Use All 5 Senses to Bring Your Setting to Life

Unlike movies, which are inherently visual and auditory, your written fiction depends solely on your power of description to evoke reaction of the senses from your readers and bring your setting to life.

This is tricky business, since you want to bring the scene to life, but you don’t want to bore readers with lengthy explanations.

So what’s the solution?

What you want to do is use highly evocative phrases to pique all five senses.

Here’s How Even the Smallest Sensory Description Will Bring Your Setting to Life

In the opening chapter of Sunrise Song, Catherine Palmer does a marvelous job of raising her Kenyan setting into the three-dimensional realm thanks to her deft use of a single sensory detail. She writes:

[A] rich smell of heat and soil and fragrant grasses hung thick in the air.

In reading this, I was instantly transported from merely visualizing the African bush to actually participating in it.

What’s the Most Important Sense to Use in Descriptions?

Too often, writers focus on sight and sound to the exclusion of taste, touch, and smell. But because of the limitations of the medium, you can’t afford to waste even one of these senses.

Experts claim smell is the sense connected most integrally to memory. As a result, it holds significant power in bringing your setting to life.

As you’re writing and rewriting, pay attention to all the senses. Look beyond just simple descriptions of how things look, and start thinking about how you can use small telling details to evoke all five senses.

Of course, there’s no need to bombard the reader with five descriptions of every scene. But try to balance your use of the senses over the course of your entire story. If you can do that, you’ll be able to pull your reader out of his chair and bring your setting to life!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What do you think is the most powerful of the five senses to use to bring your setting to life? Tell me in the comments!