Descriptions that engage the five senses - sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch - to make writing feel physically real.
Sensory details are the specific sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures you put on the page to make a reader's body respond to your story. Instead of 'the kitchen was warm,' you write 'steam curled off the pot of soup and the radiator ticked against the wall, and the whole room smelled like garlic and wet wool.' Good sensory writing doesn't just paint a picture - it creates a full-body experience. The reader doesn't just see your scene; they feel the humidity, hear the ambient noise, catch the scent. That physical reality is what makes fiction feel like memory rather than information.
Your reader is sitting in a chair staring at words on a page or screen. Sensory details are your only tool for making them forget that and feel like they're somewhere else. Research on how readers process language shows that sensory words activate the same brain regions as actual sensory experiences - when you write about the smell of coffee, the reader's olfactory cortex lights up. That's why sensory-rich writing is more memorable, more immersive, and more emotionally powerful than abstract description. It's also the fastest way to make your writing feel more professional.
An entire novel built around smell - Suskind makes olfactory details so vivid that readers report feeling like they can smell the 18th-century Paris he describes.
Machado grounds her memoir in sharp sensory details - the feel of a hand gripping too tight, the specific quality of light in an unfamiliar house - that make emotional experiences physical.
McCarthy's post-apocalyptic world is built almost entirely from sensory details - the ash, the cold, the gray light, the taste of canned food - creating dread through texture rather than exposition.
Pick two or three senses per scene and do them well. Listing all five senses in every paragraph becomes exhausting and feels like a checklist.
Sound, smell, and touch are often more emotionally evocative than visual details. Challenge yourself to write a paragraph where sight is the last sense you reach for.
Don't write 'it smelled bad.' Write what it smelled like specifically. Was it a wet-dog smell? A chemical burn? Overripe fruit? The specificity is what makes it real.
Go sit somewhere with your eyes closed for two minutes. When you open them, write down everything you noticed with each sense - what you heard, smelled, felt against your skin, tasted in the air, and then saw when you opened your eyes. Now write a scene set in that location using at least three senses in every paragraph. Prioritize the non-visual senses, since sight tends to dominate by default.