Perfecting Description
It is often a conundrum for writers to know how much description to put into their work. They want their readers to be able to conjur up images of the world they’ve created, without stumbling down the path of ‘purple prose’.
Too many fancy analogies or unusual metaphors will only serve to throw your readers out of the world of the book, not welcome them in. I only need to know that ‘he frowned’, not that ‘his thick eyebrows drew together like two furry caterpillars sizing each other up for a duel’.
But too little description can leave readers feeling removed from your story, not giving them the chance to become emotionally involved.
The way to perfect your description is not through intricate details or metaphors, it is through using all of the senses.
When your character walks into a room I don’t care if the wallpaper is pea green or moss green (unless it’s important to the story), I want to feel like I’m stepping into the room myself.
- I want to smell the flowers in the vase
- I want to hear the piano being played
- I want to feel the coldness of the stone tiled floor
- I want to taste the dust on my tongue
- and I want to see the sunlight streaming through the window
Take your reader into the room with you, don’t leave them standing outside looking through the window.
Have You Got More Sense Than You Thought?
Writers are often advised to appease all of the five senses in their writing. We don’t just experience the world by sight (in truth, some people don’t experience it that way at all), but we can smell it, hear it, taste it, and feel it too.
But that’s not where the senses stop. There are more than five senses. In fact, there are at least 22 of them.
There are senses that you’ll include regularly in your writing without realising it. Senses like sense of time, thermoception (temperature differences) or magnetoception (direction). These easily slip in by themselves: afterall, time passes, warm days turn to cool nights, and people move around.
So what would it take to include the full spectrum of the senses? How about including nociception (pain), equilibrioception (balance) or kinaesthesia (acceleration)?
To write a piece that contains every single one of the senses certainly is an interesting idea for a writing challenge…
The Humans With Super Human Vision
discovermagazine.comAn unknown number of women may perceive millions of colors invisible to the rest of us. One British scientist is trying to track them down and understand their extraordinary power of sight.
An average human, utterly unremarkable in every way, can perceive a million different colors. Vermilion, puce, cerulean, periwinkle, chartreuse—we have thousands of words for them, but mere language can never capture our extraordinary range of hues. Our powers of color vision derive from cells in our eyes called cones, three types in all, each triggered by different wavelengths of light. Every moment our eyes are open, those three flavors of cone fire off messages to the brain. The brain then combines the signals to produce the sensation we call color.
Vision is complex, but the calculus of color is strangely simple: Each cone confers the ability to distinguish around a hundred shades, so the total number of combinations is at least 1003, or a million. Take one cone away—go from being what scientists call a trichromat to a dichromat—and the number of possible combinations drops a factor of 100, to 10,000. Almost all other mammals, including dogs and New World monkeys, are dichromats. The richness of the world we see is rivaled only by that of birds and some insects, which also perceive the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.
Researchers suspect, though, that some people see even more. Living among us are people with four cones, who might experience a range of colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called tetrachromats see a hundred million colors, with each familiar hue fracturing into a hundred more subtle shades for which there are no names, no paint swatches. And because perceiving color is a personal experience, they would have no way of knowing they see far beyond what we consider the limits of human vision.
