When we write, we write with our bodies: with our fingers, eyeballs, imaginations, the drag of hand across paper, or the rat-a-tat of thumb hitting spacebar.  Successful writing is sensory - we hear the distant whirr of the laptop fan, the candy sweet lipgloss taste as we bite our lip, the pull of muscles along our slouched back.

 Thus our bodies are both doorways to great fiction, and also a key to unlocking successful writing practice.  In From Where You Dream, Robert Olen Butler gives a phenomenal review of the elements of writing that “show” rather than “tell.”  A couple of lovely interviews with Butler may be found at Bookslut and Webdelsol.

Suffice to say, the five senses are an entry point to the necessary novelistic work of “showing.”  In my time as a coach who works through the body, what I’ve found is that many writers are numb to their sensations.  People are numb because they have trained themselves not to feel, often for very good reasons, the ache of living, and they are numb because they have no language for what they are experiencing.

 If you want to write, feel yourself.  When you feel your own longing for company on a quiet Saturday, when you smell the peculiar burnt-rye of a pumpernickel bagel and remember your grandfather, when you pull a comb through your hair, see if you can discern the discrete elements of each sensation, emotion, and mood of the moment.

According to Richard Strozzi Heckler, sensation can be broken down into three categories: movement, temperature, and pressure.  Movement can be further understood as tingling, streaming, pulsing, flowing, tickling, prickling, pins and needles.  Temperature is simpler: ask yourself if something is getting warmer or cooler, is hot or cold.  Pressure is the sensation of heaviness or lightness, tension or release, hardness or softness.

Let’s say someone cuts you off in traffic.  Perhaps this type of vehicular rudeness is a pet peeve of yours, and makes you see red.  If we break your sensations down into their component parts, what’s probably happening is that your attention and energy has risen in your body, you’ve heated up, and you’re holding your breath, tensing your shoulder, neck, and facial muscles, and hardening your eyes.

Any of these details are fantastic “shows,” fiction-wise.  As you get to know yourself, your repertoire grows, fueling your characterizations and descriptions with extraordinarily specific and interesting details.

Try this: lift your shoulders up around your ears and hold them there for two breaths.  On the second exhale, let your shoulders drop.  Notice the range of sensations that happen immediately after you release your shoulders.  Do you feel the spreading release of tension across the middle of your shoulder blades, the tingle running down your arms, the explosion of breath as the movement forces air from your lungs. 

You are your own best laboratory for the sensations of living, the necessary sensory details that will help your readers see your characters, smell the odor of their distress, and taste the fresh, wet staleness of an  early morning autumn fog.  Compile your own library of details and your readers will live inside your character’s skin for a little while.