Story sense

Using sensory detail to bring your story to life

Craft: How dark is dark?

Twenty years ago, the lights went out in the northeastern US and central Canada during one of the largest power blackouts in history. I lived in Toronto at the time, and on that first blackout evening, as I walked a few blocks to a friend’s house at dusk, I passed a young woman on the sidewalk. “Will it get darker than this?” she asked me. I realized she was truly a city dweller, and had likely never been somewhere that wasn’t artificially lit up at night. “Oh yeah,” I replied. “It’s going to get a lot darker—you need a flashlight if you’re going to be out!” (Tech history note: In 2003, our phones didn’t have flashlights built-in.)

It was a moment that brought home to me how different our sensory histories and experiences can be. From camping as a kid, I knew the close blackness of forest dark. From trips outside the city, I’d seen the country brightness of clear-skied winter nights when stars reflected on bright white snow and of full-moon summer nights when moon-shadows stretched from our toes far ahead of us. From coastal living, I knew the indigo of ocean and star-filled sky spreading to the horizon. But even though my nighttime experiences were more varied than my neighbour’s, to me, a pitch-black city at night was still weird, the hard surfaces of buildings and pavement and concrete foreign when cloaked fully by night, nothing at all like the mossy forest with trees that surrounded but didn’t fully enclose.

I’ve been thinking about that moment, and other sensory differences, as I dive more deeply into an historical nonfiction project I’m working on, focused on a woman who lived in the last half of the nineteenth century. On a research trip to Virginia Civil War battlefields (thanks to an Access Copyright Marian Hebb Research Grant), I happened upon a book titled The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War by historian Mark M. Smith. Smith is an advocate of “sensory history”—as he writes “virtually any period from the past can be understood in a more textured fashion by trying to uncover (not recover) the sensory experiences of people at the time.” (p. 5)

In his book, Smith goes on to do just that, using five specific Civil War events as focal points for exploring each of our five key senses—sound, sight, smell, taste and touch—and mining historical documents and accounts for references to those sensory details. Throughout, he reminds readers again and again that nineteenth century North Americans inhabited a different sensory landscape than we do today. What does “loud” mean in an era without the background hum of traffic noise, in a world without electronic amplification? What do people smell like in a time without personal deodorants and less frequent clothes laundering? What tastes rancid in an age without regular refrigeration of food? “Events and developments have changed our sensory habits, the ways we hear, smell, and taste—sense generally—and the meaning we attach to those sensations,” writes Smith. (p.3)

Reading Smith and the firsthand accounts he cites has pushed me to question notions of sensory uniformity that extend beyond the historical, though. As we consider writing across cultures and communities—whether in nonfiction or fiction—we run the risk of presuming our sensory “truths” are universal. What do we mean when we say a place is “noisy”? If the language around us is one we understand, does that shift how we might describe overlapping voices? A lack of sound might mean “peaceful” to one but be a signal of disorienting loneliness to another. Food textures that are comforting reminders of home—perhaps for me, porridge on a cold morning and for my friend Toufah, yam fufu—might be unpalatable to those unfamiliar with them. Words like delicious, noisy, peaceful, spicy, and so many more become empty holders into which each of us pours our individual perceptions.

And beyond perception there is meaning. What did the stench of a Civil War field’s poorly buried dead mean in the nineteenth when odor—miasma—was presumed to be deadly? A week after the Gettysburg battle in July 1863, a local resident wrote: “The atmosphere is loaded with the horrid smell of decaying horses and the remains of slaughtered animals, and, it is said, from the bodies of men imperfectly buried. I fear we shall be visited with pestilence, for every breath we draw is made ugly by the stench.” (p. 81) A more recent example? Think of how our own perceptions of scent and breathing, touch and contact were affected in the early days of the pandemic, before we knew how the virus spread and fear infected our senses.

What is the meaning of touch in cultures and times where, by virtue of skin colour, gender, age or class, one has more or less bodily autonomy because of one’s social position? What is the meaning of a jet engine’s roar when your experience has taught you jets are for vacations or airshows while for your neighbour they carry echoes of war? What is the meaning of the taste of pastrami when for one it transmits memories of diner lunches with a beloved uncle and for another it is a reminder of a food bank’s surplus of frozen lunch-sized servings consumed over miserable high school months during a father’s unemployment?

And what do all these questions mean for us as writers?

First, the recognition of the limits of shared perceptions requires us to interrogate whose perceptions we are getting down onto the page—our own or our subjects’? What are our sensory biases? We have to recognize them in order to step around them.

Second, we need to specifically seek sensory detail from our sources. For fiction and nonfiction writers, that may require research seeking sources and accounts that describe the sensory details we are trying to capture from the point of view of those who experienced them, including mining accounts captured for other purposes for passing references to sensory impressions. For nonfiction writers particularly, it may require asking specific sensory questions when conducting interviews.

Third, we need to get specific. Discard imprecise or empty words like pleasant, noisy, smelly and others, and search for descriptors that convey sensory impressions with greater concrete clarity and—bonus round!—hint at their meaning for the person who is at the centre of the experience. And one word, or in fact, one paragraph, of caution here, from poet Mark Doty in his book The Art of Description: World into Word:

“Wanting to make the world on the page seem real to the reader, our first impulse is sometimes to reach for adjectives and adverbs, those QUALIFIERS intended to lend a host of sensory qualities to the sentence or the line. But be careful: it’s often the case that writers turn to these additives—like spices in the kitchen—when the main ingredients themselves seem bland. If the nouns and verbs aren’t interesting enough, no amount of adjectival or adverbial flavoring is going to really do the trick.” (p. 112)

The world you bring to the page can both sharpen and occlude the worlds you seek to create on the page. Clarifying your understanding of your sensory influences and biases can bring you closer to capturing another’s more accurately.

Choice words

Some sensory inspiration from things I’ve underlined this month:

From Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, sensory impressions from the main character, a teenaged aristocratic Italian girl in an arranged marriage:

Sight: “In truth, she thinks..., the ride here from court was dull, through fields stark and frozen, the sky so heavy it seemed to droop, exhausted, on the tops of bare trees.” (p.4)

Touch: “...she slid from the bed. The tiles seemed to arch their cold, gritty surfaces into the undersides of her feet. She dressed hastily, pulled her woolen sottana over her shift, pushing her feet into her shoes. The air in the room was frigid and still; moving across it felt, to Lucrezia, like wading through an icy lake.” (p. 22)

Sound: “A month or so after Maria’s burial, an ear pressed to the splintery wood of a passageway that ran behind the Grand Duke’s private rooms might have heard the following sounds: the muffled tap of boots, pacing meditatively from one side of the chamber to the other, the scratch of a quill on paper, a smothered throat-clearing, the breathing of someone just on the other side of the panelling. And then the voice of Vitelli, adviser to the Grand Duke Cosimo: ‘It is highly regrettable,’ he said, and then after a moment continued. ‘But nothing, of course, compared with the tragic loss of Lady Maria.’ ” (p. 60)

From Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds, written from the point of view of an English servant girl brought as one of the early settlers to a doomed American settlement:

Taste: “She stared at the gaping fish head, then took up the knife in her hand and split the fish’s skin at the belly, and with the blade she peeled it away from the frozen flesh. The meat was so iced that it resisted the knife, and she could not risk the smells and smoke of cookery. She took the surface of the pale muscle and sliced a fine sheet of flesh off it and set this sheet of flesh upon her tongue, and there to her rejoicing mouth it melted and became sweet and buttery and dissolved down her throat.” (p. 25)

Smell (from a scene while still in England): “They were let inside a cool white space so sweet-smelling that the girl’s nose drank down the smell as though it were a honeyed draught.

Through a far door, she could see back gardens full of trees and flowers. There was a conservatory, she would discover later, with lemon trees in wheelbarrows that the gardeners rolled into the outdoor sun on a fine day and back inside when there was a bite in the air. A servant wafted by and said that the mistress would see them now upstairs in the hall.” (p. 111)

Smell: “And the child Bess with her soured-milk smell, her apple smell, her faint urine smell because she dribbled over the chamberpot and often pissed on her petticoats and slippers.” (p. 166)

Touch/feeling: “She moved her feet in their beds in the coverlets and her limbs exploded with thousands of tiny bites as the blood rushed back to them, as her blood returned them from the small death of sleep to the pain of waking life.” (p. 180)

Exercises

1. Gather your senses: On your next project, start a “sense” file. As you research and interview, shift sensory descriptions into this file (be sure to include the reference details so you know what you’re quoting from). You may do specific research geared to particular senses, but you’ll also likely come across sensory references in other materials—make sure you capture them.

2. Isolate one sense: As O’Farrell does in one of the scenes above, write a scene from a single sensory perspective.

3. Layer in a second: Interestingly, O’Farrell follows that sound scene with a visual one:

“If a person to whom the listening ear belonged were to shift to the left, they might find a sliver of light betraying a chink in the panelling. And if the eye were pressed as close as possible to the gap, the person could make out the glow of candelabra, the shapes of chairs, a standing figure, presumably Vitelli, and a seated person attired in something lustrous and brown. The Grand Duke Cosimo, in his sable robe, which he wore on cold days in his bedchamber.” (p. 61)

Take your single-sense scene above, and shift to another sense as you move us into your story.

4. Swap senses: Notice in Groff’s excerpt set in England that she describes a scent as a taste—“the girl’s nose drank down the smell as though it were a honeyed draught”—and then in the next paragraph, a movement using a term more often associated with scent—“A servant wafted by…” Try describing sensory details using language associated with another sense.

Resources

1. Learn from poets: The Art of Description: World into Word by Mark Doty is a terrific primer on making your description precise and fresh.

2. Learn from historians: Mark M. Smith’s The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege is particularly focused on the Civil War, but is a terrific example of pulling sensory details from primary historical sources. He has a new book out which I haven’t yet read which may offer a more general introduction to sensory history: A Sensory History Manifesto.

3. Learn from other writers: Beth Kephart’s essay “And there’s your mother, calling out to you: In pursuit of memory” is a lovely reminder of the ways memoirists—and others—can connect with sense memories.

Courses and other stuff

• One resolution, done: Get a head start on achieving your resolutions by signing up for a King’s Writing Workshop. Set to run in February and March 2024, there are four- and eight-week online, non-credit workshops on offer, including travel writing, food writing, memoir, fiction fundamentals, writing your family story and a workshop tailored to writers of African descent.

• Go for a grant: If you’re a Canadian writer or visual artist, check out the Access Copyright Foundation’s Marian Hebb Research Grants (deadline Feb 15) and Professional Development Grants (deadline April 1).

• Apply yourself: Looking for an MFA program that fits your life and your goals? University of King’s College offers two MFA programs, one geared to nonfiction and the other to fiction. There are online information sessions coming up this week and in the new year if you’d like to find out more.

• Give yourself a writer’s gift: Looking for writing community? Check out Paragraph NY online—the lunchtime write-ins with Diana Goetsch are a highlight, and the Pitch War and other workshops are always info- and inspiration-packed. Looking for an online reading group? The Center for Fiction has terrific offerings. And don’t forget to look for options closer to your own home: libraries and local and regional writers’ organizations often have a range of writing workshop and writing community events in person and online.

Obligatory photo of Buddy and Reggie

Seriously, Reggie is much happier than his steely glare might suggest.

The stuff at the bottom

I’m a writer, editor and teacher. This is my personal e-newsletter on the craft of writing nonfiction, sprinkled with occasional feminism and social justice. You can find out more about me on my website at kimpittaway.com. You can also find me on Facebook. I’m a cohort director in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction limited residency program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. If you’re interested in writing a nonfiction book, you should check our program out! (And hey, we just added a limited residency MFA in Fiction as well, taught by some of my amazing colleagues!)