  Fantasy
This week: Sensorium Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Snyder: There are some things I can just smell. It's like a sixth sense.
Giles: Well, actually, that would be one of the five.
― Mutant Enemy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer |
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I'm sure we all learned from a young age that we have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch.
Like many things we all learned at a young age, that's not exactly true.
By one way of looking at things, we have only one sense: touch. Sight is a result of photons touching our retinas. Hearing is enabled by vibrations in the air touching our eardrums. Smell is caused by specific molecules touching membranes in our upper respiratory tract, and taste is the same, only with the tongue.
Touch, then, of all the five "classical" senses, is the basis for all sensation.
Taken in a different direction, with a little thought, we can identify senses that don't fit into any of the five. One example is our sense of proprioception, which is a fancy word for knowing where our own parts are in relation to other parts. A blind, or blindfolded, person generally has no problem eating food - if you can't see, but you know where the food is, you can pick it up with a fork and bring the fork to your mouth without any more difficulty than a sighted person has. (I say this because the food usually drops off my fork right before it hits my oral orifice, because I'm a klutz. "Klutz" is a Yiddish word for someone who has a poorly developed sense of proprioception.)
There are other senses with poor PR as well. Sense of pain is a sense separate from the traditional five - sometimes it's related to touch (impact, for example), but it can also be entirely internal, as with back or chest pain. So in one sense (pun intended, of course), we have a multitude of senses, in a number greater than five.
I'm putting this out there because, as writers, we're advised to use all senses in descriptions and scenes. This is good advice for any writer, but Fantasy writers in particular need to pay close attention to senses - because even if we take the classical five-senses model as a given, we're often writing about other species, and other species sometimes have additional (or replacement) senses.
Bats are well-known to have a sense of echolocation. It's complicated, but from what I understand, it's mostly used to avoid obstacles in flight and track the location of tasty bugs. While it seems, to us, to be similar to hearing, it's apparently more complex than that, and we can no more understand how it must feel than a person blind since birth can understand the actual meaning of "orange."
Some fish, such as electric eels or sharks, can directly sense electric fields - another sense we humans lack (while we can certainly sense electricity when it affects us, as with static charge or sticking one's finger into a light socket, that detection is a function of our senses of touch and pain).
As far as I know, no species can sense nuclear radiation - we have to use devices such as Geiger counters to detect when there's radiation nearby. But we can imagine a species that has such a sense, and write about it. Also, telepathy is a (probably) nonexistent sense often portrayed in fantasy and science fiction. And don't forget the danger sense, as exhibited by such enduring characters as Spider-Man.
Let's also consider the idea of synesthesia - a condition where the senses are, in a way, mixed up - someone might hear colors, or smell sounds, or the like. As I understand things, this is more a function of neural signals going to "wrong" places in the brain than it is of a separate sense. But it's also good material to write about.
So yes, definitely use senses in your writing. Just don't limit them to the Big Five. |
Some fantasy for your sense of pleasure:
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Last time, in "Writing Advice" , I advised about advice.
Quick-Quill  : There is a geico commercial that shows kids walking out of a corn field to a garage and every line is just what you wrote above. You see the creepy guy with the hockey mask, chain saws hanging from the rafters, and one kid's saying "lets just go call for help." Perfect! what makes a story is the reader silently screaming, don't go to the basement, don't get out of bed and see what's making noise downstairs, or don't go in that alley. The fact the writer puts the reader following the main character is what sells books. Otherwise if we'd all stopped reading, no author or screenwriter would write again. What quest we put our character on, has to resonate with the reader. They have to want to go with them. We never stop listing to a Hobbit yell, "I'm on an adventure!" and we go too.
I didn't know about that commercial! I get all my entertainment commercial-free (but not money-free), so I miss out on that part of popular culture. I can live with that.
M.D Schultz  : In addition to trying my hand at submission, I just wanted to let you all know that I do enjoy these newsletters. These updates provide insightful details into the Fantasy theme and all its subcategories. Not only this but the links to sponsors are also very useful for both experienced and budding writers.
Thank you all for your hard work in producing these newsletters.
-MDS
[SUBMITTED ITEM: "Case Study 365000 The Glutton" [18+]]
Thank you for reading, and thanks for the submission!
brom21  : Hmm...interesting newsletter. I've never thought about writing advice that way. It is true how forbidding something only procures the opposite reaction. Thanks for this.
It's good to get different perspectives on things.
And that's it for me for October! Until next time,
DREAM ON!!! |
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Fantasy: October 25, 2017 Issue [#8562]
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