The easiest way to make your writing stronger, whether it’s poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction, is to add sensory details. What that means, quite simply, is to add your body. What do you smell, hear, taste, touch, and see?
The reason sensory details are so powerful is because they invite the reader into the felt experience of whatever you’re writing about. Suddenly, the reader inhabits a vibrantly alive, richly textured world. Instead of being told what to think or feel, they experience it directly. This is what we mean when we say “show don’t tell.”
Tuning into sensory detail also helps you connect with your body. This builds self-awareness (a valuable skill all by itself) and helps you better understand what you’re really trying to say. Instead of skating along the surface of memory or emotion, you’re right there in its beating, messy, beautiful heart. What do you feel here? What insights do you have? They may surprise you. Inviting in the wisdom of the body helps your writing transform you, which is part of its magic.
As Elizabeth Jarett Andrew says in her phenomenal book Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft As Spiritual Practice, “For your writing to change, you must change.” Getting in touch with our direct experience through the gateway of our senses is the first step to this kind of creative alchemy.
To give you an example of how sensory detail can strengthen a piece, here are a few stanzas from the poem “Licking the Buds,” from my chapbook The Body of All Things:
Western Red Cedar, California Bay
Yellow Magnolia stretch green shoulders
under fine silver drizzle, breathe
damply, reach muscular roots
through dark stories of silt
and loam, branches embracing
the fine gray silk
of sky, creating
a nest that holds me
above
and below.
And here is how this poem would read without sensory detail:
Trees stand in the rain.
Big difference, right?!!
Is sensory detail something you’re aware of when you write and revise? If you haven’t paid attention to it before, how does it feel to start?