News & Blog by Lauren Kate
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Now: take back everything I said all week about isolating one sense from the others. To conclude with the sense of touch, we’re going to pull them all back together. The coolest poetic device I ever learned was synesthesia, which means one sensory experience is described in terms of another sensory experience. Like using a taste word to describe a sound: “her spicy voice,” or a sight word to describe...
Right around this point in my tour of the senses, I’m starting to realize that what I’m doing is isolating each sense from the others to examine how it works, why it matters, where my knowledge of it comes from, and what it’s place is in fiction. This feels like an appropriate discovery going into my next post about sound. My husband is a singer-songwriter and is musical in just about as many ways...
The sense of taste is a big one for me. If I weren’t writing novels, I think I’d probably be working in a kitchen somewhere. I love to cook, I love to eat, I love to talk about food, read about food, and shop for food. When I travel, every meal ends with a discussion of what the next one should be. My favorite foods are spaghetti, pickles, and homemade cookies, and the best thing I have eaten recently...
Of all the senses, to me the sense of smell feels most closely related to memory. Growing up, my ballet teacher wore cologne that smelled like watermelon. Now, more than a decade later, any time I get a whiff of watermelon, it takes me back to years spent under his supervision at the barre. The part of Texas where I grew up is in the middle of what we call Tornado Alley. Frequently, in the summer,...
When I was asked to contribute five posts to the Random Blog, I started thinking about things that come in sets of five as a method to make the most my stay here. Since vivid descriptions play a large part in my stories, I kept coming back to the five senses. This week, I’m taking you on a sensory tour of how I see, smell, taste, hear, and feel the world—and then, how I write it. Virginia Woolf...
