A sure-fire way to captivate readers is with concrete details. However, describing the appearance of a person, place or thing is just the beginning. Characters, like readers, have four other senses—hearing, taste, smell, and touch—and each one offers the writer countless opportunities to render those characters’ experiences more vividly. By extension, the reader’s experience of fiction, memoir, and/or creative nonfiction embedded with sensory details will be deeper, more compelling, and, yes, visceral.

Allowing characters to hear, taste, smell, and touch enables a writer to create, not just a story, but a palpable world readers are eager to enter and reluctant to leave.

In this class, students will read and discuss examples of sensory detail in narrative excerpts by such contemporary writers as Lily King, Michael Ondaatje, Anthony Doerr, Chitra Divakaruni and Lauren Groff, among others. The class also will include writing prompts for using sensory details in new or in-progress work.

Please bring a laptop or paper and pen to class. (Optional: bring a scene or a few pages of a piece you’re working on that you’d like to enrich with more detail.) Each student will receive a handout containing excerpts, writing exercises, and bibliography of works cited.

About the instructor:

Marian Szczepanski, author of the debut novel Playing St. Barbara (High Hill Press, 2013), holds an MFA in fiction from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a BA in American Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Her short fiction has garnered the deMaine Award for an Emerging Writer from Clackamas Literary Review. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and the Houston Press Club. Named to the Houston Press roster of “100 Houston Creatives” for 2014, Marian teaches creative writing workshops in Houston at Writespace and beyond.