The Sense Writers Forget (And Why Readers Never Do)

Most writers describe what a room looks like. Readers remember what it smelled like.

Sight is the default because we’re visual creatures. We write the oak desk, the afternoon light, the stack of papers. But smell reaches the emotional brain before the analytical one. Sound works the same way. Taste can detonate an entire era of someone’s life in a sentence.

When I read first novels, I can tell which sense the writer overuses. Sight is everywhere. Smell appears once or twice, usually in a deliberate “scene-setting” paragraph.

Compare: “The kitchen was warm and well-lit, with copper pots on the wall.” That’s a visual inventory.

Now: “The kitchen smelled of burned coffee and her grandmother’s lavender sachets—a combination she’d spent twenty years trying to replicate and never quite getting right.”

Same room. The second version is a character.

The fix: pick one scene in your current draft and add a single non-visual sensory detail that reveals something about this person’s inner life. Not all five senses at once. One detail.

Now read the scene again and check whether a reader who didn’t know anything about your character could identify something specific about who she is from that detail alone—not just “this is a warm kitchen” but something that points to memory, loss, or longing. If the detail is atmospheric but generic, replace it with one that only your protagonist would notice in that moment, for a reason that’s specific to her history. The test: if you moved the detail to a different character’s scene without changing it and it still worked, it’s not hers yet.

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This topic is covered in depth in our Novel Writing.