If you want your story to be impossible to put down, we—your readers—need to experience what you’re experiencing, feel what you’re feeling. It’s what makes us care about you, drawing us deeper into your story, keeping us turning the pages even when the hour is late or we should be doing something else.
‘I’m not writing a novel’, I hear you say. ‘I’m just telling my story.’ But remember why you’re doing this. Whether you’ve aspirations to publish your story, or your purpose is simply to share the story of your life with your family, it’s what live for them and grips their attention to the very end. And even if you’re writing for yourself, evoking the moments of your story just as you experienced them is part of telling your truth. And the answer is what celebrated writer and teacher of memoir, Mary Karr, calls ‘sacred carnality’.
Engage the senses
Activating the five senses is fundamental—sight, taste, touch, hearing and smell. It’s an aspect of the ‘show don’t tell’ maxim. Don’t say there was a bang—let us hear it!
Which of these puts you right inside the story?
I heard a loud crash. Running back the way I’d come, I saw that part of a huge conifer had broken away and fallen across the path.
or
Thunder resonated through the small wood. Running back the way I’d come, I realised that what I’d interpreted as thunder was, in fact, the sound of a mighty multi-stemmed conifer tearing itself apart. I looked up at the raw wound on its magnificent bole where a great section had been ripped away and crashed to the ground, crushing its more diminutive fellows. There it lay. Right where I’d been moments before.
It’s not enough to write: ‘I walked into the cafe and sat at a table.’ What kind of cafe? Warm and cosy, or basic and functional? What did you see that gave it that feel? Was it crowded or empty? What did the other people look like? What drew your attention? As Stephen King says in his writing bible, On Writing, a memoir of the craft, you need ‘to supply a photograph in words’.
And that’s just one sense. What about the others? Back in that cafe, what did you hear? What did you smell, feel and, no doubt, eventually taste? Immerse us in your experience of the moment.
Don’t overdo it
Beware of shoe-horning in details just for the sake of it—every detail must serve a purpose. Detail that doesn’t feel natural makes your prose sound laboured and contrived. Instead of immersing us in your story, you create distance and distract us from what your story’s really about.
Imagine you’ve just described the day you finally left your abusive partner. Sitting on a hillside, you watch the sun go down. A symbolic moment. You’ve included lots of visual detail, the sound of the birds, the scent of the grasses and the damp earth. We know what it was like to be there. Then you realise you haven’t included the sense of taste. ‘Hmmm. Maybe I could put in a bit about the sandwich I ate?’ I’m joking, of course, but you get the point. Unless food is a theme in your journey, it’s going to feel mechanical and be a distraction.
The details you choose need to pay their way, either by supporting your theme, or paving the way for what’s coming next, or fleshing out your protagonist’s character. After all, what we pay attention indicates a lot about the kind of person we are. Irrelevant details distract and distance us; the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously used to tell young playwrights that, ‘if in Act One you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.’ Most of the time, two or three senses is enough. For more on this, read Stephen King’s brilliant Imagery and the Third Eye.
Is the sense of smell really the most evocative?
It’s long been a truism that our sense of smell is the most powerful for evoking memory, and there is some truth in this. Smells are handled by the olfactory bulb, which sends information directly to the limbic system, the regions of the brain related to emotion and memory (The Harvard Gazette). It’s what creates those moments of feeling transported back to your childhood. But recent research has shown that it’s not so simple. So don’t get too hung up on it. Smell sensations are as important, but no more so, than the others. The key is selecting the right details, that serve your story.
The sixth sense?
No, I don’t mean extra-sensory perception, but our internal sensations. What sensations did you experience inside your body that day you were so terrified about the outcome of your husband’s operation? Nausea? Tight chest? Needing to pee? We often forget about these internal indicators of our emotions, which can signal what’s going on inside our heads without a lame, ‘I was frightened’.
How to learn
Google will find you endless writing prompts to practice using sensory details in your work, but I’m with Marion Roach: if you’re going to get this project done, ‘from this moment on you are writing with purpose and are no longer merely practicing’ (Marion Roach, The Memoir Project).
So remember why you started, pick a scene from your story and rewrite it to include as much sensory detail as possible. Have a thesaurus by you to help you come up with specific words to make your description detailed and unique. More than likely, you’ll end up with way too much. Now begins the process of honing it down, deciding which details serve your story by creating anticipation for what’s to come, bringing out your theme, or giving us insight into your personality. It’ll take a while, but instead of planning to write your life story, you’ll be writing it.
Time to get out that paper and pen and make a start!
I'm a ghostwriter specialising in writing life story, memoir and autobiography for anyone who wants to share their story. For more information head over to my website, www.lifestorywriter.co.uk, or send me an email at penny@lifestorywriter.co.uk
