Sensodumping

The Mavens welcome debut author Tessa Dare to our blog!

We always talk about the dangers of infodumping (chunks of backstory that are poorly integrated and slow down the story) but I’d argue there’s an equally insidious phenomenon of “sensodumping”—long swaths of sensory detail that may be beautifully written and evocative, but have little relevance to the actual story. Worst of all, the two — infodumping and sensodumping — often go hand-in-hand, especially in opening scenes where the writer is trying to establish the story’s physical and emotional setting.

Have you ever read a book that started something like this?

It was cold. The winter air nipped at Mary’s ears and rasped in her throat, erasing the lingering taste of her morning tea. Thin crusts of ice glazed each rut in the footpath. The wind whistled through bare tree branches; somewhere in the distance a man was chopping wood. The smell of smoke hung thick in the air. A single snowflake twirled from the sky, and Mary caught it in her palm and watched it melt.

Gathering her threadbare cloak around her, she hurried down the path. The little village she called home was simply not the same this year. Ever since the tragedy, Cotswold seemed to have entered a permanent winter. But although Mary was poor in coin, she was rich in imagination. Even in this gloomy chill, optimism warmed her heart. Unlike the rest of the villagers, she would not wait for springtime to live again.

There’s nothing especially wrong with it, is there? You get a sense of the physical setting, and you learn a bit about Mary and her backstory — but the two are completely separate. There’s a paragraph of sensodumping, followed by a paragraph of infodumping. Unfortunately, I tend to do this kind of thing a lot.

Somewhere along the line, I noticed that my favorite writers avoided both of these sins by using sensory detail to drive the revelation of characterization and backstory — and the result packed a stronger emotional punch. Take, for example, this utterly brilliant passage from the first page of Julie Anne Long’s recent release, The Secret to Seduction:

The Libertine. It was the sobriquet by which he was known throughout all of England, and his reputation was in fact such that the word of it had managed to waft, like opium-and-incense-scented smoke, all the way to the tiny, tucked-away town of Tinbury, Derbyshire—where the air, incidentally, had never been scented by anything more controversial than roast lamb, or maybe once or twice a cigar, and where life was as sedate, predictable, and pleasing as a minuet. The gentle green hills surrounding the vicarage, not to mention the Vicar of Tinbury himself, seemed to prevent local passions from becoming unduly inflamed. No one in Tinbury seemed in danger of writing sensual poetry.

What a gorgeous, vivid picture this gives of the town of Tinbury; yet the sensory description is not random sensodumping. Every detail proceeds organically from the story.

So, how could I improve Mary’s opening? Perhaps with something like this:

It was cold. The freezing air nipped at Mary’s throat where her too-small cloak gaped in front. There hadn’t been money for a new cloak this winter. Nor the winter before. Gathering the threadbare garment about her as best she could, she hastened her steps along the ice-crusted path. The distant thwacks of an ax cleaving wood cut through the thick blanket of silence. A thin curl of smoke from a nearby cottage disappeared into the winter-white sky. All was grey; all was quiet—just as it had been ever since the tragedy. This was Cotswold’s season of sorrow.

But a smile warmed Mary’s cheeks, for the air tasted of snow—crisp with anticipation, sweet as a secret. A lone snowflake twirled from the gray silence, and she caught it in her hand, admiring the bit of crystalline lace as it melted on her palm. And then it was gone. The first snowflake of winter, and a scrap of beauty none but her would ever see. The rest of the villagers kept to their thatched-roof cottages, or trained their eyes on the loamy soil beneath their feet… but not Mary. Mary looked to the sky.

Okay, JAL it isn’t, but it’s an improvement at least, don’t you think? Hopefully the sensory details draw you into the unfolding story, rather than feeling like an obtrusive break from it. The reader gets the idea that Mary is whimsical and optimistic by experiencing the scene through her senses, not by being told she’s whimsical and optimistic. (No, I’m not writing any book about a Mary in tragedy-stricken Cotswold, it’s just an example.)

Sensory description is always something I’m looking to improve. Some questions I try to ask myself as I write description these days: How would this character perceive this setting (or character) differently from anyone else? How would s/he perceive it differently than s/he has in the past? What details of the environment can evoke the mood I want to create?

Thanks for joining us, Tessa!

Do you ever notice “sensodumping” in your own writing, or in published books? What kinds of questions do you ask yourself when envisioning and incorporating sensory detail?