Setting Craft: The Sensory Landscape

If you ever want to make me blush, tell me my writing is textured.

Why? Because when I write, I devote so much energy to putting myself into my landscapes and settings, the time and place of my story — sometimes to the extent that I’m writing with an ink and quill by candlelight in the dead of the night — that when it comes through for the reader and whisks them away to the setting of my story, my heart glows.

But how do we do this? Must we always write by candlelight? (I don’t recommend it as I don’t think it’s great for one’s eyes to do this all the time… and I already have pretty thick lenses in my glasses.)

Step 1: Stop “Seeing” Everything

For those of us who are able to see, it’s the primary way we humans encounter and interpret the world around us. It’s no shock then, that fiction often begins with how things look.

That’s fine. But we don’t want to stop there.

We have many senses, and it’s important to engage them all when we’re writing, and for our reader when they pick up our book.

Truth time: A book can be unputdownable if the reader never wants to leave the world you’ve crafted.

We do this by making the writing textured. Think about it: Smells can be our biggest triggers for memory. Sounds can tell us long before sight if we’re safe. Taste and touch can make our world pleasant or disgusting or anything in between; after all, vision is intellectual, but smell and touch are visceral.

What the world looks like is important, but it’s not everything, nor should it be.

Step 2: Stop Cramming Them All In At Once

Once a writer stops relying solely on sight, it’s common for them to think every paragraph needs to have every sense.

This is a great way to make your prose purple, and for most readers, that’s a turn-off, a reason to close the book and perhaps return once or twice out of some weird guilt before deciding life is too short to spend with a story that doesn’t grab and hold them by the ribs.

Pro Takeaway: Your story should be textured. Every paragraph shouldn’t be.

Go ahead and pick one sense to work with at a time.

Let me give you an example from my own writing and let’s see if it lives up to my advice. This is from Daughter of the Seven Hills, which came out in May 2024. I won’t share a spoiler, but if I ruin any surprises, I can’t be held accountable because it’s been almost two years since publication.

My soldier, Cassius, meets me beneath the rafters of the physician’s stall, his dented and tarnished bronze helmet tucked under one bare arm. Neither Neptune nor Jupiter honored my prayers to conjure up a storm that would keep his legion near the city. My eyes still burn from watching the flames last night, the shadows they cast on the figurines of our household gods. My wrist still stings; it is still singed red from reaching forward to dust those fires with dried and crushed herbs in my midnight prayers. Today, Cassius leaves Rome.

Okay, I ended up choosing the first paragraph, so really, no spoilers.

Let’s look at the primary sensory experience of this paragraph — it’s tactile:

• Aurelia’s (protagonist’s) eyes burn

• Aurelia’s wrist stings

• Aurelia’s wrist is singed

• The herbs were dried

• The herbs were crushed

• Cassius’ helmet is dented

• Cassius’ helmet is tarnished

• Cassius’ arm is bare

By focusing on the sting, the singe, and the bare arm, the reader doesn't just see the scene; they feel the heat and the vulnerability of the moment.

There’s a bit of visual description, but overall, the main sensory experience is all about touch. This was not accidental. Aurelia is someone who longs to be loved, to belong through love, and her journey is largely about this. For her, feeling love is a tactile experience, so by opening in a tactile experience, I get to set the stage for that as a sensory touchpoint throughout the story.

Insider Tip: This was like the 100th+ intro paragraph I wrote. Don’t stress over it in drafting. Let the senses come and then give space to add texture in revision.

Step 3: Train Your Brain

This heading is a little deceptive because trust me, your brain knows how to work with your sensory world. You’re doing it all the time. Right now, my fingers are tapping on my laptop keys and I’m noticing that while I type with both hands, My forefingers, middle fingers, and pinkies are doing most of the work. And that I always tap the space bar with my right thumb, not my left.

The room I’m in still smells a little smokey and sweet because when I made pizza last night, I didn’t realize that liquid from the French toast casserole we made over the weekend spilled onto the bottom of the oven, and the house filled with saccharine smoke (we’re okay, but like Aurelia, my eyes still burn a little).

Occasionally, I hear my dog’s collar as she shifts under the bed to play with a toy or dream, and I can hear her paws brushing over the cotton-weave carpet as she runs in her sleep.

Unless I focus in on this, my brain just accepts this is part of my environment.

Pro Tip: Specificity is a writer’s best friend.

Keying into these sensory experiences is what gives my space texture. It’s what informs, right now, the difference between a well-loved dog’s life and a creative human’s life, and it offers up a reminder of the fallibility of humans (the oven smoke).

This is one of the many reasons editing and revision can take a long time. It’s not that changing the words on the screen takes so long… it’s that we need the time and space to let our brains really process textured experiences.

Your Turn: The Sensory Landscape Exercise

I’m so excited about this exercise. It’s one of my absolute favorites because whenever I’m struggling to get back to the page, I do this exercise and it puts me right where I need to be, even if I don’t end up using any of it in my actual writing.

This is a simple exercise, but I want you to give it however much time it needs, because it’s about noticing. It’s about letting the brain not just process the texture of our world in the background, but working to bring it to the foreground so we can write about it.

Choose a setting (bonus if it holds a similarity to a setting in your story — when I was writing The Red Fletch, I spent a lot of time in the woods). Go there. Sit there, lay there, stand there, walk there. Catalog (write down):

• 5 things you see

• 4 things you hear

• 3 things you feel (touch)

• 2 things you smell

• 1 thing you taste (don’t eat any plants if you don’t know for sure they’re safe, k?)

Then, take those descriptions, and write a paragraph around each. Bonus if you can insert them into your character’s world (like the similarity between my smoke-stung eyes and Aurelia’s, even though hers were from failed prayers in Ancient Rome and mine were from drippings of brunch prep in the 21st century Connecticut).

Put it down. Let it rest for at least a week. Then, come back and see if you can texture this exercise with intent that ties to yours or your character’s arc of change/needs/personality.

Pro Tip: Because everything, even if it’s setting, will come back to characterization eventually.