How can you provoke your audiences senses to influence how they perceive the world?

Sensory Cartography

It can be helpful to break down the sensory experience of your protagonist to help understand the world from their perspective.

  1. Consider the medium with which to capture the world

  2. Map one sense at a time

    1. Smell & Taste: Aromas and flavours

    2. Touch: Textures and temperatures

    3. Visual: Light, shadow, movement, colours and shapes

    4. Audio: Prominent, ambient, and absent.

  3. Overlay each recorded sense to assemble your sensory map

Simile’s for the Senses

Provoking senses using descriptions, analogy, imagery, sounds, etc. can help to evoke sensory memories. Build the world around what what you are creating with these questions:

  • If X was a colour, what colour would it be?

  • If X was a sound, what sound would it be?

  • If X was a texture, what texture would it be?

  • If X was a smell, what smell would it be?

  • If X was a flavour, what flavour would it be?