using the senses

One of the many thought-provoking moments in Sol Stein's "Solutions for Writers" is the idea that in good fiction writing, a passage which evokes one of the senses is stronger, more memorable, than one which doesn't. How somebody looks, how a place sounds, what an event smells like, all make for better description.

This set me wondering what radio news would sound like if every story made reference to at least one of the senses. It occurred to me that relatively little writing for radio does use the senses - the eye may be there by implication, but there's not enough explicit reference to the look, feel, sound, smell of an event. And when there is - boy, is it powerful!

Of course, we have to take care not to create empty cliches - like the earthquake we're told felt like a bomb going off, and the explosion which felt like an earthquake. After the Tsunami in December 2004, one evocative despatch from Bali (I think) mentioned the smell. An event as devastating as that does force people to search for new ways of bringing the horror to the audience - the worry is that there are too many everyday events which get reported in colourless ways - senseless reporting!