Evoke the senses with your writing

E. L. Doctorow once noted, “Good writing is supposed to evoke a sensation in the reader—not the fact that it’s raining but the feeling of being rained upon.”

Like the one below by Jean Georges, a New York writer, and a master of sensory writing.

After a winter storm several years ago, Jean was asked to check a friend’s Long Island beach house while the friend was away.

Jean expected to find a ‘dreary scene—an abandoned cottage set among pines, stirred by mournful winds.’

But the instant she climbed from her car, she found a world of harsh beauty, discovery, and sensory delight.

The air smelled clean as I looked at a brilliant landscape. The sea was a violet blue, the sky turquoise, and the beach, which the last summer had sloped gently, was not steep, scooped out luminous. Crabs scurried for burrows and gulls spiraled down on them, like paper airplanes against the sky. At the water’s edge, empty shells that whisper when summer waves turn them now made shrill, whistling sounds.

She saw a couple walking hand-in-hand. The man leaned down and wrote something in the sand. She smiles at his age-old act, the epitome of transience: romantic declarations written and so quickly erased by the sea. Not so.

When she came upon his sand message—one word only, his companion’s name—the erosive winter waves were sweeping it, etching the letters more sharply and deeply until they fairly shouted their permanence.

They will be there forever, she thought… or at least until the next high tide.

What a beautiful story and how beautifully and simply it is written.

Why simple words are the best?

Everyday stories should be written in the simple everyday language that we all use. As Philip Berry Osborne puts it:

“Among most writers, there’s a natural tendency to get too exquisite and ornamental in their prose. Such writers spend all their time trying to pound the pig iron of language into the bright toys and gleaming blades of literature. They ignore the fact that the best stories deal with the small corners and verities of life—and you don’t need fancy words for that.”

Think more in terms of creating a small, delicate watercolor, rather than a giant oil painting.

You want sentiments that stop short of sentimentality—simple words and simple construction for what should basically be a simple theme.

You want the reader to taste, touch, smell, and feel the very experience you’re sharing.”

Ernest Hemingway, once replying to criticism by William Faulkner that his word choice was limited, wrote,:

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”