It's Sensory Saturday, which means a blog focused on descriptive writing. As always, feel free to comment on my writing, make suggestions, or write your own descriptive passage.


Breath rasped into Erika's heaving lungs. The air was jagged daggers tearing down her throat, visiting her lungs for the briefest of moments before tearing out again to be replaced by more of the painful air.

Her leg muscles quivered, sweat running slick down her thighs, behind her knees, even beading on her shins and trickling down to her socks. She bent over, rested her hands on her sweaty knees, and tried to steady her breathing and ignore black spots dancing in front of her eyes.

In the distance she could hear traffic passing on the highway, but the running trail was deserted aside from her. The traffic was the only human sound, but there were other sounds: birds singing despite the sticky, oppressive heat, fish lipping insects off the surface of the lake with a distinctive plop.

The wind shifted and, warm and humid or not, it felt good on Erika's face. It carried the faint scent of fish from the lake, and she'd recovered enough to be bothered by that. She drew in another deep breath and coughed, her lungs spasming from the abuse.

She'd run too fast, too hard, too long.

Erika shuffled to the side of the path and sat down in the shade, tipping her head back against the trunk of a tree. She'd rest--her legs, her lungs--and walk back home when she felt steady enough.

It is a busy day for me today, so I decided to look at a passage from descriptive-writing master Jean M. Auel's bestselling book The Clan of the Cave Bear. These are just the first paragraphs of the first in her brilliant series, and every line is rich in description.


"The naked child ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in the small river. It didn't occur to her to look back. Nothing in her experience ever gave her reason to doubt the shelter and those within it would be there when she returned.

She splashed into the river and felt rocks and sand shift under her feet as the shore fell off sharply. She dived into the cold water and came up sputtering, then reached out with sure strokes for the steep opposite bank. She had learned to swim before she learned to walk and, at five, was at ease in the water. Swimming was often the only way a river could be crossed.

The girl played for a while, swimming back and forth, then let the current float her downstream. Where the river widened and bubbled over rocks, she stood up and waded to shore, then walked back to the beach and began sorting pebbles. She had just put a stone on top of a pile of especially pretty ones when the earth began to tremble." 


If you really want to learn to write descriptively, every once in awhile you have to step back and learn from a master.

The girl's foot tapped nervously on the ground, the sound muted by the worn orange carpet left over from the 80's. She looked away from the sheet filled with empty bubbles that made her head swim and focused instead on the room around her.

The walls were the sickly beige color shared by so many public institutions, and the facilitator watching the students had sharp features that reminded her of a hawk. She picked up her pencil to begin sketching the hawk-man, but remembered that she could not draw on the test and dropped the writing utensil.

It made a thud as it hit the desk, unnaturally loud in the quiet testing center, and she saw a boy sneak a furtive glance at her before bending back over his work. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as though she planned to dive underwater for a long time, then opened them again and dove back into the test.

Write your own Sensory Saturday post in the comments below.

She tilted her head back, nostrils flaring as she scented the air.

The scent was familiar, but it was one she had not smelled for months. It was clean, but not what others might consider clean. There was an underlying smell of fresh earth, newly revealed after the melt of feet of snow.

She had spent enough time in the city to know that the smell of earth, no matter how it made her heart swell, would be offsetting to those who lived in the city.

But she was no longer one of them.

She turned her head to the northeast and let the wind breathe over her face. It played there, breaking over her nose, caressing her cheeks, tickling her ears and blowing back her hair.

The northern wind reddened her skin, a remnant of the long winter, but she did not care. She could smell a new scent on the wind, one that filled her at once with excitement and peace.

It was a scent she could never have described, but which she recognized instantly.

There was rain on the air.

If you're interested in writing, please take a stab at writing your own sensory-rich passage.

The sun beat down on her. She could see it even through her closed eyes. Her eyelids turned it from a blinding light to a bright orange-red glow.

A bead of sweat broke loose and stole down her neck to gather with its brethren in the hollow of her throat. A voice penetrated the barrier of her headphones and the sounds of The Boss. She reached lazily up and slipped the headphones from her ears, leaving them to loop around her neck.

"Hmm?"

"It's time to go!"

With her headphones off, she could hear the splash of water and the delighted screams of children. She was no longer alone, lost in the sounds and the heat and the imagined solitude. She opened her eyes, squinted against the glare of the sun, and reached out for her sunglasses. She slipped them on and did not turn to her companions until her eyes were shielded.

Her lips curved up in a well-rehearsed smile. "Yes. Okay."

The heat clung to her skin as she made her way from the sandy beach back to reality.

First off, sorry that this Sensory Saturday turned into a Sensory Sunday. It has been one of those weekends where the days slip by like sands through the hour glass (and yes, that was a reference to Days of Our Lives).

Ice pellets struck his skin like hundreds of tiny needles. His work boots were soaked from the freezing rain and pulled on him like lead weights. His leather gloves had grown cumbersome from the rain, and he had sacrificed his hands to the icy cold to get the work done faster.

One of the other workmen swore behind him, but the words and their meaning were far off. Distant from his current reality. He worked with one of the other man to lift the window they were installing into place, but in his mind he was already in his shower, jets on full.

The hot water stung more than the ice pellets had, but it was a good pain. His fingers tingled, his skin warmed to a bright red, as though he had spent a relaxing day lying on a hot beach in Nassau rather than a miserable day spent working in Kalamazoo.  

Hot water streamed down his face, down his back, over his feet that had so recently felt like frozen blocks of ice. It--

"Get your head in the game, Richie." 

He was jolted out of the steamy heat of his shower back to the cold, wet construction site.

He grunted and reached for the drill.

 

Here is my first attempt at descriptive writing for my weekly Sensory Saturday blog post. I encourage you to leave a comment as I would love feedback, and I am even going so far as to solicit a descriptive passage that you have written, either for this blog in particular or which was part of a different work.

The chair under me creaks ominously as I shift my weight. Two young men hold hushed conversations on the battered couch against the far side of the room while their peers sit in their assigned desks, fingers clacking on the keyboards.

A young woman pulls her cell phone out of her pocket and sneaks looks at it as she pretends to work. I know she would hide it away if I called her on having her phone out in class; she doesn't realize that looking down into her lap and smiling every so often gives her away.

Another young men types furiously while his friend sleeps with his head down on the desk beside him.

None of them realize that from my position I can hear them all, see them all, and that they don't fool me for a minute.

It wasn't so long ago that I sat in those desks myself.

Sometimes I feel that I do not spend enough time on description in my writing, so I want to try something new. Up to this point, the main focus of my writing is the plot and the movement of the story, but I feel that this might hurt readers' ability to immerse themselves in my story. In my head I can see, hear, feel, and smell the surroundings, but my readers cannot experience what is in my head, only what I put on paper. So I need to make a change.

I am thinking of starting a recurring blog topic where I write a few descriptive paragraphs focusing on setting the scene or describing feelings/emotions/experiences in a sensory way. I'm thinking I might call it "Sensory Saturdays" (a little hokey, but this is a blog, right?).

This Saturday will be my first Sensory Saturday, and I want to invite anyone interested to reply to that blog either with tips or comments on what I wrote or with your own senses-driven passage. I think that it would be great if we could get a weekly writing group where writers can work on developing their ability to write descriptively.