Day 187: Describing Sensation

I woke up this morning and I was so tired it felt like I hadn't slept at all. Rain pattered against the gravel outside my window, and the world outside looked gray. It was cool in my room because the A/C has trouble circulating, but the blankets were warm and so was the mattress. My limbs turned to lead, and my sheets wrapped around me like vines, it was too late to help it. I was already asleep again.

We've all probably gotten stuck in bed before. Maybe you had a class to attend, an event you wanted to get to, or maybe you just slept through the weekend. Since everyone has felt something like this before, it's easier to get it across in language. Use a metaphor (leaden limbs), or a simile (sheets like vines), and it's no problem. Set the context for a sleepy day with the rain and the cool air and everyone will know just what you mean. This gets a lot trickier when you want to describe something that isn't so common though. Writers have this problem where a sensation may have never even been experienced before, and yet we have to make it feel as real as possible. It can be a daunting challenge. Thankfully, there are some good tricks we can use to get our meaning across, plant ideas in the imagination, even if those ideas have never been thought of before.

I like to start with context. The context for a situation can provide as much information to the reader about a certain sensation as the sensation itself. If you put the reader in a place they understand, they'll fill in the gaps you leave themselves. A sleepy room is easy, but what if you were in a harder setting? A sci-fi writer might want to describe a new sensation, but struggle to find a way to put the reader in the character's shoes. We can lean on others for this context, use movies or other books to help fill the gaps. You've probably never been to space before, yet you can imagine what it's like to experience the weightlessness of low gravity because you've seen it soo many times. Put your character in a space station, have them look out the window onto the stars, and suddenly the reader is already expecting 0 g to be the norm. You may not even have to describe it, but at this point it could be useful to nail down the sensation and fill the reader's mind by using one of those metaphors or similes again.

Another powerful trick is to make sure the sensation leads to some outcome that makes it real. Describing a sensation is pointless if it doesn't cause your characters to act differently. It can even be a distraction if there's no tangible result on the page. In the paragraph at the beginning of the post, I made sure to let you know I fell back to sleep. On the space station, it could be as simple as the character kicking off the wall to get to wherever they're going rather than simply 'they moved to the window.'

The context, the comparative imagery, and the follow through will usually make for a powerful image in the reader's mind. The best authors can squeeze all three of them (and probably some aspects of sensation I don't even recognize yet) into just a couple sentences, or maybe even just one. I like to write a paragraph or two using the three points above for practice sometimes, just to make sure I've got the muscle memory whenever I get into the flow of writing. There's nothing more annoying that having to go back and fill in all the gaps where I could have already had solid imagery.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley