Stories
Did your parents ever tell you the story of how they first met? Think back to that story; imagine it in your mind’s eye. What do you see? Maybe you imagine just what your dad might have described: a sunny, spring morning with the scent of lilacs in the air, a young woman on a bike with long hair streaming in the wind, the electricity of a smile across the neighbor’s yard…
People all over the world love storytelling. Remember when you were little? When you went to sleep with a bedtime story? ‘Tell me a story;’ it’s universal. That’s why we love movies, and that’s why we love reading. I think that stories are embedded in our DNA. But what makes us experience the story and feel it as if it were real?
Details
By far, the easiest way to draw someone into your story is to use specific, concrete details. By ‘specific,’ we mean ‘exact’ – the exact thing. For example, instead of saying ‘a tree,’ we might say, ‘the oldest weeping willow in City Park.’ Instead of saying, ‘cell phone,’ we might specify which phone, such as ‘a black iPhone 5 with a hot pink protective case.’
Is it hard to figure out how to write these details? It’s really not that hard. Simply imagine the story and, just as you did with your parents’ courtship story, see it in your mind’s eye. I’ll bet you can name the exact brand of bike in the story or the specific song playing on the radio. That’s what we mean by specific details.
What do we mean by concrete details? That’s where we cross over into the other part of our lesson, sensory language.
Sensory Language
In this case, ‘concrete’ doesn’t mean the hard stuff you walk on or the sidewalk. In research writing, ‘concrete details’ means those things that are solid, proven facts. In narrative writing, concrete language means things that we can actually touch and hold; things in the real, physical world that engage the five senses.
When we write sensory details, we engage any of the five senses: see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Sometime, take a moment and go back to a passage in one of your favorite books. You will undoubtedly notice that the author has used at least one sensory detail. Here’s an example from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling:
Harry sat down in the tent entrance and took a deep breath of clean air. Simply to be alive to watch the sun rise over the sparkling snowy hillside ought to have been the greatest treasure on Earth, yet he could not appreciate it: his senses had been spiked by the calamity of losing his wand. He looked out over a valley blanketed in snow, distant church bells chiming through the glittering silence.
What can we experience from the great sensory details here? We can see the sparkles of the snow on the hillside; we can hear the echoes of the church bells; we can feel the shock of breathing in that cold, clean air.
Sometimes, you may have a hard time coming up with concrete sensory details, but here’s an easy way to do it. Just pull up that chart we were talking about. Print it out or save it online and write in as many entries as you can for each sense. That will give you a bunch of great possible choices.
Metaphors and Similes
Here are some powerful tools you can use to help your reader experience your specific, concrete details: metaphors and similes. Similes are simple comparisons using ‘like’ or ‘as,’ while metaphors are direct comparisons, like the one I used at the beginning, ‘the electricity of a smile.’
Think back to your parents’ courtship story. Maybe the bike was as pink as a watermelon Popsicle. Maybe her hair flowed in the wind, like streamers on a faraway kite. In such beautiful stories of romance, we often hear of things like ‘sun-kissed skin’ and ‘an electric touch of the hand.’
These are metaphors, since they make the comparisons without ‘like’ or ‘as.’ Remember that section we just read from Harry Potter? It also has a great metaphor: a silence that ‘glitters.’ Metaphors and similes are powerful tools for poets, for writers, and hopefully, now, for you as you seek just the right descriptive details using sensory language.
Lesson Summary
So, any time you need to write a story, a narrative, remember that you will capture your reader by using the exact specifics that best tell your story and by making them come to life by using concrete details that speak to the five senses, including metaphors and similes. You will end up with a narrative that you will love, and your teacher will, too!