.
And then their assignment was to read the
description that they found and try to infer
what kind of emotion
the writer was experiencing or what kind of
mood the writer was in when they had
written this short quick write.
Now I didn't know what to expect from
this little experiment,
but the results were, pretty profound,
(06:13):
at least for me and what I discovered.
So I actually did this writing, due to
as well. I do most of the writing
that I ask my students to do along
with them. And I traded my writing with
one of the students, and I what I
found in her writing
was not just a list of details. I
mean, it was. Right? It it was actually
just a list of details because that's what
I'd asked her to do.
(06:34):
But in the process of reading
and interpreting
her list of details,
it became something very different. It became a
story
with a full range of emotional
experience.
So she started out describing,
the students in the room as bright eyed
and said that their minds were alive.
(06:55):
And it felt very positive and upbeat. Right?
And I started to kind of build this
character in my head
who someone who's always looking on the bright
side of life and feels very positive and
upbeat person.
But then, almost immediately, the tone changed.
Suddenly, she was focused not on the group
as a whole, but she focused in on
one
(07:16):
particular student who was off by themselves a
little bit.
Now, the mood that I assigned to this
writer shifted a little bit. Right? She wasn't
completely happy and positive anymore.
Something about her had drawn her attention
to this solitary student.
And I begin to understand that the the
writer is perhaps a little bit lonely herself
(07:37):
simply because that's what she had noticed
in the room.
The next description in her list was of
the desks
creaking and the chalk drawings
crumbling off the walls. She chose that word
crumbling, which I thought was really interesting to
describe
chalk coming down off the walls.
Now these two loaded details, right, creaking and
(07:58):
crumbling
felt decidedly negative,
especially
up against all the positive things that were
probably around that she could have focused on.
I mean, the chalk drawings after all, they're
very bright and they're vivid and they're fun,
but what she noticed
was the way that chalk was crumbling off
of the board and collecting on the floor.
(08:18):
So as the mood and emotion of this
character I was building in my mind, I
naturally
created a kind of story around her.
So this was not someone who was simply
just bright and bubbly. This was someone who
seemed to to be desperately trying to see
the positives of the world around her, but
was constantly
being pulled back into kind of a darkness
(08:41):
because of whatever she was going through at
the time.
The really cool part of this is that
when I talked to the writer about this
afterwards, she told me that I was actually
dead on right
about her emotional state that morning.
Simply by listing details, what she noticed
first,
and the particular words she chose to describe
it,
(09:01):
she gave me a window
into her emotions.
She didn't have to come right out and
tell me how she was feeling, but she
basically did
simply by showing me the world
as she was seeing it. In fact, if
she had told me how she was feeling,
if she had come right out and just
said it, I probably wouldn't have heard it
as loudly as I did
(09:22):
by being able to put myself in her
shoes and see and experience what she was
seeing and experiencing.
And I, in this process, was a fully
engaged
reader.
If she had announced her emotional state at
the beginning of her writing, I would have
disconnected from it because there's no longer a
puzzle to solve. Right? And these kinds of
(09:43):
little subtle puzzles
are exactly what readers come to books to
experience. They want to play a role. They
want to figure out things
and put things together. They wanna be able
to discover for themselves
how someone feels
by the way that person is viewing the
world and the things that they're paying attention
to. It's a powerful kind of magic that
(10:06):
only exists
in writing prose.
You don't really get access to this kind
of thing in film or plays, at least
not to the same extent
that writers of prose do.
So here's the hack. Right? Here's how we
take this information and turn it, into good
writing. Or at least how here's here's how
I'm using it in my own writing. Maybe
(10:27):
it works for you, maybe it doesn't.
So when I'm drafting,
I often purposefully write
really,
really terribly.
I know that the detail work of a
story requires more intense,
slow,
methodical thought than I can give as I'm
just getting the bare bones of an idea
down on paper in a rough draft. So
(10:48):
it's common for me to write something terrible
like,
Mike was angry about what Martha said, or
Phil Phil was feeling disconnected from society.
Now sentences like these will never see the
light of day, of course. They'll never make
it into a final draft. They're they're,
they're doing all the work for the reader,
and it's leaving the reader entirely passive. And
(11:10):
that's when readers disconnect
and put your book down.
But what I'm really doing is just leaving
placeholders
for me to go back and fill
during a rewrite, during revision.
So when I'm revising
and rewriting and I come across one of
these handy heavy handed announcements of emotion,
I know it's a sign that I have
to slow down there. I have to put
(11:32):
myself in the shoes
of that particular character and spend some time
seeing the world and the setting
the way they would see it.
Like, so would this character who is feeling
lonely and isolated, would they notice the vast
blue sky overhead?
Or would they instead focus on the single
tree
(11:52):
left standing in an area of clear cut
forest?
You don't even have to say something like,
he felt as lonely as that isolated tree
left standing in a swath of clear cut
forest. Your reader is smarter than that. They'll
do the work of interpreting how that character
is feeling
simply based on what he or she notices.
(12:14):
Now, they they don't do this consciously, your
reader. But none of us really do. Right?
Not even in real life. We're we're hardwired
to solve little puzzles like this. In fact,
we get a little boost of adrenaline
every time we put one of these little
puzzles together. We're doing
it constantly in our real worlds, and we
can easily bring those same skills
(12:35):
to bear when we're reading a work of
fiction. It's just the trick is figuring out
how to bring them to bear when we're
writing
a work of fiction.
I recommend that you actually try this little
little game and see what you learn from
it.
You don't really even need more than one
writer to do it. Just go somewhere where
there are people around or things are somehow
(12:55):
otherwise interesting. Right? There's a lot going on.
And write what you see as descriptively as
you can. Now don't try to tell a
story or be overly emotional.
You're just going to document what you see,
what you feel, what you hear, what you
taste.
Then ask someone, really anyone, to read it.
And have them infer, have them guess
(13:18):
what mood
they think the writer was in when they
were documenting these things. Now, they'll be able
to do it.
And you'll discover the way something seemingly innocuous,
some tiny little detail,
can be interpreted with real emotional impact and
weight that you didn't even realize was there
when you were writing it.
(13:39):
And the key here is in the details.
So get away from talking about what everybody
sees. Right? The sky, the clouds, the grass,
the road.
Live in the tiny things in your writing.
Live in the things that ordinary people
don't necessarily notice as they go through their
day. These are the things that hold real
power in your readers' minds.
(14:00):
These are the things that will cause them
to stop and wonder
why did that character notice that particular thing
out of all the other possibilities?
Now, again, they don't consciously stop and put
your writing down and scratch their chin in
thought. Right? But those little synapses,
those little puzzle solving areas of the brain
are going to be firing on all cylinders
(14:22):
to try to put
all of that together under the surface. Your
reader's brain is going to be buzzing with
ideas and inferences,
and then you've got them hooked into your
story because you've given them a job to
do, a puzzle to figure out.
Now a little word of warning here, and
I think it's something I mentioned briefly in
a recent episode.
(14:43):
And this warning is to
be careful not to get caught up in
a single sense.
Now we're very visual beings. And if we're
not careful, we can write like it's the
only sense that we have. If you're a
screenwriter, you're really actually kind of limited to
that one sense. Although you actually have a
lot of opportunity
to bring in audio details as well.
(15:04):
But don't forget, especially if you're writing prose,
that we are,
tasting, we're smelling, we're feeling,
we're hearing creatures just as much as we
are seeing ones or visual ones.
So work all of the senses into your
writing and immerse your reader in the setting
that your character is experience
experiencing so that they are right there
(15:26):
alongside them.
Okay. One more word of warning about all
this detail stuff.
Be especially careful of cliche here.
It can be really easy to slip into
describing,
other senses with cliches.
Right? We want to bring in a smell,
so we end up saying something like, the
air smelled like fresh flowers, or maybe his
(15:48):
breath smelled like a grave. You know, that
may not sound cliche at first,
but it's not really doing anything too interesting.
We've heard things like that before. You see,
we naturally reach for cliches
when we're writing because we've heard them so
often.
Everybody can think of them because they are
so common. So always keep digging for that
(16:09):
angle,
that image, that connection that nobody's heard before.
Create that moment in your reader's mind where
they have to
kind of wake up to your description
and experience it in a new way because
you forced them to do it with a
creative new take on it that they haven't
heard before.
And make sure
(16:29):
when you make that connection that it's connected
to your character's mood, so it's always doing
double duty. In other words, never stop at
the first idea that you come up with.
There's always something better out there if you
just keep digging and trying more things out.
Now, I can't say for sure that what
I've been talking about here is exactly what
Alan Heathcock meant when he coined his seventh
(16:52):
tenet of writing good fiction. But I can
tell you that I see this kind of
work happening in his writing all the time.
What I wanna do is take a look
at a very short excerpt
from his, collection of short stories, Volt,
and discover how he's using the senses, including
images,
to lead his readers into
emotion.
(17:13):
So what we're going to read is the
first few paragraphs of the first short story
in the collection,
and this is called The Staying Freight. I'm
gonna read just a couple of, paragraphs here,
and then we'll unpack it a little bit.
So here's, from Alan Heathcock's
short story collection, Volt. This is The Staying
Freight.
Dusk burned the ridgeline,
(17:34):
and dust churned from the tiller disc set
a fog over the field. He blinked, could
not stop blinking.
There was not a clean part on him
with which to wipe his eyes.
Tomorrow, he'd reserved for the sowing of winter
wheat, and so much was yet to be
done.
38 and well respected,
always brought dry grain to the store, as
sure a thing as a farmer could be.
(17:56):
This
was Winslow Nettles.
Winslow simply didn't see his boy running across
the field.
He didn't see Rodney climb onto the back
of the tractor.
Hands filled with meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped
in foil, didn't see Rodney's boot slide off
the hitch.
Winslow dabbed his eyes with a filthy handkerchief.
The tiller disks hopped.
(18:17):
He whirled to see what he plowed, and
back there lay a boy like something fallen
from the sky.
Winslow leaped from the tractor, ran to his
son.
With his belt, he cinched a gash in
the boy's leg. He pressed his palm to
Rodney's neck, blood pearled between his fingers.
Winslow cradled his son in his lap and
watched the tractor roll on, tilling a fading
(18:40):
arc of dust
toward the freight rail tracks that mark the
northern end of all that was his.
So that's the first one, two, three, four,
short paragraphs of that story.
And even though we get a a third
person narrator here, we're not necessarily
inside Winslow's brain here, it's third person,
it feels like we are. Because it's focused
(19:03):
on a single character, Winslow Nettles, we feel
like we're seeing
and experiencing the world through his eyes. So
in other words, we are,
intuiting his emotions and point of view
and feeling some of it ourselves.
Now the work that Alan has done here
is really subtle, and that is the point.
Right? Anything too heavy handed
(19:25):
starts to feel too obvious, and the reader
gets the feeling that they're kind of being
played. Right? They're being manipulated.
So Alan starts by describing the way the
dusk
burns the ridge line,
and how the dust churns up from the
tiller to create a fog.
Now, these words all in the first sentence
alone
(19:45):
start already to speak to us emotionally. Right?
Burns
and churns and fog. It feels like something's
coming. Something
serious and ominous. So
Winslow's
apprehensive and moody here. Allen doesn't have to
come out and tell us that because we
feel it through the details that he's noticed.
So
he's worried about what is over the horizon,
(20:07):
both literally and figuratively.
And
Allen also gives us this this detail that
Winslow is absolutely
covered in dirt.
Now that is a kind of symbol or
a foreshadowing of death, right, if I've ever
heard one of covered in dirt.
And then right after that, we get an
homage to how much this man's farm means
to him. Right? The height of his pride
(20:30):
was that he, quote, always brought in dry
grain, unquote.
Now, I don't even actually know what that
means, to bring in dry grain, but I
don't have to. Right? The emotion, the pride
is there in those words, and it translates
to us as the reader. We feel his
sense of pride, and and this is a
guy who takes his job seriously, but he's
(20:51):
worried that something is coming
to ruin it all.
Now, there's a bunch of other examples of
using details to evoke emotion
in this
excellently written opening, but I wanna go ahead
and jump to the real emotional meat of
this section. Right? And that's the moment that
Winslow runs over and kills his son.
(21:13):
Now, if this were written as most people
would write it, we'd see Winslow break down
into gushing tears and he'd rend his garments
and Right? The reader couldn't help but miss
the overly
wrought emotion that they were supposed to feel.
So much so that they probably wouldn't have
actually felt it at all.
It would have been too heavy handed and
(21:34):
and too obvious, and the reader would kind
of put up a wall against it. They
would see they would sense what the writer's
trying to get them to do, and they,
kind of,
work against that. So instead,
Allen shows us this man simply cradling his
dead son in his arms
as the tractor
runs off without him, still tilling the field,
(21:57):
still working.
So in other words, his regular life, the
one he was so proud of, so invested
in,
literally just left without him. Literally just drove
off without him. And that's what this death
of his son is
for him. Right? It's the end of everything
that he loves.
(22:18):
Now none of that is spelled out specifically
on the page.
In fact, a a cold reading of it
could seem like it's completely
lacking
in emotion because Alan doesn't come out and
tell us at all what this guy is
feeling.
But it's actually all there in the details,
in the images.
And Alan has left it to his reader
(22:38):
to discover it, making them an equal part
in the telling of the story.
Now truly
powerful storytelling
happens when the reader gets to meet the
writer halfway
to create the meaning, to create the emotion.
That's when a reader becomes part of the
story.
(22:58):
So just a few short paragraphs there, but
a master class in using the senses
and imagery to create an emotional impact for
the reader.
So let's hear that tenet once again. Now
that we've unpacked it a bit here today,
it goes like this.
Feeling is communicated through the senses.
Communicate through images, sounds,
(23:19):
scents, and textures textures,
not through words.
You know what? I'm gonna go ahead and
put a link to Alan's,
tenants document again in the show notes for
this episode as well. Just make it easier
for you to find. There's no need to
go back and dig through to find episode
six. Although, it's a fantastic episode. And if
you haven't heard it or wanted to give
it a listen again, I highly recommend it.
(23:40):
So, you can head on over to bradreedwrites.com
and, check out his other great insights into
what it takes to write great fiction. It
is totally
worth the read.
Today's wise word comes to us from famous
Russian novelist Vladimir
Nabokov.
(24:01):
Vladimir says that nothing revives the past so
completely as a smell
that was once associated
with it.
And isn't that true?
What smells
take you back in time to a very
specific place
surrounded by very specific people?
For me, it's actually the smell of a
(24:21):
Marlboro
cigarette. Now I've never been a smoker, and
almost nobody in my life smoked, but my
grandfather sure did.
And every experience I had with him was
garnished with the smell of a Marlboro
cigarette.
And the best times I had with him,
the times we were the closest,
was sitting with him in his fishing boat
(24:43):
up on Lake Oyehye in Eastern Oregon.
He taught me to put a worm on
a hook,
cast a line into the water, jig the
bait just so, and reel in a shining,
shivering crappie,
all to the smell of a Marlboro cigarette.
The smell of any other cigarette starts to
make me sick almost immediately, but a Marlboro
(25:04):
takes me back to when I was a
kid and plants me right next to my
grandpa, and I'm there with him again, fishing
with him again.
This is the power
of the senses.
Yes. Our sense of sight is vital, and
it might even be the most important sense
in some ways.
But the other senses, I think, can more
(25:24):
deeply connect us on an intimate level
with emotion and with experience. So let's take
it from Nabokov and get some great smells
working in our writing.
Our weekly challenge this week could have been
to try the little writing exercise I described
(25:44):
in the main part of the show, the
descriptive
reporting exercise. And I hope that you'll actually
do that as well. I think it'll be,
a fun and, profound experience for you. But
for our weekly challenge, I've got something else
in mind. This one is about breaking away
from the cliches that so dominate our creative
minds. So this week, I'm going to give
(26:05):
you a handful of prompts to help you
shake up the way you think about description
related to the senses the senses. Now these
are taken from a great book,
edited by Sherry Ellis. The book's called Now
Write,
and, it's full of great writing exercise ideas
from some great, writers. So these aren't necessarily
(26:26):
meant to be used as is in your
writing. Right? But perhaps you'll actually find something
interesting that will work. So, what I've got
here is just a series of sentence starters
to kind of break away from the way
your brain usually defaults to a cliche.
You'll probably need to hear these again or
see them again if you actually want to
write these. I assume most of you are
(26:47):
listening to this not at a writing desk
with a pen in your hand.
So go check out the show notes once
the episode is concluded. When you'd wanna do
a little bit of writing, go to bradreedwrites.com
and find episode 35. Click on that, and
you'll see these prompts in there under the
weekly chat weekly challenge. So let me just
read through some of these for you. So
complete these sentences.
(27:07):
The morning sun tastes like
what?
Her voice
smelled like
what? See, we're we immediately have to go
a different place
in our minds. We can't reach for those
cliches because we're we're breaking the pattern in
there. Let me read a few more.
(27:29):
The music sounded as heavy as
what?
The color green
feels like
what?
The color red tastes
like what?
Seeing him walk was like hearing
what?
Or tasting the night's dinner was like watching
(27:52):
what?
Or touching her dying father's hand
was like seeing
what?
So these can actually be really fun. I
love to use these with my creative writing
students because,
just like we talked about, it breaks that
natural tendency
to reach for a
cliche.
And what's really pernicious about cliches is that
(28:15):
we feel like kind of a genius when
we first write them. Right? We feel like
we're in the zone. You need you're searching
for some kind of piece of figurative language
and boom, something just pops in your head
and you think, I'm a genius. Right? I
I just thought of this thing. I didn't
even have to work that hard for it.
And almost always, that's because it's a cliche.
Almost always, it's because you've heard it over
(28:36):
and over again, and that's why it is
so prominently in your mind. So I love
these exercises to break that process down and
to force you to think
of these similes, these metaphors in new ways.
So that's gonna wrap it up for us
this week. I would love to hear your
experience with our weekly challenges. What's working for
you? What's not?
(28:57):
Maybe what you're learning about writing through doing
them?
Actually, I'd love to hear from you about
any aspect of the show. You can get
in touch with us by going to bradreedwrites.com.
You can shoot us an email. There's a
way to connect with us on Twitter. You
can even leave us a message on our
voice mail line and perhaps even hear your
voice on a future episode of the show.
Until next week, remember the best way to
(29:19):
improve your craft is by writing. That's what
I'm off to go do, and I hope
you're off to do the same. Let's get
some words on paper this week, and we'll
meet up again next week for another episode
of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast.
Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing
Podcast with your host, writer, and educator,
(29:40):
Brad Reed.
We'll be back next week.
Welcome to the inside creative writing podcast.
The weekly discussion of craft and technique for
writers of fiction and creative nonfiction.
And now here's your host,
writer and educator,
Brad Reid.
Episode 35.
How do you get your reader to really
feel what you're trying to get them to
feel? It's the opposite of what you might
(00:21):
think. Today, we explore the importance of writing
from the senses.
Welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing podcast.
My name is Brad Reed, and I am
so happy that you're spending part of your
day with me today talking about the craft
of writing.
It's a topic that I love exploring with
(00:42):
you, and I appreciate so much the feedback
you send me through the website at bradreedrights.com.
I really value your suggestions and ideas for
the show, so keep those coming.
The topic of today's show comes from a
listener who was listening back over the show
archives
to one of our most popular shows. It
was an interview with writer and writing teacher,
(01:03):
Alan Heathcock.
And he asked a question about one of
Alan's tenets of writing good fiction that he
shared with us on that show.
The question related to techniques to get your
reader to feel
what it is you want them to feel
in a scene. So that's what we're going
to be exploring today. It's a topic I
just covered with my in person creative writing
(01:24):
class, so it's fresh in my mind.
But it's also a technique that I think
we can be constantly improving. So I'm looking
forward to the opportunity
to go even deeper with it today with
you.
If you haven't checked out the companion website
to this podcast,
I encourage you to take a look. You're
gonna find a bunch of great resources and
(01:44):
information over there, including all of our free
to everyone Patreon resources,
ways to get in touch with us here
at the show, and links to subscribe and
rate the show. All that good stuff you're
gonna find over at bradreedrights.com.
Alright. Onto today's topic, and it's all about
the feels.
(02:13):
As I mentioned in the intro, today's show
idea comes to us from writer Alan Heathcock
and a resource he shared with us way
back in episode six.
As he was finishing his award winning collection
of short stories called Volt, which if you
haven't read, you should definitely check out.
He,
codified his collection of writing vice into what
(02:35):
he called the 27
tenets of writing good fiction. Now you'll still
find a link to that document in the
show notes for that episode if you wanna
go back and take a look at all
of
them. One of them that stood out as
particularly
interesting though was tenet number seven, which reads
like this.
Feeling
is communicated
through the senses.
(02:56):
Communicate through images, sounds, scents, and textures,
not through words.
You will primarily communicate through images.
And I think this is one of his
most insightful
tenets for a couple of reasons.
First, if we're not trying to communicate feelings
to our reader,
then what is it we're really trying to
(03:17):
do? Right?
Getting a reader to feel something should be
the highest purpose of our art.
And secondly,
I think he points out how we go
about trying to get our audiences to feel
entirely backwards.
I'm going to try to boil Alan's wise
words down here to even more simple language,
so we can begin to get our minds
(03:38):
fully around
what I think he's trying to teach us.
And here's how I'm gonna boil that down.
Let's simplify it to
emotions are transmitted to readers
through the five senses.
He seems to be suggesting suggesting that it's
not through
clever or overwrought plot lines. It's not through
lines of dialogue or seeing the furrowed brow
(04:01):
of a character.
And now all of those elements do play
a role for sure, but they're not
the part of writing that is doing the
heavy lifting
when it comes to translating emotion.
So rather than explore what's being claimed here
from an academic standpoint, I'd rather tell you
about an experience I had a few days
ago with my creative writing class.
(04:23):
I'd been thinking about this concept of transmitting
emotion through the senses, and I ended up,
kind of making up a writing activity on
the spot that actually worked really well to
illustrate that point. So here's what I did.
I took my class in to observe another
class in progress,
and this other class was playing some kind
(04:44):
of Pictionary type game. I'm not even sure,
why why they were playing it, but it
was a little bit chaotic. Right?
Which is actually a nice environment for the
kind of writing that I was asking them
to do.
So I simply had them write for five
minutes about what they saw, what they heard,
what they felt,
not emotionally, but with the with through touch,
(05:06):
what they tasted,
if anything. None of them licked the walls,
so none of them wrote about how it
tasted,
and write about what they smelled. Right? Basically,
it was a five senses exercise using all
your senses
document
the environment.
So I told them they couldn't actually write
a story. They couldn't create characters. They couldn't
do any of that. They were just recorders
(05:29):
of all of the details that they experienced
in that place
for that brief period of time.
So after writing for a while, we came
back to our own classroom and I had
them switch papers
with another classmate and pretend that they had
just found
this piece of writing on the ground somewhere.
Right? Like, they they didn't know who had
actually written it or where that person had
(05:50):
actually been.
And then their assignment was to read the
description that they found and try to infer
what kind of emotion
the writer was experiencing or what kind of
mood the writer was in when they had
written this short quick write.
Now I didn't know what to expect from
this little experiment,
but the results were, pretty profound,
(06:13):
at least for me and what I discovered.
So I actually did this writing, due to
as well. I do most of the writing
that I ask my students to do along
with them. And I traded my writing with
one of the students, and I what I
found in her writing
was not just a list of details. I
mean, it was. Right? It it was actually
just a list of details because that's what
I'd asked her to do.
(06:34):
But in the process of reading
and interpreting
her list of details,
it became something very different. It became a
story
with a full range of emotional
experience.
So she started out describing,
the students in the room as bright eyed
and said that their minds were alive.
(06:55):
And it felt very positive and upbeat. Right?
And I started to kind of build this
character in my head
who someone who's always looking on the bright
side of life and feels very positive and
upbeat person.
But then, almost immediately, the tone changed.
Suddenly, she was focused not on the group
as a whole, but she focused in on
one
(07:16):
particular student who was off by themselves a
little bit.
Now, the mood that I assigned to this
writer shifted a little bit. Right? She wasn't
completely happy and positive anymore.
Something about her had drawn her attention
to this solitary student.
And I begin to understand that the the
writer is perhaps a little bit lonely herself
(07:37):
simply because that's what she had noticed
in the room.
The next description in her list was of
the desks
creaking and the chalk drawings
crumbling off the walls. She chose that word
crumbling, which I thought was really interesting to
describe
chalk coming down off the walls.
Now these two loaded details, right, creaking and
(07:58):
crumbling
felt decidedly negative,
especially
up against all the positive things that were
probably around that she could have focused on.
I mean, the chalk drawings after all, they're
very bright and they're vivid and they're fun,
but what she noticed
was the way that chalk was crumbling off
of the board and collecting on the floor.
(08:18):
So as the mood and emotion of this
character I was building in my mind, I
naturally
created a kind of story around her.
So this was not someone who was simply
just bright and bubbly. This was someone who
seemed to to be desperately trying to see
the positives of the world around her, but
was constantly
being pulled back into kind of a darkness
(08:41):
because of whatever she was going through at
the time.
The really cool part of this is that
when I talked to the writer about this
afterwards, she told me that I was actually
dead on right
about her emotional state that morning.
Simply by listing details, what she noticed
first,
and the particular words she chose to describe
it,
(09:01):
she gave me a window
into her emotions.
She didn't have to come right out and
tell me how she was feeling, but she
basically did
simply by showing me the world
as she was seeing it. In fact, if
she had told me how she was feeling,
if she had come right out and just
said it, I probably wouldn't have heard it
as loudly as I did
(09:22):
by being able to put myself in her
shoes and see and experience what she was
seeing and experiencing.
And I, in this process, was a fully
engaged
reader.
If she had announced her emotional state at
the beginning of her writing, I would have
disconnected from it because there's no longer a
puzzle to solve. Right? And these kinds of
(09:43):
little subtle puzzles
are exactly what readers come to books to
experience. They want to play a role. They
want to figure out things
and put things together. They wanna be able
to discover for themselves
how someone feels
by the way that person is viewing the
world and the things that they're paying attention
to. It's a powerful kind of magic that
(10:06):
only exists
in writing prose.
You don't really get access to this kind
of thing in film or plays, at least
not to the same extent
that writers of prose do.
So here's the hack. Right? Here's how we
take this information and turn it, into good
writing. Or at least how here's here's how
I'm using it in my own writing. Maybe
(10:27):
it works for you, maybe it doesn't.
So when I'm drafting,
I often purposefully write
really,
really terribly.
I know that the detail work of a
story requires more intense,
slow,
methodical thought than I can give as I'm
just getting the bare bones of an idea
down on paper in a rough draft. So
(10:48):
it's common for me to write something terrible
like,
Mike was angry about what Martha said, or
Phil Phil was feeling disconnected from society.
Now sentences like these will never see the
light of day, of course. They'll never make
it into a final draft. They're they're,
they're doing all the work for the reader,
and it's leaving the reader entirely passive. And
(11:10):
that's when readers disconnect
and put your book down.
But what I'm really doing is just leaving
placeholders
for me to go back and fill
during a rewrite, during revision.
So when I'm revising
and rewriting and I come across one of
these handy heavy handed announcements of emotion,
I know it's a sign that I have
to slow down there. I have to put
(11:32):
myself in the shoes
of that particular character and spend some time
seeing the world and the setting
the way they would see it.
Like, so would this character who is feeling
lonely and isolated, would they notice the vast
blue sky overhead?
Or would they instead focus on the single
tree
(11:52):
left standing in an area of clear cut
forest?
You don't even have to say something like,
he felt as lonely as that isolated tree
left standing in a swath of clear cut
forest. Your reader is smarter than that. They'll
do the work of interpreting how that character
is feeling
simply based on what he or she notices.
(12:14):
Now, they they don't do this consciously, your
reader. But none of us really do. Right?
Not even in real life. We're we're hardwired
to solve little puzzles like this. In fact,
we get a little boost of adrenaline
every time we put one of these little
puzzles together. We're doing
it constantly in our real worlds, and we
can easily bring those same skills
(12:35):
to bear when we're reading a work of
fiction. It's just the trick is figuring out
how to bring them to bear when we're
writing
a work of fiction.
I recommend that you actually try this little
little game and see what you learn from
it.
You don't really even need more than one
writer to do it. Just go somewhere where
there are people around or things are somehow
(12:55):
otherwise interesting. Right? There's a lot going on.
And write what you see as descriptively as
you can. Now don't try to tell a
story or be overly emotional.
You're just going to document what you see,
what you feel, what you hear, what you
taste.
Then ask someone, really anyone, to read it.
And have them infer, have them guess
(13:18):
what mood
they think the writer was in when they
were documenting these things. Now, they'll be able
to do it.
And you'll discover the way something seemingly innocuous,
some tiny little detail,
can be interpreted with real emotional impact and
weight that you didn't even realize was there
when you were writing it.
(13:39):
And the key here is in the details.
So get away from talking about what everybody
sees. Right? The sky, the clouds, the grass,
the road.
Live in the tiny things in your writing.
Live in the things that ordinary people
don't necessarily notice as they go through their
day. These are the things that hold real
power in your readers' minds.
(14:00):
These are the things that will cause them
to stop and wonder
why did that character notice that particular thing
out of all the other possibilities?
Now, again, they don't consciously stop and put
your writing down and scratch their chin in
thought. Right? But those little synapses,
those little puzzle solving areas of the brain
are going to be firing on all cylinders
(14:22):
to try to put
all of that together under the surface. Your
reader's brain is going to be buzzing with
ideas and inferences,
and then you've got them hooked into your
story because you've given them a job to
do, a puzzle to figure out.
Now a little word of warning here, and
I think it's something I mentioned briefly in
a recent episode.
(14:43):
And this warning is to
be careful not to get caught up in
a single sense.
Now we're very visual beings. And if we're
not careful, we can write like it's the
only sense that we have. If you're a
screenwriter, you're really actually kind of limited to
that one sense. Although you actually have a
lot of opportunity
to bring in audio details as well.
(15:04):
But don't forget, especially if you're writing prose,
that we are,
tasting, we're smelling, we're feeling,
we're hearing creatures just as much as we
are seeing ones or visual ones.
So work all of the senses into your
writing and immerse your reader in the setting
that your character is experience
experiencing so that they are right there
(15:26):
alongside them.
Okay. One more word of warning about all
this detail stuff.
Be especially careful of cliche here.
It can be really easy to slip into
describing,
other senses with cliches.
Right? We want to bring in a smell,
so we end up saying something like, the
air smelled like fresh flowers, or maybe his
(15:48):
breath smelled like a grave. You know, that
may not sound cliche at first,
but it's not really doing anything too interesting.
We've heard things like that before. You see,
we naturally reach for cliches
when we're writing because we've heard them so
often.
Everybody can think of them because they are
so common. So always keep digging for that
(16:09):
angle,
that image, that connection that nobody's heard before.
Create that moment in your reader's mind where
they have to
kind of wake up to your description
and experience it in a new way because
you forced them to do it with a
creative new take on it that they haven't
heard before.
And make sure
(16:29):
when you make that connection that it's connected
to your character's mood, so it's always doing
double duty. In other words, never stop at
the first idea that you come up with.
There's always something better out there if you
just keep digging and trying more things out.
Now, I can't say for sure that what
I've been talking about here is exactly what
Alan Heathcock meant when he coined his seventh
(16:52):
tenet of writing good fiction. But I can
tell you that I see this kind of
work happening in his writing all the time.
What I wanna do is take a look
at a very short excerpt
from his, collection of short stories, Volt,
and discover how he's using the senses, including
images,
to lead his readers into
emotion.
(17:13):
So what we're going to read is the
first few paragraphs of the first short story
in the collection,
and this is called The Staying Freight. I'm
gonna read just a couple of, paragraphs here,
and then we'll unpack it a little bit.
So here's, from Alan Heathcock's
short story collection, Volt. This is The Staying
Freight.
Dusk burned the ridgeline,
(17:34):
and dust churned from the tiller disc set
a fog over the field. He blinked, could
not stop blinking.
There was not a clean part on him
with which to wipe his eyes.
Tomorrow, he'd reserved for the sowing of winter
wheat, and so much was yet to be
done.
38 and well respected,
always brought dry grain to the store, as
sure a thing as a farmer could be.
(17:56):
This
was Winslow Nettles.
Winslow simply didn't see his boy running across
the field.
He didn't see Rodney climb onto the back
of the tractor.
Hands filled with meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped
in foil, didn't see Rodney's boot slide off
the hitch.
Winslow dabbed his eyes with a filthy handkerchief.
The tiller disks hopped.
(18:17):
He whirled to see what he plowed, and
back there lay a boy like something fallen
from the sky.
Winslow leaped from the tractor, ran to his
son.
With his belt, he cinched a gash in
the boy's leg. He pressed his palm to
Rodney's neck, blood pearled between his fingers.
Winslow cradled his son in his lap and
watched the tractor roll on, tilling a fading
(18:40):
arc of dust
toward the freight rail tracks that mark the
northern end of all that was his.
So that's the first one, two, three, four,
short paragraphs of that story.
And even though we get a a third
person narrator here, we're not necessarily
inside Winslow's brain here, it's third person,
it feels like we are. Because it's focused
(19:03):
on a single character, Winslow Nettles, we feel
like we're seeing
and experiencing the world through his eyes. So
in other words, we are,
intuiting his emotions and point of view
and feeling some of it ourselves.
Now the work that Alan has done here
is really subtle, and that is the point.
Right? Anything too heavy handed
(19:25):
starts to feel too obvious, and the reader
gets the feeling that they're kind of being
played. Right? They're being manipulated.
So Alan starts by describing the way the
dusk
burns the ridge line,
and how the dust churns up from the
tiller to create a fog.
Now, these words all in the first sentence
alone
(19:45):
start already to speak to us emotionally. Right?
Burns
and churns and fog. It feels like something's
coming. Something
serious and ominous. So
Winslow's
apprehensive and moody here. Allen doesn't have to
come out and tell us that because we
feel it through the details that he's noticed.
So
he's worried about what is over the horizon,
(20:07):
both literally and figuratively.
And
Allen also gives us this this detail that
Winslow is absolutely
covered in dirt.
Now that is a kind of symbol or
a foreshadowing of death, right, if I've ever
heard one of covered in dirt.
And then right after that, we get an
homage to how much this man's farm means
to him. Right? The height of his pride
(20:30):
was that he, quote, always brought in dry
grain, unquote.
Now, I don't even actually know what that
means, to bring in dry grain, but I
don't have to. Right? The emotion, the pride
is there in those words, and it translates
to us as the reader. We feel his
sense of pride, and and this is a
guy who takes his job seriously, but he's
(20:51):
worried that something is coming
to ruin it all.
Now, there's a bunch of other examples of
using details to evoke emotion
in this
excellently written opening, but I wanna go ahead
and jump to the real emotional meat of
this section. Right? And that's the moment that
Winslow runs over and kills his son.
(21:13):
Now, if this were written as most people
would write it, we'd see Winslow break down
into gushing tears and he'd rend his garments
and Right? The reader couldn't help but miss
the overly
wrought emotion that they were supposed to feel.
So much so that they probably wouldn't have
actually felt it at all.
It would have been too heavy handed and
(21:34):
and too obvious, and the reader would kind
of put up a wall against it. They
would see they would sense what the writer's
trying to get them to do, and they,
kind of,
work against that. So instead,
Allen shows us this man simply cradling his
dead son in his arms
as the tractor
runs off without him, still tilling the field,
(21:57):
still working.
So in other words, his regular life, the
one he was so proud of, so invested
in,
literally just left without him. Literally just drove
off without him. And that's what this death
of his son is
for him. Right? It's the end of everything
that he loves.
(22:18):
Now none of that is spelled out specifically
on the page.
In fact, a a cold reading of it
could seem like it's completely
lacking
in emotion because Alan doesn't come out and
tell us at all what this guy is
feeling.
But it's actually all there in the details,
in the images.
And Alan has left it to his reader
(22:38):
to discover it, making them an equal part
in the telling of the story.
Now truly
powerful storytelling
happens when the reader gets to meet the
writer halfway
to create the meaning, to create the emotion.
That's when a reader becomes part of the
story.
(22:58):
So just a few short paragraphs there, but
a master class in using the senses
and imagery to create an emotional impact for
the reader.
So let's hear that tenet once again. Now
that we've unpacked it a bit here today,
it goes like this.
Feeling is communicated through the senses.
Communicate through images, sounds,
(23:19):
scents, and textures textures,
not through words.
You know what? I'm gonna go ahead and
put a link to Alan's,
tenants document again in the show notes for
this episode as well. Just make it easier
for you to find. There's no need to
go back and dig through to find episode
six. Although, it's a fantastic episode. And if
you haven't heard it or wanted to give
it a listen again, I highly recommend it.
(23:40):
So, you can head on over to bradreedwrites.com
and, check out his other great insights into
what it takes to write great fiction. It
is totally
worth the read.
Today's wise word comes to us from famous
Russian novelist Vladimir
Nabokov.
(24:01):
Vladimir says that nothing revives the past so
completely as a smell
that was once associated
with it.
And isn't that true?
What smells
take you back in time to a very
specific place
surrounded by very specific people?
For me, it's actually the smell of a
(24:21):
Marlboro
cigarette. Now I've never been a smoker, and
almost nobody in my life smoked, but my
grandfather sure did.
And every experience I had with him was
garnished with the smell of a Marlboro
cigarette.
And the best times I had with him,
the times we were the closest,
was sitting with him in his fishing boat
(24:43):
up on Lake Oyehye in Eastern Oregon.
He taught me to put a worm on
a hook,
cast a line into the water, jig the
bait just so, and reel in a shining,
shivering crappie,
all to the smell of a Marlboro cigarette.
The smell of any other cigarette starts to
make me sick almost immediately, but a Marlboro
(25:04):
takes me back to when I was a
kid and plants me right next to my
grandpa, and I'm there with him again, fishing
with him again.
This is the power
of the senses.
Yes. Our sense of sight is vital, and
it might even be the most important sense
in some ways.
But the other senses, I think, can more
(25:24):
deeply connect us on an intimate level
with emotion and with experience. So let's take
it from Nabokov and get some great smells
working in our writing.
Our weekly challenge this week could have been
to try the little writing exercise I described
(25:44):
in the main part of the show, the
descriptive
reporting exercise. And I hope that you'll actually
do that as well. I think it'll be,
a fun and, profound experience for you. But
for our weekly challenge, I've got something else
in mind. This one is about breaking away
from the cliches that so dominate our creative
minds. So this week, I'm going to give
(26:05):
you a handful of prompts to help you
shake up the way you think about description
related to the senses the senses. Now these
are taken from a great book,
edited by Sherry Ellis. The book's called Now
Write,
and, it's full of great writing exercise ideas
from some great, writers. So these aren't necessarily
(26:26):
meant to be used as is in your
writing. Right? But perhaps you'll actually find something
interesting that will work. So, what I've got
here is just a series of sentence starters
to kind of break away from the way
your brain usually defaults to a cliche.
You'll probably need to hear these again or
see them again if you actually want to
write these. I assume most of you are
(26:47):
listening to this not at a writing desk
with a pen in your hand.
So go check out the show notes once
the episode is concluded. When you'd wanna do
a little bit of writing, go to bradreedwrites.com
and find episode 35. Click on that, and
you'll see these prompts in there under the
weekly chat weekly challenge. So let me just
read through some of these for you. So
complete these sentences.
(27:07):
The morning sun tastes like
what?
Her voice
smelled like
what? See, we're we immediately have to go
a different place
in our minds. We can't reach for those
cliches because we're we're breaking the pattern in
there. Let me read a few more.
(27:29):
The music sounded as heavy as
what?
The color green
feels like
what?
The color red tastes
like what?
Seeing him walk was like hearing
what?
Or tasting the night's dinner was like watching
(27:52):
what?
Or touching her dying father's hand
was like seeing
what?
So these can actually be really fun. I
love to use these with my creative writing
students because,
just like we talked about, it breaks that
natural tendency
to reach for a
cliche.
And what's really pernicious about cliches is that
(28:15):
we feel like kind of a genius when
we first write them. Right? We feel like
we're in the zone. You need you're searching
for some kind of piece of figurative language
and boom, something just pops in your head
and you think, I'm a genius. Right? I
I just thought of this thing. I didn't
even have to work that hard for it.
And almost always, that's because it's a cliche.
Almost always, it's because you've heard it over
(28:36):
and over again, and that's why it is
so prominently in your mind. So I love
these exercises to break that process down and
to force you to think
of these similes, these metaphors in new ways.
So that's gonna wrap it up for us
this week. I would love to hear your
experience with our weekly challenges. What's working for
you? What's not?
(28:57):
Maybe what you're learning about writing through doing
them?
Actually, I'd love to hear from you about
any aspect of the show. You can get
in touch with us by going to bradreedwrites.com.
You can shoot us an email. There's a
way to connect with us on Twitter. You
can even leave us a message on our
voice mail line and perhaps even hear your
voice on a future episode of the show.
Until next week, remember the best way to
(29:19):
improve your craft is by writing. That's what
I'm off to go do, and I hope
you're off to do the same. Let's get
some words on paper this week, and we'll
meet up again next week for another episode
of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast.
Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing
Podcast with your host, writer, and educator,
(29:40):
Brad Reed.
We'll be back next week.
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