This Is Your Brain

There was a fascinating article in the NY Times on the 17th all about how our brains react to fiction. Called "Your Brain on Fiction", the article explains how our brains react to the different descriptions we use in our writing. The best example the author, Annie Murphy Paul, used was the difference between "he had strong hands", which apparently does nothing for us, and "he had leathery hands" which immediately lights up the sensory part of our brains.

Using words that not only describe how something is or generally what it looks like, but invokes a sense really sparks a reaction. So while I could have written "it was really hot" in the beginning of Magic In The Storm, I have "heat swirled around them threatening to burst into flames". Instead of "she cried", I've got "barely keeping the tears from her voice". More evocative. More sensory.

So many times, we've been told to use the five senses in our writing. Now we've got empirical, hard facts proving to us just how important this is.

What I find so fascinating about this, aside from all the really cool stuff neuroscientists are doing now, is that they say reading a story which sparks the senses in our brains is as exciting to us as experiencing these things in real life. We get that movie playing in our heads, we experience the highs and lows our characters are going through, we "see" what they see, "feel" what they feel. We get a complete experience just from diving in between the pages of a book. Can you get any better than this?

As a writer who works hard on that deep point of view, on making that experience as real and exciting as possible, I don't think anything could be more exciting than this. Is evocative writing easy? No way! It takes writing and then rewriting and then editing and then rewriting some more to create that experience, but in the end, it's so worth it. So get out there, people, and spark some neurons!