CHAPTER SEVEN

Imagery and the Senses

You may be familiar with the common creative writing adage: show don’t tell. This bit of advice has been repeated so often that it seems to have become a unquestioned truth. In the fiction chapter of this book, you have learned a lot about developing narrative telling, which often gets short shrift when we talk about what makes good writing. We want to complicate that notion of showing always being preferable to telling. In other words, showing and telling are each techniques that you can choose to employ or not. They represent neither good nor bad writing. Rather, the context of your particular piece of writing will determine if, when, and how you might call upon them.

Let me make a case for showing as an indispensable writing technique, whether you’re working in fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. I’m focusing on it here because the word nonfiction will inevitably carry certain connotations in your mind. You may think that nonfiction is academic, stuffy, boring. I hope that I’ve demonstrated in the first chapter the difference between that kind of nonfiction and the kind of creative nonfiction you’re working on in this class.  

Showing is another way to talk about the inclusion of images in your writing. Images are not only visual. They include all five senses. The reason sensory images work so well in creative writing is that we experience the world through our bodies. Humans are embodied creatures. We have minds, through which we also think about the world. We cogitate as intellectual beings, but our primary experience of the world comes to us through the body, through our skin, our ears, our nose, our tongue, our eyes. These sensory organs are the only way that the world enters us, contributing to our inner psychic lives. Even our emotions are influenced by chemicals in our brains and bodies. We don’t think our emotions, after all. We feel them, viscerally and immediately inside our bodies.

The goal of creative writing is not primarily to convince a reader of some abstract argument as you might wish to do in other, critical modes of writing. Embedded in a piece of creative writing might be an idea that you wish to convey, but the means to do so is not necessarily logic or persuasion. Rather, the goal of creative writing is to offer your reader an experience, some of which may indeed include ideas and arguments but will always attempt to animate them through experience. The job of the writer of creative nonfiction, then, is to learn to translate an experience of the world into the language of the senses. What’s more, I resist the easy (and I would argue harmful) division between the mind and the body, the intellect and the senses, reason and emotion. As a writer, you don’t need to privilege one over the other because when you take either of them seriously, you must necessarily contend with the other. Severing body from mind distorts and does violence to the human condition. In other words, to write convincingly about the body is another way to get at the interior experience of consciousness itself.

Rendering the sensory world into language is not a matter of decoration. Images can be pleasing and beautiful by themselves. Perhaps that is enough sometimes. But then, perhaps not. I believe that images function in creative writing in a much more elemental way, appealing to the grounded, embodied experiences we have as human beings. Dazzling the reader with pretty sentences and gratuitous imagery may be entertaining, but I will always be left asking: to what end? Instead of thinking of imagery as decoration, then, I would urge you to consider the manifold functions of images, including the following:

• Images can offer an accurate representation of the world you want to evoke.
• Images can reveal something of the consciousness or personality of the observer.
• Images can establish a tone in your writing, putting your reader in a specific mood.
• Images can advance the plot or complicate the narrative in your writing.
• Images can serve as symbols that suggest larger thematic significance.

Exercise: Sensory Filters

Here’s a writing tip: in order to render sensory experiences as directly as possible, avoid the sense words themselves if you can. I call these sensory filters. Compare, for instance, the following two sentences:

I saw the flag whipping in the wind.

The flag whipped in the wind.

In the first sentence, the main verb is “saw,” meaning that the act of seeing is the most important action. The second sentence renders the action of the flag much more directly. If the goal is to focus on the flag, the second sentence is preferable. On the other hand, if you’re writing about regaining your vision, perhaps the act of seeing is more important and should be emphasized. The point I want to make here is that sensory filters are extremely common in first drafts. It will be important to locate them and make a decision about whether they’re important or not. Just because it would be hard to revise doesn’t mean you should let it stand, which is good advice in any writing context. The pleasure of revision lies in finding elegant solutions to problems like these. Read the sentences below and ask yourself how you would revise them to remove the sensory filters. In some cases, it’s more than just a matter of rearranging words. Be as radical in your revision as you like. Sometimes, you will have to add entirely new words to make a complete sentence or offer important context.

        I heard the chickens in the backyard.

        I smelled the manure as we drove down the highway.

        I saw him running up the escalator.

        I felt the spongy texture of the cake.

        I tasted the bitterness of the aspirin.

Here’s a writing tip: sensory filters are similar to the concept of what I call cognitive filters, in which a writer includes sometimes unnecessary phrases like I think and I believe. Usually, these filters can be removed as well, making the thought process much more immediate to the reader. On the other hand, the same test applies here: if the thinking or believing is the important action in the context of what you’re writing, that likely means you need to keep the filter. Regardless, you should be alert to the prevalence of such filters and become accustomed to revising accordingly.

Smell

In an early scene of the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, three paranormal investigators are gathering clues at a library after reports of supernatural disturbances. At one point, the character played by the actor Dan Ackroyd says, “Listen! Do you smell something?” It’s a silly, subtle little joke that might go unnoticed altogether—or only elicit a polite chuckle. Why should you have to listen in order detect a smell? Well, it might only be a joke, but something about it also rings true to my lived experience. Smell is the most elusive of the senses to capture on the page. When trying to locate or identify an unfamiliar odor in the air, you often need to remove or suppress other sensory input in order to focus on the olfactory.

Smell is also notoriously difficult to render on the page without resorting to the word smell itself, or its equivalent like scent or odor. For instance, in the sensory filter example above, how are you supposed to describe smelling manure while driving down the highway without saying smell? Sometimes, the virtue of the direct description of a sensory experience must give way to the limits of our language. Don’t give up on smell, however, as a powerful sense in your writing. To my mind, it is one of the senses that is deeply connected to memory. Samantha Edmond has this experience in her essay “An Incomplete List of Sad Beautiful Things that Almost but Don’t Quite Manage to Make Clear to Me How Anyone Continues to Love Anything Knowing Someday It Will All Be Gone.” She is immediately transported to the past through smell: “The smell, raw and wet, of uncooked fish—inhale and I am five years old, knife in hand, thumb in gaping crappie mouth.” In my own experience, to this day, there is a smell in the air at a certain time in the spring when I sense that it’s time to start playing baseball. Now, I haven’t played baseball for thirty years, but I remember it in my body. I can very easily go back to that time in my memory when I smell the ground itself begin to exhale something ancient and bacterial into the air.

Freewriting questions

What smells evoke memory most strongly to you? What smells do you recall from your childhood? What is the most or least appealing smell to you and why?

Taste

Similar to smell, taste can be elusive and difficult to write about without resorting to the sensory filter. You may also be tempted to describe taste in tired, familiar, or cliche ways. For instance, you likely want to avoid writing something dancing on your tongue, or that there is a party in your mouth. You’re a writer, not auditioning for the Food Network. So, too, will it be hard to keep from writing as though you’re a marketer or advertiser. Apples might be crisp and juicy and sweet, but it does little to help me experience eating an actual apple since those words are so often used in commercial contexts. When Barbara Haas tastes a Pearl of Inkerman wine in her essay “Like Losing Three Sardinias,” she describes the experience in both concrete and abstract terms, presenting a complicated, compelling experience: “Pearl of Inkerman hit the tongue with a splash of glistening wet-stone minerality,” she writes. Later, she notes that “With even that first sip, as Pearl of Inkerman rolled across my tongue and its grassy astringent notes registered, I felt the intimacy. This was a substantial mouthful, earthy, unpretentious, integrated.” It’s hard to get more concrete than “glistening wet-stone minerality” and “grassy astringent,” but then she feels “intimacy,” something that is “unpretentious, integrated.”

Freewriting questions

How would you describe your favorite food? How would you describe your least favorite food? What kind of abstract ideas do you think would offer a complicated but compelling sensory experience of one of these foods?    

Touch

Describing the sensation of touch can be challenging because it manifests in many different ways. It can be an encompassing feeling all over your skin, or it can be localized on your fingertips: cold, hot, rough, smooth, hard, soft. In his essay “On Fire,” Paul Crenshaw describes a childhood memory of fires igniting in the summer near Fort Chaffee: “Afterward the land lay scorched, the grass blackened and burned. Ash fell like snow. Trees smoldered for days. The heat lingered in the earth, rising like radiation.” Later, as a teenager, he watches a house fire: “Even across the street we could feel the fierce heat of the fire. The night turned damp with steam.” In both cases, he evokes many senses at once, including touch, creating a mood in the reader of danger and foreboding. Compare these descriptions of heat to Neil Mathison’s essay “Ice.” Describing camping on Mt. Rainier, he writes, “We had merely to pull our caps over our eyes and let our senses float out—to the sounds, to the breezes, to the cold-to-the-touch-and-ice-sculpted rock. Then we envisioned an icier day, a millennia of ice, an age of ice.” Later, he remembers a childhood memory of boating on Puget Sound the day that John F. Kennedy was killed: “The day was cold and gray. We felt as if the assassination had irreversibly chilled everything. On that day, it was easy to imagine what it had been like when the ice was here: cold and bleak and shaping, only this time, on this day, what was being shaped was us.” In both of these cases, Mathison’s attention to the cold prompts moments of speculation and imagination.

Freewriting questions

What is the hottest or coldest you have ever been? How would you describe a texture that you love or hate to touch? How would you describe what you are touching right now?

Sound

Unlike taste, smell, and touch, our sense of hearing comes much more readily to mind when we try to describe the world around us. The beauty of rendering sound imagery in your writing is that language itself evokes sound, appealing to our inner ear as we imagine words being spoken out loud, so when you describe an auditory experience, you are also creating a new one. Some of the most beautiful and artful writing is arranged so that these two experiences echo or reinforce one another. For instance, in a description of a river, if you choose words that are lulling, liquid, and lazy, the imagery becomes calming and serene. If you choose words that are gushing, rushing, whooshing, however, the imagery becomes exciting and possibly dangerous. This formal technique is based on a phenomenon called sound symbolism. In English, there are certain clusters of sounds that evoke different domains of meaning. For instance, words that begin with gl- often suggest something to do with light or vision: glance, glare, glimmer, glisten, glint, and so on. A famous linguistic experiment asks people from many language backgrounds to give one of two names, bouba or kiki, to two different shapes, one sharp and jagged, the other round and curvy. Naturally, we associate kiki with the first shape and bouba with the second. As writers, we can occasionally take advantage of this phenomenon. Sometimes, sounds naturally suggest themselves by the activity taking place in your writing. Kim Groninga’s “Knot and Pull” opens with such a scene: “Knit. Click click. Purl two. Click click. Knit. Click click. Purl two. Click click. When the tiny metal tapping grew louder than Lydia's voice, I knew I needed to pull back to my larger surroundings, settle into my whole self.” The author is interviewing a woman about a school she had founded in Jerusalem for blind adults. Aptly, sound imagery becomes as important as visual imagery as Groninga returns to the sounds of knitting, weaving it through the scene to create an ambient background of sound.

Freewriting questions

What sounds are you hearing around you right now? What different ways can you describe them? How do these different ways suggest different meanings? What sounds do you enjoy? What sounds annoy or frighten you? What sounds are intriguing or mysterious?

Sight

Through sight we know and understand the world. Because vision is our primary sense, it is ubiquitous in our language and therefore in our writing. Brandon Schrand masterfully renders the visual world in his essay “The End of Something.” Let’s take a long look at the opening:

On the second night, the crew rolled in a bank of floodlights to blaze the shoreline, and another high beam to sweep the dark surface of Alexander Reservoir, the large caterpillar-shaped body of water at the edge of Soda Springs, Idaho, my hometown. It was July 1989, I was sixteen going on seventeen, and, like everyone else in town, I had been upended by the story. Chad and I were watching from his truck at the reservoir’s edge on the opposite side of the action, smoking Marlboros and listening to Rock 103 out of Salt Lake City on low volume. The sky was an obsidian dome and you could only see the stars and moon in the intervals between the sweeping high beams bright on the black water. Search boats trolled back and forth with their throaty motors churning in the deep dark. Crackly radio chatter carried across the water as if transmitted from another time. Farther down the shoreline, dogs barked in the damp distance and we could see flashlights wiggle in the dark. Lured by the spectacle, trout broke the water’s surface, trying to feed on the lights and the moon.

First, notice that Schrand does not linger solely on the visual. Like all good writers, he appeals to multiple senses, including the sound of “throaty motors” and “crackly radio chatter.” However, the visual imagery is vivid and specific. Alongside the two characters in the scene, we watch the play between light and dark, from the stars and moon in the dark sky, to the light beams scanning the dark water, to the distant flashlights in the dark. Like the fish, it’s as though the reader, too, is “trying to feed on the lights and the moon.” The visual will likely come more naturally to you as a writer, but you should still try to craft your imagery so that it creates artful effects as in “The End of Something.”

Freewriting questions

What are you seeing at this moment? What are its most and least obvious visual characteristics? How can you describe a familiar visual image in fresh and unusual ways? What pairs of visual adjectives like light and dark can you play with in your own writing?  

Synaesthesia

I’ve purposely ordered the discussion of senses in this part of the chapter from the most to the least difficult to incorporate into your writing, smell being notoriously challenging, sight seeming more or less automatic. To finish off this section, I’d like to introduce you to an extremely valuable literary device: synaesthesia. Synaesthesia occurs when you craft a specific sensory image by using the language associated with a different sense, as when you render a visual image in auditory terms, or render an image of taste by choosing tactile words. For example, “Her whisper glimmered softly in his ear.” A whisper is something we hear, but in this sentence it glimmers, which is a visual verb. Or, “The wine lulled like a shush on his tongue.” Here, the taste of wine is rendered as an auditory phenomenon with the word “shush” (and, arguably, the verb “lull” here evokes the word “lullaby.”) You might not even notice the subtle effects of synaesthesia, but it can be truly memorable.

Alison Alstrom’s “Good Morning, Heartache” dips into synaesthesia as she ends the essay with a musical performance: “My father counts to two, then three. He lifts his saxophone. Horns swell up like waves, glints of keyboard sunlight bounce off and through them. Swishy brushes on the drums are like seaweed fingers, softly stroking. Bass notes are smooth, sturdy stones along the bottom.” Music becomes visual and tactile, opening an evocative oceanic metaphor that may have otherwise remained closed.

While synaesthesia is a literary device, it is also an actual neurological condition. Laura Legge recounts this experience in her essay “Deep Purple,” explaining a specific form of synesthesia she has called “chromesthesia, in which many pieces of music I hear are twinned with distinct visual experiences,” as her description of listening to a song by Prince demonstrates:

I was a candle in a cross-breeze. My self was flickering. Beyond the physical sensation, I could actually see the smoke coils. It was my first time witnessing a song expand beyond its own auditory build. Everything changed. I was newly aware that poetry could sunburn me. On a spiritual level, I knew a drum kit could break my neck.

Once more, synaesthesia allows for the emergence of an energetic and compelling metaphor: music as fire. Legge makes clear that synaesthesia is a uniquely transformative mode of writing worth integrating into your own work.

Freewriting questions

Has music ever had a physical effect on your body? How would you describe a common sensory experience without using words associated with that sense? Can you describe toothpaste in your mouth without invoking taste? A symphony without sound? Perfume without smell? The sun, stars, or moon without sight? A pinprick without touch?