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Effective writing demands the use of all five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting – but it also demands something else: the ability to see beyond the usual, to find the extraordinary in the commonplace, to get beneath the surface of the everyday and discover the wealth of treasure that lurks just out of the reach of what’s normal.
Everyday we’re bombarded by sounds, sights, smells, shapes and other snapshots of real life as lived by everyone around us. Most of the time we block them out, not out of wilful ignorance, but out of necessity. If every sense was fully receptive all the time we’d be overwhelmed in a matter of minutes.
Imagine trying to notice and make sense of all the snatches of conversation heard while walking along a busy street. Impossible. Couple that with the sounds of motor engines, the call of the pigeons, the scrape of shoes on concrete, a police siren in the distance, the rattle of a charity collector’s box, the aroma of the fish and chip shop or a burst of coffee outside the cafe, the sudden sharp yell of a frustrated child or the shrieks of excited teenagers.
The trick is to be selective in what you notice and focus on just that one thing for a moment.
It’s not very often, for instance, that we’re treated to the pleasure of real silence and very often what we image to be silence really isn’t. Sit very still and listen. Can you really hear nothing at all? In the house, is the clock ticking, is the central heating humming, does the occasional car go past outside the window, are the birds singing?
Right now, although I’m sitting alone at my computer as I write this, the sounds I can hear become almost a cacophony when I pause to really listen.
I hear birds, not singing but squawking, there’s the hum of the computer and the tap of the keys as I type, the wind blows the fly screen against the door, knocking, the cat claws the furniture in the next room and my own voice calls sharply for her to stop, I move slightly and my clothes rustle as the chair gives a little squeak. I clearly hear the clicking of the mouse wheel as I scroll up and down the page.
Isolating sounds, listening for them one by one and giving each a name, is good training for the creative mind. It teaches you to home in on the small things, to pause and realise the breadth and depth of the normal.
All too often the little things escape us, but it’s the little things that build into big things. Words build into sentences, into paragraphs and pages, to chapters and whole books. But without the words, one by one, there is nothing.
Learning to home in on the moment and stay there for a little while builds on the subconscious store of remembered senses.
Then, when your character is alone in her house and feeling lonely or scared, anxious or happy, your subconscious will throw you the senses, the tiny sounds so easily missed or overlooked, that will heighten the characters’ sense of aloneness, or whatever else she’s feeling, and draw it sharp and real for your readers.
But before you can home in on these tiny sensations and sounds in writing, you need to have experienced them in real life.
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