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 Drama: August 10, 2016 Issue [#7794] |
  Drama This week: The Five Senses Edited by: lizco252More Newsletters By This Editor   1. About this Newsletter 2. A Word from our Sponsor 3. Letter from the Editor 4. Editor's Picks 5. A Word from Writing.Com 6. Ask & Answer 7. Removal instructions 
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Seeing: This is the easiest of the five senses to bring into your writing, because you're writing what you're seeing in your mind's eye, so obviously, my dive bar was dark and worn, not necessarily clean, a bit trashy and unkempt.
Hearing: Being of a certain age, the 70's, 80's and 90's are kind of my default, so the dive bars I've visited have always had a familiar sound. But you can bring other elements to the hearing aspect. Does the sound travel easily in this place, or is it muffled or constricted? Maybe it's hollow or tinny. Perhaps it carries a heaviness with it, or maybe it's something that hangs back in the background rather than intruding.
Smelling: This was the hardest aspect for me, because it's not always simple to describe a smell, so I tried to use some of the elements of a bar to work into that description: years of spilled drinks and cigarette smoking, plates of greasy bar food that mix with the electricity of the jukebox or the heat emanating from the booth lamps or the bleach the bartender uses on their towels, stale odors that have built up in the wood of the tables and the floor. Kind of gross, I know, but you definitely know what sort of place you're in when you read it.
Tasting: Have you ever walked into a place, taken a breath and almost wished you hadn't? It's that sort of underlying taste that your sense of smell conveys to your taste buds. Obviously, this doesn't have to be bad or unpleasant ~ for my particular setting it was ~ but if you're a coffee buff and your character is enjoying an exceptionally fine shot of espresso, how would you describe it? What if it's an especially tasty meal ~ or a really awful one, for that matter?
Touch: For the purposes of my story, my character has her own favorite booth in this dive she hangs out in. She knows the feel of the worn but soft vinyl of the seat, the faint stickiness of the table, which, were you to try to clean it properly, would take several passes before you'd see the actual and true surface of the table itself. She knows all the lines that have been carved into its surface over the years, and it is a familiar, somewhat comforting thing for her.
