Details of the FIVE Senses Bring the Reader into the Story

 What pulls you into a story?  The plot, or story line, of course, but what do you know when you first open a book?  If you've read reviews and the jacket copy, you will know something.  The cover should provide a sense of the book, but it's the opening pages that will pull you in. Using the five senses in your writing (touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste) will ground the reader in the setting. 

 

In my novelette, The Meth House, the main character,  Hattie, a middle-aged woman with her dog, is searching for an old off-the-grid cabin  in the Rockies.

I found a rough path that the vehicle had plowed through, probably following an animal trail. I lost it couple times. Barton scampered hither and yon, wanting off the leash, but I was having none of that. I trudged along for about twenty minutes, enjoying the perfume of the pines, so fragrant in the afternoon sunshine.

Up ahead I spotted an ancient log cabin. The woods were trying to take over, but they hadn’t yet. The cabin’s logs had bleached gray. Closer, I noticed a door, and a little window with no glass, and a big stone slab for a front step. I saw how the utility vehicle, known here in the hills as a UTV had crushed the growth by the front door. Once upon a time, this had been a cozy little dwelling. Now, it stood in near ruins: hole in the roof, deserted and creepy. Vegetation crowding in. No signs of life. Barton got excited and strained at his leash. The dog kept whining. Now I had the wind up.

“What is it, Barton? I asked. Why did I whisper? “Shush!” I said. “Sit!” That’s when I heard a child’s voice calling. The hair on my arms stood straight up, and from my heartbeat, you’d a thought I’d bicycled up Pike’s Peak. I edged closer to the cabin. Barton and I stood on the stone slab. The door was closed, but the voice carried through the gaping window.

“Help! Help me! Help!” Scared, not angry. Sounded like a little girl. 

Can we see the path, and the rambunctious dog?  Smell the pines? Do we see the cabin? Hear the whining dog?   Feel him straining at the leash?  Our senses are on alert.   Then we hear the child's voice calling. Sound. The reader is in a specific setting described in a few short paragraphs.  

 

 

 

 

In Chased By Death, the reader is meeting Maxine, the main character for the first time.  Note the senses again:  sight, smell, hearing, taste. 

 Maxine pushed the door open to endure an awkward hug. Larry insisted on a table where he could see who walked in.  The squint lines around his eyes were deeper and his face had new hollows. He had lost weight, but instead of looking fit, he seemed gaunt. Even his tan looked sallow, and his bloodshot eyes cried for Visine. Being bronzed was part of the Summer Larry with his sports shirts, neat khakis, and Topsiders without socks. Despite the preppy clothes, Larry looked like hell.

Maxine ordered iced coffee. Larry asked for Jack Daniels. His red-streaked eyes darted around the restaurant, studying the other diners.

Turning to her, he said, “Lookin’ good.”

         He always wanted an elegant wife on his arm, charming and all smiles. She was no longer that woman.

She had expected him to say, ditch those clunky shoes, babe. Now Maxine dressed to please herself. On this steamy late May evening, she wore linen shorts and a silk camp shirt. And Teva sandals.         

Larry didn’t comment on her practical footwear. She didn’t remark on his dyed hair.

“I’m taking off after dinner,” she said, hinting this wouldn’t be a leisurely meal.

 The harsh briny aroma of lobster drifted across their table. Lobster always tasted better than it smelled.

 Touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. Use the five senses will and your reader will relate to all of them.  She'll feel right there with the characters.

 

Here are some other authors who will surely have interesting takes on our most interesting topics:

Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Dr. Bob Rich https://bobrich18.wordpress.com/2020/08/22/elementary-my-dear-rhobin/

 Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobincourtright.com

Season of Our Discontent or Maybe our Content

Does the season ever play a part in your setting? How do you think seasons affect setting & plot either physically or metaphorically?

Ah, yes, seasons.  In my writing it is always summer, my favorite season.  Only my first book was set in the fall and it had many issues and is stuck forever in the hard drive of my computer.

I never meant to write The Shadow Warriors, World of Mirrors, Festival Madness, The Meth House, and (scheduled for publication) Chased by Death and Murder in the North Woods to be set in summer.  An as yet unpublished novel (not a mystery) is set in 1928 Southern California.  In summer, of course. My WIP (work in process) is set in two periods in South Central Kansas.  Both periods take place during the wheat harvest, which is __summer.

How did all these summer books transpire? I have loved summer since I was a little kid.  No walking to school during snowstorms in summer.  No snowstorms in summer!  This winter we were both snowed in and iced in.  New England winters are awful.  Did I ever like winter sports?  No.  Swimming and tennis are summer sports.  Kick the can on a hot summer evening.  Riding bikes to the Platte River.  Swimming in the sand pit (a no-no).  Always summertime activities.

So how does summer as a season function in my books?  Let's take World of Mirrors, set in East Germany the year after the wall came down.  In the Baltic, where the novel takes place, the sun doesn't set until late.  The sailboats ply the waters off the island.  Tourists and locals crowd the nude beaches.  The little train takes visitors around the island.  My characters are posing as tourists, so they do touristy things.  Summer helps create their disguise.

The isle of Ruegen is peaceful in any season.  But the bad guys are there in summer.

Festival Madness is set at Burning Man which takes place the week before Labor Day.  Summer!  That was a no brainer.  The hot desert functions as a backdrop for a bad guy intent on mayhem. Half-naked people.  People in costumes.  Craziness.  Who can you trust?  In winter the Black Rock Desert is deserted. That wouldn't be any fun. The festival is a phantasmogoric scene of heat, dust, techno, costumes, art, craziness.  A perfect place for a novel.  A summer novel.

When the man burns, the summer sky is lit with flames and fireworks.

 My most recent publication is a novelette, The Meth House. What inspired the story was a news item about homeless people living off the grid in a national forest in Colorado.  Someone accidentally set a fire that burned a forest.  I didn't write about the fire, rather I wrote about an older woman who delivered food to the homeless from her church.  Naturally nobody would be living in a forest in the mountains in the winter.  Well, maybe rangers.   She is delivering food and other items and runs across an old cabin that someone says used to be a meth house.  She finds a child in the cabin and then the fun begins.  Estes Park, a summer resort figures in the story as does a trip to the hot plains of Northeastern Colorado where a meth house blows up and many further adventures insue.  In the good old summertime.

We associate memories and activities with all four seasons.  Summer is warm (maybe hot) with beaches, swimming, cookouts, rafting, mountain cabins, harvests, travel, picnics, long days and fun. But it's not all fun.  Bad stuff happens in any season.  In my books, bad stuff happens in summer.

Here are some good writers who will have a different take on the seasons and their writing.

   Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
  Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
  Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
   Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
  Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
  Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
  Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobincourtright.com

The Meth House, A Story with Heart.



Amazon Giveaway of the Meth House

Characters We Create or Steal and Can They Teach Us Something?

Many thanks to Rhobin  for another probing topic. 

The Meth House by Judith Copek

 The Meth House: $1..99 for your Kindle and other devices

This week I published the novelette, (shorter than a novella, longer than a long short story) The Meth House for  Amazon's Kindle.  By the way, are you aware that you do not actually need a Kindle to read Kindle publications?  On the  page where the book is sold, there is a link to get the FREE app for reading on other devices.  Once you. have the app, you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. This has been a free public service  announcement.

* * *

This month our blog roll has returned to the ever-fruitful topic of characters. Do they come from our minds? Have we perhaps met them before? And what do our characters reveal (if anything) about ourselves.  Can they teach us something?

I will use examples from The Meth House. I lived in Colorado from first grade through high school and in the summers while at college.  This story was inspired by a newspaper article about homeless living in the state forests, and how one of then had set the forest on fire (accidentally).  I don't have a fire in my novelette, but but I have an old, abandoned cabin (maybe once a meth house), where my protagonist comes upon a little girl, dirty, scared and abandoned.  My main character is a reformed alcoholic who lived on the street for many years, sobered up with the help of AA, and became a social worker.  She has seen a lot, and experienced a lot.  Bad stuff happens at the cabin and then the locale moves to Boulder,  Estes Park, and finally out to the plains and beet fields of Northeastern Colorado where more bad stuff happens. You read the newspaper, you get ideas, you write the story.

The only characters I "stole" were the Moos brothers, the baddest of the bad.  I knew of these twins (always innately bad) from my days in grade school.  They must have been born with evil genes.  The little girl, Lina, came out of my head, as did Hattie Pullen,  her lawyer friend and Mr. Ed.  The deceitful uncle, Ferguson, the child predator: anyone's guess where he came from. But these people were all somehow inspired by the settings in Colorado,  the state forests, Boulder, Estes Park and the sugar beet growing towns of Northeastern Colorado. My husband and I once drove through the town I named "Beetville." There were places almost as decrepit as the meth house.  As a teenager, my pals and I used to drink at the  unnamed bar.

Meth has been a problem in rural areas for a long time.  Little towns lose population and jobs and  the young people feel trapped.  Drugs are a tempting outlet for despair and even boredom. For years, I collected newspaper clipping about meth, thinking I would write a novel sometime.  But The Meth House is not really about meth.
Unlike me, Hattie has seen a lot of life, as an alcoholic living on the street for years.  She got sober and become a social worker.  Lina?  Lina is every  frightened child who has ever been abandoned in a scary place.  If you were ever scared witless as a kid, you can understand Lina.  If you've eve been down on your luck and come out of your tailspin, you can identify with Hattie.  If you've ever known a starchy upright man who can entertain little kids with his antics, you've met Archer.

So the answer is yes, we have met all these characters in various guises before.   We know them.  Maybe they are even archetypes.  But what do they reveal about us?  Our fears, our worries, our knowledge, our hopes.  And who wouldn't want to grab a handful of cash out of an abandoned suitcase stuffed with money?  Hey, I wouldn't mind.  Hattie didn't either, but she used it for good.

Can our characters teach us something?  Yes, they can teach us bravery, compassion, a longing for justice.  They can teach us empathy for others. They can teach us love.  But the purpose of writing is to entertain, and characters who are ordinary, but courageous and stubborn, like Hattie, can  both teach and entertain.

Check out what other writers have to say about this fascinating topic.   


Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Marci Baun  http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Marie Laval http://marielaval.blogspot.co.uk/
Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1c1
Rachael Kosinski http://rachaelkosinski.weebly.com/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Connie Vines https://mizging.blogspot.com/

The Meth House

My novelette, (13,000+ words) is now available for on Amazon for the Kindle. 

Cover of my novelette.  

The setting is Colorado, my home state.  Montana is my birth state.  I lived in Colorado from first grade through high school and in the summers while at college.  The story was inspired by a newspaper article about homeless living in the state forests, and how one of then had set the forest on fire (accidentally).  I don't have a fire, but but I have an old, abandoned cabin (maybe once a meth house, no one is sure) where my protagonist comes upon a little girl, dirty, scared and abandoned.  My main character is a reformed alcoholic who lived on the street for many years, sobered up with the help of AA, and became a social worker.  She has seen a lot, and experienced a lot.  Bad stuff happens at the cabin and the locale moves to Boulder,  Estes Park, and finally out to the plains and beet fields of Northeastern Colorado where more bad stuff happens. The characters came to me out of nowhere.  You read the paper, you get ideas, you write the story.

I think you might enjoy it.

Order "The Meth House"

By the way, it is not necessary to have a Kindle to read this.  On the Meth House page there is a link to download software to your smart phone,  your tablet or your  computer.