Imagery: the four forgotten senses

Source: Wikimedia Commons public domain photo.

Imagery, as we all learned in middle school or thereabouts, is writing that appeals to the five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. But in practice, most imagery focuses on the first sense in this list -- sight -- and seldom touches upon the other four. Many people tend to be visually oriented in their perceptions, so perhaps our bias in favor of sight while writing imagery results from this disposition. Nonetheless, to make your imagery stand out, try including the four forgotten senses.

One way to fruitfully practice writing imagery that uses all five senses is to compose a description of a meal. Meals have abundant sights (steaming food and colorful dishes), sounds (the slurp of soup and the scraping of forks against plates), smells (the fragrance of cilantro or the pungent aroma of vinegar), tastes (duh!), and touch (the texture of the food, the feel of the tablecloth). The few examples I’ve put inside parentheses represent only the tip of the imagery iceberg (...lettuce?). What other examples can you think of?

Now go ahead and use all five senses by writing a detailed description of a Thanksgiving dinner or a wedding reception meal or a birthday party picnic. In addition to the possibilities for imagery offered by these events, human rituals such as holidays, weddings, parties, funerals, reunions, graduations, etc. make excellent writing topics because they are universal and they are often rich in family tension, conflict and drama. Now get busy writing so you can see (hear, smell, taste, and touch) what I’m talking about!

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.