I was very happy to find out that my poem “Roaches in the Wormwood” will be published in “Death’s Garden”, a Black Book Series anthology by Lycan Valley Press. You should look forward to that coming out if you’re interested in creepy poems with a hidden meaning.
The line break is such an important feature of poetry that we can almost use it to define poetry: prose is text that runs all the way to the margin, whereas poetry is text written with line breaks. (Prose poetry poses a wrinkle here).
For poets writing in fixed-form and spoken traditions, the line break was in some sense an invisible feature of their art. Since its placement was determined by the form, the poet needn’t concern themselves with moving it around; words moved around the line breaks. Things have changed. The position of the line break is no longer fixed or determined by form or tradition, so the poet needs to make decisions about where line breaks should fall.
The evolution of free verse has also changed the relationship between sound and typography:
[…] in metrical verse, the auditory structure generates the printed structure; in free verse, the printed structure generates the auditory.
Stephen Adams, “Poetic Designs”, p.153
We listen to metrical verse to determine where the line endings fall; we look at free verse to see where the line endings generate auditory effects.
One of the main skills of a poet -perhaps the fundamental skill- is sensitivity to the aesthetic effects of formal elements. Since free verse has given the poet greater control over the positioning of line breaks, poets need to develop sensitivity to the aesthetic effects of line breaks in varying positions.
It is the duty of a poet to take care and consideration in crafting their poems. Every word, sentence, and punctuation mark is chosen deliberately and against a backdrop of all alternatives. Every element of the poem, every mark and all the white space, serves the whole. So it is with line breaks. It is the duty of a poet to be aware of the options for placement of line breaks and to choose judiciously among them, just as it is their duty to choose the right word and to put the punctuation marks in the right place. And by “right place”, I mean the best choice in service of the needs of the poem; the form must serve the content.
This post is all about developing sensitivity to and skill with line breaks.
Learning Goals
develop sensitivity to the effect of line breaks; develop awareness of the range of effects of the poetic line; analyze a variety of uses of line breaks from poems; practice using line breaks to achieve varying effects.
Poetic Lineation
The first effect of lineation is to create a visual structure that affects the reader before they have even read the first word. The words look like a poem. Presenting words in the visual shape of a poem has the effect of drawing the attention and focus of the reader and shaping their expectations; the reader feels as though they are approaching something poetic, something that demands poetic attention.
Take a look at the following lines:
The night hours passed, and the dark
was in against the truck. Sometimescars passed them, going west and
away; and sometimes great truckscame up out of the west and
rumbled eastward. And the starsflowed down in a slow cascade
over the western horizon.
It feels like a poem. A reader looks at the words, sees the lines, recognizes the familiar signs of a poem, and treats it as such when they are reading it. This is one effect of lineation. It is a cheap effect. I say it is cheap because it takes almost nothing to pull off, and it doesn’t require the poet to put any thought into where the line endings fall. It comes free.
These lines were taken from The Grapes of Wrath, which happened to be within arm’s reach. I flipped to a random page, took the first few sentences in a random paragraph, and chopped it into lines of roughly the same length.
Here are the same words as they appeared in the book:
The night hours passed, and the dark was in against the truck. Sometimes cars passed them, going west and away; and sometimes great trucks came up out of the west and rumbled eastward. And the stars flowed down in a slow cascade over the western horizon.
To be sensitive to the differences between the words as prose and the words as I have chopped them up above is to appreciate the aesthetic impact of lineation. How do the words feel different in each form?
First, when broken into lines, the words posture as a poem. They are read more slowly, with additional attention drawn, in particular, to the ends of lines -which linger in the mind for a pause that might be said to roughly equal a half-comma- and the beginnings of lines, which can surprise the reader and carry extra weight. Although I chopped these lines up purely for the visual effect, there were some fortuitous line-endings that create interesting aesthetic effects: a parallel structure between enjambment in the second and third stanza with the recurring words “west and” enhances the effect of passage of time and the monotony of cars passing on the highway; a similar enjambment between the third and fourth stanza forces the reader to link the movement of the cars to the movement of the stars; “flowed” at the beginning of the final stanza gets extra emphasis, as the third stanza flows over into the fourth -a formal complement to the content. These are happy accidents. They are the sort of thing that poets look for in language and exploit to the benefit of the poem (rhyming poetry, for example, to the extent that words are not onomatopoeic, is an art of exploiting accidents of language). Whether or not those lines were chopped in the right place is precisely the question that a poet needs to answer when they compose a poem, and they do so by relying on their sensitivity to the effects of various alternatives.
It’s the job of the poet to judiciously arrange words in coordination with punctuation and line endings, so that the effects generated by the interaction of those elements contribute to the aesthetic whole. Form must complement content; the greatest sin in composition is arbitrariness. If someone created a poem merely by chopping up sentences, as I have done above, and if there were nothing to be said of any of the other elements -if there were not an inordinate confluence of fortuitous accidents- it would be a very poor poem indeed.
We need to look at the different ways in which line-endings can be deployed to create various effects: these are the dimensions of choice in which the poet’s craft is exercised. A skilled poet exercises control over these dimensions of choice to create a well-crafted structure.
Before we look at the many uses of line breaks, we should do a simple exercise to develop sensitivity to the effects of lineation.
Poetic Lineation Exercise – General Sensitivity Exercise: Arbitrary Lineation
1. Arbitrary Lineation. I recommend doing this exercise on paper. Take the following words (from the Wikipedia entry on pigeons) and chop them into lines of roughly equal length, about ten syllables, and two lines per stanza (if you prefer, you could also use a random paragraph from a random article, or search for an article of your choice):
Pigeons have made contributions of considerable importance to humanity, especially in times of war. In war the homing ability of pigeons has been put to use by making them messengers. So-called war pigeons have carried many vital messages and some have been decorated for their services.
Additional instructions: for this exercise, don’t omit any words; it’s important to exercise a minimal degree of creative control over the manipulation.
2. Compare the effect of your lineated words to the plain prose. Read your version twice. How does it feel different? Does it feel like a poem? Did any line-endings fall in interesting places or create interesting effects?
Reminder: the purpose of this exercise is to be attendant to the aesthetic effects of lineation. By fixing the words and comparing them to prose, we are isolating the line-endings as a formal element; any aesthetic difference between the two forms is entirely the product of lineation. Think of it as a controlled experiment. We are controlling for the effect of word choice so we can experiment with the effect of line-endings.
3. Take the same words you used in the first exercise. Chop them into shorter lines -between three and six syllables- and stanzas of three lines each.
4. Compare the effect of the shorter line version to the longer lines. Without reading them, just looking at the shape on the page, do they feel different? After reading both versions, does one feel faster or slower than the other? Did you notice any different interesting line-effects in the short version? Which version do you prefer? Why?
Lineation to Direct Attention
Modern poetry expanded the power of the line break. But it’s difficult to say what the line break’s power is, precisely. It doesn’t have a standard “meaning” or a standard effect; its “meaning” and effect changes depending on the context. Nor is there a numerable list of functions that the line break can serve, as we have for punctuation marks.
Still, we can try. If a line break were said to have a meaning, it could be, roughly, “pay attention; something interesting is happening”. It doesn’t specify what kind of interesting thing is happening, nor where it happens. It might happen at either end of the line break, or somewhere in the line.
Part of the effect of the line break comes from the time it takes your eyes to move from one line to the next -a slight pause that the reader feels, even if it is subconscious- and part of the effect comes from our knowledge that the poet has chosen every formal element deliberately, so we can expect the placement of every formal element to mean something.
The reader expects that line breaks serve a purpose. To satisfy this expectation means that each line should have, at a minimum, at least one interesting thing going on. By interesting thing, I mean the sort of thing that deserves attention for its poetic merit: a fresh metaphor, a clever thought, an emotional truth -something that justifies the reader’s attention. If you think this density of interesting-ness sounds hard, you’re right. Poetry is hard. It takes skill and craft to justify poetic attention.
The poet’s choice between long and short lines is a decision about what kind of attention they are asking for from the reader. If we want readers to focus on each image and each minute detail of description, we will use shorter lines; if we want them to focus on phrasal units, or the musicality of the speech, or larger arrangements of words or images, or complete, complex thoughts, we will use longer lines.
Haiku uses short lines. Imagist poems tend to use short lines. These forms are asking for close attention to be paid to each word. This is also why the poet needs to take great care to condense their imagery in these forms: not just because there are fewer words to work with, but because the reader is being promised by the form that close attention is justified. So it had better be.
One of the principles of Imagism is:
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
This statement of the importance of each individual word relates to the formal tendency in imagist poetry towards short lines. If indeed each word is chosen with deliberate care, this warrants greater attention, and therefore shorter lines.
It is difficult to sustain this level of heightened attention for long. This explains the formal tendency of Imagist poetry towards fewer lines. (Conversely, poems with many lines are likely to have longer lines).
Haiku is similar. Here is a haiku:
Autumn moonlight—
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.-Matsuo Basho
This is characteristic of haiku: the unadorned expression, short lines, and lack of commentary all suggest that we should pay close attention to the individual words and images. The overall impression is that the poem contains condensed meaning. The reader will expect it, and the poet should work to satisfy that expectation.
By contrast, longer lines, such as Walt Whitman’s, ask us to pay attention to whole phrasal units. These types of poems are meant to be read in a different way, and we’re told this through their form.
Here are four lines of Whitman (selected pretty much at random, and pulled completely out of context):
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,-Song of Myself XLVIII, Walt Whitman
The long lines suggest that it would be inappropriate to focus tightly on individual words like “furlong” or “sympathy” without considering them in the context of the poetic unit in which they appear; we are meant to read these lines as whole units, and reflect on the entirety of the thought expressed. This way of reading is further suggested by the alignment of line breaks with syntactical breaks. Whitman is not using line breaks to direct our thoughts any more than they are already directed by ordinary punctuation. Each line is presented as a complete unit, and it is meant to be read as such.
This type of poetry is more suitable for delivering philosophical concepts; it allows room to move beyond letting images speak for themselves to let the poet have a say. The disruption caused by enjambment would interfere with expressing the whole thought as a single unit; by maintaining the whole thought in a line, the poet ensures that our focus is there.
These long lines preserve the voice of the speaker. The poem feels less like a crafted object than a speaking voice. We feel the presence of a speaker more in Whitman than we do in haiku, or in imagist poetry. This effect derives in large part from the alignment of syntax with line breaks.
Exercise – Developing Sensitivity to Line Breaks, Line Length, and “Interesting-ness”
The following text was generated by taking poems and removing the line breaks. I’ve also changed the punctuation to remove capitalization at line beginnings. In other words, it’s been rendered as prose, and clues as to where the line breaks originally fell have been removed.
Here is the poem “Night, And I Travelling”, by Joseph Campbell, rendered as prose.
Night, and I travelling. An open door by the wayside, throwing out a shaft of warm yellow light. A whiff of peat-smoke; a gleam of delf on the dresser within; a woman’s voice crooning, as if to a child. I pass on into the darkness.
Here are some lines from the poem “On the Metro”, by C.K. Williams, rendered as prose.
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
1. One of these poems uses short lines. One uses long lines. Can you tell which is which? What makes you think that?
2. Take each passage, and add your own lineation. There is no “right” answer here: it’s about poetic sensibilities. Your goal is to make the text into the best poem you can by doing nothing other than adding line breaks (do this for both poems before moving on to the next question).
3. Do you think you would be able to reconstruct the poem as the poet intended? Why or why not? What kind of information might help you to reconstruct the poem?
4. Compare your lineation to the lineation as the poet intended it (provided below). Where are the differences? Is there anything surprising about the poet’s choices? Choose one of the most surprising choices made by the original poet -a line break that you didn’t expect, or a missing line break(s) where you expected them. Why do you think the poet wrote the poem that way? What effect were they going for? Justify your decision to lineate the poem differently (discuss the aesthetic effect you were aiming for).
To see the lineation as the poet intended:
Classifying Line Breaks by Strength of the Break
We can understand line breaks as existing on a continuum based on the “strength” of the break. Line breaks are weaker to the extent that they align with natural breaks in language, and stronger to the extent that they disrupt our expectations about where the language should be broken. The stronger the break, the more we feel its disruption, and the more we expect it to correspond to something significant occurring within the poem.
| Break Type | Example |
|---|---|
| Aligned with sentence | I ate a cranberry. |
| Aligned with phrase | Yesterday, I ate a cranberry. |
| Breaks within clause | I ate a cranberry. |
| Breaks at morphemes | I ate a cran berry. |
| Breaks at letters | I ate a cranberr y. |
Any of these types of break can be “strengthened” by having the break occur across stanzas, rather than lines within the same stanza. Having the break occur across stanzas will increase the effect.
William Carlos Williams uses the first three types in one stanza of his poem “To a Poor Old Woman”, when he describes a woman munching plums:
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
This stanza has three sentences and three different strengths of line break, appearing in order of increasing strength -aligned first with the sentence, then with the phrase (“good / to her”), then a break within the phrase (“taste / good to her”). This poem is a perfect illustration of the way we can use line breaks to direct the attention of the reader, and to shift their focus within a sentence. As the lines are used here, they have the effect of first setting the image, then zeroing in our attention, slowing down time as the stanza progresses through increasingly strong breaks. Critically, the same sentence is used three times, which helps isolate the effect of the line breaks.
This poem can still exist as an auditory work, since the pauses that indicate line breaks can be represented in speaking. But the same is not true of poems that increase the strength of the break further by placing it within a morpheme. These types of poems are orthographic works only.
e.e. cummings makes use of line breaks within morphemes. check out his poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”. There is no way we can read this poem. It exists visually. But the effect of the break exists on the same continuum.
cummings’ lineation focuses our attention on the moment of recognition of a leaping grasshopper. The words broken into pieces enact uncertainty, and the letters gather themselves into a comprehensible form just as the grasshopper comes into focus, leaping up from the grass.
(e.e. cummings also makes use of jagged white space at the beginning of lines, further reinforcing its existence as an orthographic work, rather than spoken. There is no possible way to speak this poem into existence.)
Breaking within a morpheme signals that something interesting is going on. The reader knows to pay attention. If a line is occupied by a single element, it warrants a great deal of attention:
fire
stick
marshmall
!
ow
In this short poem, marshmallow is split within the morpheme by an exclamation mark, which also produces an independent morpheme out of “ow”.
We connect fire, stick, and marshmallow straightforwardly, since these words are all joined by the weakest line breaks in the context of the poem. The scene is set by these initial lines: someone roasting a marshmallow on a stick over a camp-fire.
The strongest line breaks occur at “marshmall/!/ow”, breaking for the first time within a word, and demanding our full attention. We feel this break, we know something interesting is happening, so we look for it. The isolation of “ow” suggests the person has burned themselves. The isolation of “!” enacts their surprise, and suggests an iconic similarity between the ‘!’ and a marshmallow on a stick.
Exercise – Copy William Carlos Williams
To develop a feeling for increasing strength of line breaks, we’ll copy the structure of the second stanza of William Carlos Williams’ “To a Poor Old Woman”.
1. Come up with a sentence that includes a prepositional phrase. Think of any subject you’d like to examine for a close-up, or any moment you want to slow down in time, or, if you’d like a prompt, pick from “spaceship” or “classroom”. It’s probably better if the sentence is shorter, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s an example I’ll use: “her white canoe floated over the falls”. (Don’t try too hard to be “poetic” or to make a “good poem”. That’s not the point. We are just experimenting with line breaks to study their effects.)
2. Now, make a stanza by writing your sentence three times. Arrange your sentences in four lines, placing breaks of increasing strength: first, aligned with the whole sentence, second, aligned with the phrase, and last, breaking within the phrase. So, for my example sentence: “her white canoe floated over the falls/ her white canoe floated/over the falls. her white canoe/ floated over the falls.”.
her white canoe floated over the falls
her white canoe floated
over the falls. her white canoe
floated over the falls
3. Read your poem as a whole. What impression(s) does it give you? How does it make you feel? Look at each line. Do the lines feel different? Look at the line breaks. Do any of them feel different? What words stand out in each line? How does the poem feel different in the first line than it does in the last line? Does your poem produce the effect of zooming in or slowing down time? What do you like or not like about your poem? Which is your favorite line? Why?
4. Share your poem! Put it in the comments!
5. Comment on someone else’s poem! Tell them what you liked, and comment on their use of line breaks.
Exercise – Fine-Tuned Controlled
For this exercise, we will exercise control over the full range of line break strengths to enact a scene.
1. choose a moment that typically produces anxiety. This could be opening an important letter, checking a pregnancy test, or anything else that we become mentally fixated on as we await the outcome. I’ve chosen a baseball player waiting for a pitch. A sport is an easy way to go for this exercise.
2. come up with a few images or phrases leading up to the revelation of the outcome. Arrange these into lines. Begin by setting the scene with a line break that is aligned with the sentence. Use increasingly strong breaks as the tension ramps up. Break within a word in such a way that the final line carries additional meaning.
Note: you can increase the strength of any break by having the break occur across a stanza, not just across a line.
Note: bonus points if you can break within a morpheme in a way that contributes to the meaning of the poem.
Here is my attempt:
he stands at the plate.
seventh inning, bases loaded,
two strikes. keep your eyeon the ball. don’t strike
out.
The first line sets the scene. The second line break, aligned with the phrase, indicates a subtle shift in emotion -bases loaded is good, two strikes is bad. The third line break occurs within a phrase, further strengthened by occurring across a stanza break. This break ironically enacts his eye going off the ball -it separates “eye” from “ball” across the chasm of the line break. The final line break, occurring within the compound “strikeout” shows the batter getting struck out by isolating “out”; this break occurs within the batter’s internal monologue -“keep your eye on the ball. don’t strike out”- enacting him being struck-out during his nervous hesitation. If the final line had been written like this:
on the ball. don’t strike out.
it would still feel like the player’s internal monologue. The shift across the line break is what indicates that something has happened, which we feel as the batter being struck out, an impression heightened by the isolation of “out”. We may even hear the “out” in the voice of the umpire. Any way, those are the sort of considerations that I made when lineating that poem.
3. What do you like about your poem? Why? What do you think could use improvement? Try to do that.
4. Share your poem! Put it in the comments!
5. Comment on someone else’s poem! Tell them what you liked, and comment on their use of line breaks.
Other Uses of Line Break
There are innumerable uses of the line break. The line break functions in coordination with all the other elements of the poem to create an effect on the reader. In this section, I just want to look at a few interesting uses of line breaks. I guess we could call this section “advanced line breaks” or “special applications”. Studying the various uses of line breaks will develop greater sensitivity to the possible range of their effects.
Special Application #1: Create Sense of Confusion with Ambiguous Syntax
Line Breaks can be used to create a sense of confusion. Burlee Vang uses line breaks in this way in his poem “To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse”. I’ve written about this poem in another post.
Burlee Vang uses a garden path sentence to lead us to a deliberately erroneous reading:
The moon will shine for God
We hit the line break, and naturally resolve the meaning of the sentence: “the moon is shining for God’s benefit”. But as we cross over the line break, our expectations are disrupted:
The moon will shine for God
knows how long
This creates a sense of disorientation, as we have to mentally correct our erroneous reading. This complements the content of the poem, which is survival in a post-apocalyptic zombie world.
The poem uses this effect to keep the reader off balance and create a sense of disorientation or unease. (It also uses line breaks for other effects as well, discussed here).
Special Application #2: Control Sense of Physical Motion – Accelerating or Freezing
A poem called “Fast Break” by Edward Hirsch uses line breaks to variously freeze or accelerate motion in the mind of the reader. It is also written as one continuous stream of action, not reaching a period until the end of the basketball play that it enacts.
A hook shot kisses the rim and
hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop,and for once our gangly starting center
boxes out his man and times his jump
At the stanza break following “doesn’t drop/” we feel the ball frozen on the rim, an effect emphasized by the presence of the break. It remains frozen there as we move into the next stanza. The effect of the break has been to pause the motion of the ball in our minds while we focus our attention on action happening on the court below.
spinning around to throw a strike
to the outlet who is already shovelingan underhand pass toward the other guard
Here, we feel an acceleration of movement, with the break occurring on “strike”. As we pass the threshold of the line break, we feel the movement of the ball through the air, which is maintained through the entirety of the next line. It’s so fast we almost missed it -the outlet is “already” making the pass.
This whole poem is about speed. Hirsch very carefully modulates speed through his use of language, line breaks, and stanza breaks, so that we feel the motion of the play on the court; we feel the swiftness of the passes, the feet on the floor, and we feel when time pauses for those critical moments.
The poem is called “fast break”, which seems a deliberate double meaning. It refers to both the play itself, but also the authors use of judiciously arranged line breaks and stanza breaks to make us feel the motion of the play.
Special Applications #3 and #4: Create Sense of Vertical Motion; Create Sense of Deliberate, Methodical Motion
I put these two together because they are both used together in one poem by William Carlos Williams, in a poem called “Poem”:
As the cat
climbed over
the top ofthe jamcloset
first the right
forefootcarefully
then the hind
stepped downinto the pit of
the empty
flower pot
Here, the form assuredly complements the content of the poem. As the line breaks push us across the threshold of stanzas, we feel the vertical motion of the cat; the lines of the poem are walking along with the cat. As the cat “stepped down/” we step down with it, across the threshold between the third and fourth stanza, and “into the pit of/ the empty/ flower pot”. We feel the empty space of the flower pot in the penultimate line, and we feel the cat’s feet touching down to the base of the pot in the final line. Similar effects appear throughout, emphasizing the vertical motion. We feel the downward motion of the cat as we move down the lines.
A second effect achieved here is to emphasize the deliberate motion of the cat’s footsteps. We feel the careful plodding of the lines, the deliberate progression, along with the cat. You can’t doubt, reading this poem, that the cat’s movement feels controlled. The physical movement of the cat is enacted in this way by the careful progression of short, deliberate lines.
Final Exercise
For the final exercise, you’ll experiment with some of what you know about line breaks to write a poem.
1. Pick an animal from this list. Before starting your poem, it’ll help to come up with some material that you could use. Brainstorm some images or phrases for the animal you’ve chosen. Describe it using multiple senses. Describe its home. Describe what it can usually be seen doing. If it had a job, what would it be? If you went on an adventure with this animal, where would you go? If you were that animal, what would you do? If it offered you advice, what would it say? If it could tell you the meaning of life, what would it say? What three objects does it want? Describe how it moves when it is happy. Describe how it moves when it is sad, or scared, or lonely, or angry, or hungry. Put your animal in a reverse dictionary and see what comes out. Check all the terms to see if they make you think of anything.
2. After brainstorming all this material, pick out some of your favorite parts, and write the lines out in prose, one continual paragraph.
3. Okay, time to start experimenting with lineation. Are there places you can insert line breaks to accentuate the feeling of the line? Does your animal prefer to live in short lines or long lines? Or do the line lengths vary based on what it’s doing? Does your animal prefer small stanzas, or big stanzas? Does it move slowly or does it move quickly? How can you emphasize its motion through the use of line breaks and stanza breaks? What is the most important part of the poem? Can you draw attention to this with line breaks? Do you need strong line breaks or weak line breaks?
Note: feel free to change the sentences around at this stage. You might find that you can use the line breaks more effectively if the words and sentences are arranged differently. If that’s the case, then you should do that.
4. Share your poem! Put it in the comments!
5. Comment on someone else’s poem! Tell them what you liked, and comment on their use of line breaks.
Final Words
Thank you for checking out this post on line breaks. I hope you found it useful and/or interesting.
My science fiction novel, Angels and Wormholes, is now available on Amazon kindle.
(An earlier draft of the novel is still available for free on Wattpad, where it’s gotten a great reception, including 145K reads.)
I hope you’ll check it out if you’re interested, and please leave a review. These are worth far more than money.
Thanks for your support!
Two of my horror poems -‘Goodnight’ and ‘Skittering Bones’- are in the current issue of Polar Borealis magazine, which is now available free to the public here, for anyone who is interested.
I’d like to hear what you think, especially about ‘Goodnight’ (I particularly like that one). Thanks for reading.
“Bitter Knowledge” is a poem by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990). It can be found in the collection “Late into the Night: the Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos”.
Consider reading my analysis of Ritsos’ poem “Maybe, Someday” before this one. These two poems can be read together, and it makes more sense for the other one to come first.
As with any analysis of a poem, we should begin by reading it in its entirety first, and appreciating it as a whole.
Bitter Knowledge
by Yannis Ritsos (translation karlóvasi, 6-30-87)Stay in this sheltering half-light with folded hands.
There’s nowhere for the lame night-watchman to sit.
The chairs were sold off two weeks ago. Out front,
they’re hosing out some large barrels. Barges
lie beached in the harbor. The newscaster’s voice
carries from across the street. I don’t want to hear.
I sweep the charred moth wings off the table
from the night before, knowing only
that all their weight is in their weightlessness.
Tone
The tone is depressed, wistful and resigned. A number of images point to giving up or feeling powerless: the “folded hands”, the “lame” watchman with nowhere to sit, the charred wings. The images also create a deep feeling of emptiness or lacking purpose: The barrels, being hosed out, empty; The watchman, nowhere to sit; The barges beached on the harbor, inert; The moth wings, discarded, burned, brushed from the table. The images in this constellation all show loss: a loss of purpose or function.
The overall impression created is one of sadness, emptiness, and loss.
Watson’s tone analyzer confirms this reading, identifying sadness and fear as the prevailing moods.
Interpretation
Ritsos is talking about his life as a poet. He is the “lame night-watchman”, powerless as death (“night”) approaches. The “bitter knowledge” of the title concerns his life’s work.
Late into the night of his life, he is reconsidering his contributions, weighing the value of his life’s work. The charred moth wings “from the night before” are the totality of his life’s work: insubstantial, charred, fragile, crumbling at the slightest touch. Their value: nothing, except proving their “weightlessness”.
Ritsos devoted his entire life to poetry. He hoped that he might share the beauty of the world as he saw it, through his poetry. This was his driving passion: to end the loneliness of living in his private world; to bridge the divide between separate beings; to commune with others through his craft. At the end of his life, he came to dismiss his life’s work -sweeping it from the table- as a total failure.
My short story “Ngu’Tinh” is now available as a standalone eBook.
This is a military/horror/action story about a group of Navy SEALs fighting a supernatural threat in the jungles of Vietnam. It was first published in the SNAFU: Hunters anthology by Cohesion Press.
In its first draft, the story was called “Hunter’s High”, because it featured a monster whose psychic-hunting abilities didn’t work on people who were high on heroin. Now it’s named after a mythological creature known as “Ngu’Tinh”.
The story is priced at .99USD, 1.33CDN, or free for Kindle Unlimited readers. It will also be free as a promotion this weekend (Friday June 2 through Sunday June 4) for all readers. If you download a copy, please give the story a review on Amazon; These are much more valuable for me than money.
Thanks for your support, and I hope you like the story.
My story ‘Elder Gods in the Machine’ is included in the anthology Lovecraftian Tales: Stories of Weird Fiction and Cosmic Horror, which is produced by the Lovecraft eZine. It’s available now. Check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.
‘To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse‘ is a poem by teacher, poet, and filmmaker Burlee Vang.
As with any analysis of a poem, it should start by reading the poem in its entirety (some would say at least twice). So check out the poem, and then come back for the analysis.
Let’s first look at how the poem opens.
To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse
Burlee VangThe moon will shine for God
knows how long.
As if it still matters. As if someoneis trying to recall a dream.
Believe the brain is a cage of light
& rage. When it shuts off,something else switches on.
There’s no better reason than now
to lock the doors, the windows.
Setting the Scene
The title is doing a lot of work to situate the reader. Without it, the zombie-apocalypse setting could be missed. The poem could be read as describing the experience of a survivor in a war-zone. There is an overall feeling of disorientation, fear, violence, and animalistic survival in an unraveling society. But the zombie elements, with the exception of the title, are not so pronounced.
The clues are there: words like “brain” and “rage” evoke the zombie mythology, as does “a world of flesh / & teeth”. But these could just as well be interpreted only as evoking our violent natural instincts. The boys in Lord of the Flies could be said to have lived in “a world of flesh and teeth” in this sense.
Sometimes I like having to work a bit to pull the meaning out of a poem. But in this case, I think the poem works better with a title that firmly situates us in the zombie apocalypse setting.
One of the features that I find interesting about this poem is the way it continually keeps us off-balance and disoriented. This effect is felt more strongly if we begin from a firm footing and are knocked from it. For this reason, I appreciate the scene-setting work that is done by the title.
Disorientation and Disrupted Expectations Through Line Breaks
The poem uses line breaks to disrupt our expectations and keep us off-balance. Because of this recurring formal element, the reader feels the chaos and confusion of the speaker.
Nothing is certain in this poem. Things change in an instant. We feel disorientation, a need to continually find our footing. We are lost in the confusion of the fight for survival, along with the speaker. This effect is achieved in large part through the judicious use of line breaks.
Consider the first line:
The moon will shine for God
This is most readily interpreted, prior to the line break, as meaning “for the sake of God” -until this interpretation is disrupted in the next line:
knows how long.
Our brain is forced to backtrack, to re-parse the words, and amend the meaning of “for” to indicate duration (God knows how long) instead of a beneficiary (God). This backtracking knocks us slightly off balance and gives a subtle feeling of disorientation, compounded by the certainty of our first interpretation to the doubt of “God knows how long”.
It is also interesting that this backtracking effectively erases “God”, who turns from an entity prior to the line break, to a dead metaphor across the threshold of the line break; in the first line there is a “God”, and in the second line “God” is gone.
A similar effect is achieved by the line
[…] Save the books
which, prior to the line break, means to preserve knowledge. It implies the importance of preserving books, and all with which that is associated: our cultural, social, and intellectual heritage. That line is followed, across the line break, with the words
for fire […]
We are forced to backtrack again to reinterpret the words we have just read. Again, we feel the disorientation as we move across the line break. And again, something important has been lost: the value of books has been destroyed across the threshold of the line break.
The first line showed us God, then erased God across the line break. These lines show us our cultural, social, and intellectual heritage, and then destroy it across the line break.
A similar disorienting effect is achieved with the lines:
we learn to read
what moves along the horizon
In the first line, we are given the suggestion that the survivors will pick up the pieces of their society, to rebuild the intellectual fabric of society, until the line break disrupts this hope: they are learning to survive in their new world, and to kill.
Contrast of Light and Dark
This poem makes great use of sharply contrasting images and, in particular, a contrast between light and dark. In the first stanza we have the glow of the moon. In the second we have the brains described as a “cage of light” that shuts off. The porch-light is turned off. A fire is lit, for just two words, before we return to darkness. Shadows flicker.
I really feel the darkness in this poem, and I think that is in part because it is contrasted so sharply with the images of light that appear earlier: the moon, the fire, the porch-light, the “cage of light” that is the brain.
All the images of light becoming darkness are symbolic of the zombie mythology. Through its use of contrasting light and dark, the poem embodies the transformation of human to zombie.
Final Words
I hope you enjoyed this short look at some of the elements in Burlee Vang’s poem, “To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse”.
I write posts on poetry and craft once a week. Check back soon for more posts like this one.
Thanks for reading.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is a poem by Robert Frost, and one of the more famous poems in the English language. I would like to take a look at some of its interesting elements.
First, as in any analysis of a poem, it’s better to begin by looking at the poem in its entirety, and appreciating it as a whole (some would say you have to start by reading it at least twice, since you must first grasp the whole in order to appreciate the individual lines in light of the whole). Here it is:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Rhythm and Rhyme, and Acoustic Correspondence
The poem is written in iambic tetrameter. It has chain-rhymed quatrains -a form that is known in Persian as a Rubaiyat. It’s difficult to pull off in English, because it strains linguistic resources. It is a demanding form -four rhyming lines spread across four quatrains and linking them together- and poor execution will result in rhymes that seem forced or obvious. Frost pulls it off well, with language that seems natural and appropriate.
The rhyme scheme looks like this:
A
A
B
AB
B
C
BC
C
D
CD
D
D
D
That’s not the extent to which Frost is playing with sound. At a first pass, we might notice only the end-rhymes. But there are more interesting effects occurring here.
As I read the first stanza, the recurring /h/ in each line is deliberate, as is the recurring /w/, and the internal rhyme with /ill/ in lines 2 through 4. Each of these sounds establishes a subtle corrspondence, perhaps just below our conscious awareness. I map the sound correspondence in the following way, with ‘x’ representing “unused” syllables, acoustic effects bracketed with ‘/’ marks, and leaving the end rhymes as A and B:
/h/w/xxxxxA
/h/h/xxx/ill/xA
/h/(w/ill)/xxxxxB
(The second syllable of the third line is bracketed because it creates a correspondence between two sounds in a single syllable.)
By the time we finish the third line, we have already heard a pair of /w/, a triplet of /h/, and a pair of /ill/. Here is the denouement of the first stanza: every single one of these sounds recurs in the final line, which is dense with acoustic correspondence, and thereby invested with the energy of the previous lines. Even if we don’t know why, we feel the line as powerful and satisfying.
I map the first stanza this way:
/h/w/xxxxxA
/h/h/xxx/ill/xA
/h/(w/ill)/xxxxxB
x/w/h/w/ill/x/w/A
Visualized out this way, we can see why the line feels so powerful -it is loaded with correspondence to the previously established patterns, satisfying our subconscious urge to see those sound pairs recur. The final line effectively ties the whole stanza together, linking it through acoustic correspondence with nearly every syllable.
Sensory density and psychological fidelity
This is a powerful poem in terms of sensory density. We can feel the cold, the snow falling, the wind. We can hear the wind, the “sweep” of “downy flake”, the bells of the little horse. We can see the evening woods. The frozen lake. And so on. It is rich with sensory experiences. But for all its sensory density, the poem is remarkably internal, closely tracking the mental state of the speaker. It feels psychologically real.
It begins with the speaker wondering “whose woods these are”. There is a feeling of being lost, a feeling subtly accentuated by the inversion of the expected “whose woods are these” to “who woods these are”, which puts us slightly off-balance (as the speaker is). We then feel the movement of the speaker’s thought process -from being lost, to tentatively located- in the space of the first line, when we hear the words “I think I know”. The poem moves quickly, and we are swept up in the thought process of the speaker. Perhaps without our conscious awareness, the speaker’s thought process develops further, not explicitly, but implied by their perception of the woods: the woods are no longer “these” woods but “his woods” (the unknown man who lives in the village). The speaker becomes gradually more confident in a way that feels psychologically real.
Limitations on Human Beings, Finding Our Purpose
This is poem is largely about the perceptual limitations of thinking beings. (At a deeper level, it is about our inability to grasp the “truth” of existence in a grand sense). The first stanza embodies this theme, shifting between a feeling of being lost, then tentatively placed, then slightly more assuredly located in space; it enacts the struggle to find one’s place.
This theme is further reinforced as our attention is shifted to other characters. The unknown man who “will not see” what is happening, or the little horse who “must think it queer”. The speaker, the horse, and the unknown man are all presented in terms of their psychological limitations: what they cannot see, or cannot understand, or are struggling to know.
In the final stanza, we get the sense that the speaker will not keep his “promises”. He wants to sleep, but he has miles to go. The repetition of this final line suggests an ongoing task; the poem ends not with finality, but by propelling the speaker towards the “miles to go”, for which we have no suggestion of a resolution.
The speaker’s “sleep”, in this case, seems to represent death. His “promises” are those owed to his fellow beings, represented by the village outside of the woods. The never-ending task of a thinking being is to find their purpose among their fellow beings (as the speaker first begins by trying to find his place) and this task is not done until we’re dead. It is ultimately a poem about searching for meaning in life. But it is a search that can have no resolution.
This should not be interpreted as a depressing poem. Frost says the woods are “lovely, dark and deep”. The implication here is that our being lost in the dark woods of life, of trying to find our purpose, is actually a lovely thing.
On the topic of the darkness of this poem, it does enact suicidal thoughts; the speaker looks at the woods and wants to “sleep”. Some part of him wants death. But this isn’t the focal point of the poem, or its resolution. Ultimately, the speaker continues trudging on, because of “promises” owed to his fellow beings; he will continue searching for his purpose in the dark.
Oxford Comma
Let me make take this opportunity to make a plea for the Oxford comma. Consider this line from Frost:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
Here, the absence of an Oxford comma means that this line should be read not as listing three qualities of the woods -“lovely”, “dark”, and “deep”- but rather, an entirely different meaning: the loveliness of the woods consists in their being “dark and deep”. And further, if we take this line metaphorically, Frost is saying that the loveliness of life consists in not knowing our purpose -that the beauty comes from our endless search to find meaning in the darkness. Alternatively, we might read this line as suggesting the loveliness offered by the sleep of death -dark and deep- and embodying the speaker’s suicidal thoughts. Or both at the same time. It is a powerful line.
However, if for some tragic reason we stopped using the Oxford comma, we wouldn’t know how to read this line, because we wouldn’t have a mark to distinguish these two possible readings (if the Oxford comma was optional, then we wouldn’t know whether the line simply had an omitted comma). English would lose some of its expressive capacity and would be, to that extent, broken.
The argument for dropping the Oxford comma seems to be that, in certain cases, it is obvious from the context that the items are meant to be read as a list (for example, “the three fruits were an apple, an orange and a banana”). This is a bad argument. We might just as well omit the period from sentences that close a paragraph. Besides, that usage looks jarring to people who respect the Oxford comma. We will understand your meaning, probably, but you also needlessly risk causing annoyance and giving the impression that you don’t care about language.
Don’t break English. Use the Oxford comma.
Santa Claus
Finally, just for fun, let us just consider that this poem might really just be about Santa Claus.
Who is this strange man who has stopped in someone else’s woods at night, on a snowy evening? What are all these promises he has to keep? Why so many miles to travel?
The “darkest evening of the year” would be the 21st of December. But perhaps Frost has taken some liberties here. “The fourth darkest evening of the year” doesn’t quite fit in the established meter, and isn’t quite as neat.
The harness bells evoke a reindeer, and the animal appears in a stanza rhyming on queer/near/year. Is “reindeer” being playfully implied by rhyme?
The opening stanza introduces our speaker, and it rhymes on know/though/snow. Playfully implying “ho-ho-ho” through rhyme?
Well, read the poem again for yourself and see if that interpretation makes any sense:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Final words
Thanks for reading. I hope you liked this post.
We want our scenes to be immersive and believable. But sometimes description feels flat and lifeless. A common weakness is not using sensory impressions effectively. Often, there is too much focus on the visual. We don’t just see the world -we experience it through smells, sounds, temperature, and many other senses (not just five). Writing should capture these other kinds of experiences.
It’s not just about using multiple senses -it’s also about choosing the right details to construct an immersive and psychologically convincing sensory experience.
In order to make our writing more immersive and believable, we should practice engaging multiple sensory modalities, and learn how we can effectively use various sensory details to construct vivid and immersive scenes.
This post is about developing the ability to use sense impressions and details effectively. There will be a few concepts discussed, and lots of exercises for practice.
Learning Goals
Understand the meaning and importance of sensory density; Develop range across sensory modalities, and awareness of options for increasing sensory density; Practice writing with high sensory density; Understand how distancing language reduces immersion; Practice avoiding distancing language; Understand salient details and telling details; practice using salient details and telling details.
Sensory Density
Sensory Density is the degree of compactness of different sensory modalities. A passage that only has visual sense impressions has low sensory density. A passage that engages multiple sensory modalities has high sensory density.
I could describe a walk through part of the city by showing the reader discarded shoes hanging from power-lines, old payphones caked with grime, a boarded up house on the corner, potholes. You’re beginning to see what kind of a place this is. But it’s not immersive description -not as immersive as it could have been if I also mentioned urine fumes from the sidewalk, the hacking coughs of old men, clouds of cigarette smoke -things that impinge on different senses.
A common rule of thumb is to engage three different senses to make a scene feel real.
The following lines of poetry have a very high sensory density:
All through the night the dead
crunch pieces of ice from the moon. (Yannis Ritsos)
This line of surreal poetry, though not aiming to be believable, is vivid and evocative. Part of its strength comes from the density of sensory impressions. We have sight, sound, taste, temperature, passage of time, all engaged in the space of one sentence. It conveys a creepy sense of weary, dissatisfied restlessness, and maybe dread or existential angst. I don’t know what it looks like for the dead to crunch pieces of ice from the moon -and I’m not sure you could find pieces of moon-ice big enough to crunch, or how the dead might get those pieces, or how they would crunch them- but the surreal line comes to life because of the evocative sensory imagery.
Here is another example of high sensory density.
“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.” (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde)
We can say that a passage conveys a sense impression to the extent that the reader is able to answer questions about the passage related to that sense. For the passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray, we could test what was conveyed by asking such questions:
Could you say what temperature the wind was?
How frequently it was blowing?
The sound it made?
The smell(s)?
What the studio looked like inside?
What it looked like outside, through the open door?
The passage manages to paint a vivid picture across several senses (and all of that from one sentence that is, grammatically, just about the smell). That’s sensory density.
Exercise – Sense Modalities
There’s way more than five senses. The point of this exercise is practicing with senses we might not normally consider, in order to expand our range with different sensory experiences. Some of these exercises will require you to really flex your descriptive and creative muscles.
There’s a table below with a series of different senses listed in the left hand column. For each one, your job is to come up with a description that uses that sense (write out a chart like this on a sheet of paper). Use your imagination to come up with any scene, setting, action, or object you want to describe. Or use any of the following prompts: piece of fruit, visiting a planet, magic spell, meeting an alien, fist fight, explosion, losing consciousness, stepping through a portal, skiing, falling asleep on a couch.
For example, in the “sight” row, you might choose to describe an apple using sight. For the “temperature” row, you might describe a cup of coffee. Use only one sentence per description. The purpose of this exercise is just to expand awareness of available sensory modalities, and to practice making descriptions using these different senses.
| sense modality | description that uses that sense |
|---|---|
| sight | |
| sound | |
| smell | |
| taste | |
| touch | |
| proprioception | |
| temperature | |
| balance | |
| familiarity/recognition | |
| chronoception | |
| interoception (your choice) | |
| electroception |
Exercises: Sensory Density
The point of these exercises is to practice sensory density. For each of the following prompts, write a description that engages three(3) or more senses. The main goal of this exercise is to practice coming up with different sensory impressions for the same scene. It is up to you to rely on your creativity to fill in the sensory details.
Additional instructions:
Prompts: (for each one, use three or more senses!)
Exercises: Sensory Density part 2 – specific challenges
For each of the following, render the given scene/action/object by using the specified sense(s). Some of these are super challenging. Some might require a little bit of research.
Additional instructions:
Exercises:
Salient Impressions
Salient impressions are the most powerful sensory impressions in a given scene or setting. They are the things that stand out to the viewpoint character.
Try to render salient sensory impressions for any scene or setting. Imagine yourself in place of the viewpoint character -or rely on a memory of something similar- and capture what draws your attention: in an outhouse, that might be the smell; in a subway, that might be the feeling of cramped bodies invading your personal space, or the jerk-and-stutter of the train while you search for something to hold for balance; if you step outside in winter, the salient impression might be the cold.
Because salient impressions are the ones that draw our attention, it makes sense for them to be included in your descriptions, not just because it helps render the scene, but because it increases psychological fidelity. Your prose will better match psychological reality if you focus on the sensory impressions that are more plausibly drawing the attention of the viewpoint character. And, conversely, immersion can be ruined by focusing on low-salience details when a high-salience detail is available (imagine reading a passage where the POV character is set on fire, and they describe the smell and the colours of the flame: immersion is guaranteed to be broken; the focus in this case should be on the heat and the pain, because of their salience).
Telling Details
The smell of flowers coming through an open window is a “telling detail”, because it also helps to illustrate a larger picture -we can picture the garden even though we are only given the scent.
Telling details are descriptions of smaller parts of the scene that help to paint a bigger picture. Unlike salient details, they are not necessarily the strongest sensory impressions. But telling details give an indication or suggestion of the larger scene, allowing the reader’s imagination fill in the gaps. For example:
The ascending-and-descending pitch of a race-car’s engine as it whooshes by. This detail is just about the characteristic sound. But it helps render the larger scene. We can picture the race-car. Maybe we can also feel the wind.
A single pair of sneakers squeaking on the basketball court, and the rhythmic bouncing of the ball. Again, this detail is just about the sound. But we can imagine someone practicing basketball by themselves on an empty -probably indoor- basketball court. We can picture their motions. The sound gives an indication of a larger scene.
Broken bottles and cigarette butts littering an apartment hallway. I don’t need to explicitly tell you that this is a dirty and run-down apartment. The telling detail informs you of the larger scene. If I asked you whether any of the lights are broken or burnt out, your imagination can probably supply the answer.
A trick for rapidly establishing a scene is to use one broad description, just to situate the reader’s imagination, and then supplement that broad description with one telling detail. The formula is: broad description plus telling detail.
Dave Chappelle used this technique with comedic effect (successful comedians are master story-tellers). He wanted to describe a particularly bad ghetto. This is how he set the scene:
We pulled up to an old rickety building[…]
That’s the broad description. Then comes a telling detail (which Dave Chappelle calls one of “the familiar symptoms of a project”):
A [expletive] crackhead ran this way [skittering noise][…] And then another one jumped out a tree [skittering noise][…].
You could think of “telling details” as “familiar symptoms” if you prefer Dave Chappelle’s terminology. He continues the routine by adding additional telling details to further colour the scene:
I look out the window. Remember, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. […] I look out the window. There was a [expletive] baby standing on the corner. And the baby -the baby didn’t even look scared. He was just standing there.
It’s a funny picture, but it proves the point. When you want to describe a scene, give the broad description, and then colour it with “telling details” (or “familiar symptoms”).
Don’t over-describe. It is often better to let the reader’s imagination do the heavy lifting. Give them a telling detail and let their mind fill in the blanks.
Exercises: Telling Details
Your goal with these exercises is to rapidly establish a scene by using one broad description, and one or two telling details. You are practicing coming up with evocative details. They should be small details that help paint a bigger picture. Try to create as vivid a scene as you can by using small, suggestive details that create an impression of the larger scene.
Additional instructions:
Exercises:
Distancing Language (also called “filter words”)
Avoid using language like “he saw” or “she smelled” or “Billy heard” in your descriptions, and instead show the sensations directly. When you present a sensory impression by indicating that a particular character is the one sensing it, you place that character as a barrier between the reader and the experience. This distances the reader from the experience. This is called using “distancing language” or “filter words”. It makes the reader experience less immediate and less immersive.
When you are editing your prose, look for distancing language and get rid of it. When rendering a sensory detail, you don’t need to indicate which sense is being engaged, or who is doing the experiencing. I don’t need to say “the smell of urine fuming from the sidewalk” -by mentioning “urine fumes” the sense modality is implied; I don’t need to say “Billy smelled urine fumes” -if Billy is the point of view character, it is implicit that it is Billy who is experiencing those fumes. By indicating either of these things explicitly, you distance the reader from the experience, putting an additional layer between them and the experience.
Avoid distancing language whenever possible. Don’t say, “Billy saw a goat standing there.” Just show the goat. Leave Billy out of it.
Exercises: Avoiding Distancing Language
Fix each of the following passages by eliminating the distancing language. They are not good passages, and they need some revision. For some of them, you will have to be creative and invent your own details about the scene (eliminating distancing language is not always a simple matter of cutting words). Feel free to add or delete words as necessary, or completely rework the passage (as long as the gist is the same). Your primary goal is to make the passage feel more immersive by eliminating distancing language -but that will sometimes require inventing details.
Billy walked in to the barn. He could smell that the goat had left something for him.
Gertrude jumped out of the plane. She felt the wind, and she saw the ground far below, but growing slowly larger.
He felt a pull on his hand, like a magnet, sticking his hand to the rune-symbol on the wall.
She walked outside. The temperature was very low, and the wind felt very cold on her face. (For this one, please also get rid of the word “very” both times it appears).
X89’s cyber-sensors picked up the reading of an electromagnetic field. He could feel the buzzing of the field. The device must be nearby.
Review
Sensory density is the degree of compactness of different sensory modalities. Prose with a high sensory density will feel more real and immersive than prose with a low sensory density. A rule of thumb is to aim for three different senses.
Try to give salient sensory impressions. In addition to helping to render the scene, this increases psychological fidelity. Conversely, a passage that neglects a high-salience impression to focus on a low-salience one risks breaking reader immersion.
Avoid distancing language (filter words) like “he saw” or “she smelled” and instead show the sensations directly.
Use broad details to set the scene, and telling details to add colour to the scene. Don’t over-describe. Let the reader’s imagination fill in the scene based on your telling details.
In our exercises, we practiced eliminating distancing language, rewriting to increase sensory density, rendering a scene with high sensory density, using salient details, and using telling details.
Final Words
I hope you liked this post on sensory impressions. Please feel free to leave comments, questions, suggestions, etc. in the comment section.
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David F. Shultz 