I am a writer–surprise!–and before I really started studying writing and not just doing it I didn’t understand what I was doing.

Not that I was bad at it. I just didn’t know.

Like someone learning to pick out notes of their favorite Enya songs on a piano, in a stuffy old-wood and older B.O. smelling piano practice cubby in the lower bowels of the music department at their college. Not knowing how to read music.

(I actually did know how to read music; I just didn’t have any sheet music. Or the money to buy it.)

So tink-tink, there’s the note. And after a couple weeks I could play the song in full.

(Years later I got the sheet music and found I had gotten a couple of the notes wrong. Not bad notes, just made a different version–I liked mine better.)

As writers starting out, we do the same thing.

We’ve been reading for years and have a general internal sense of the feel of a good story. Subconsciously hearing the word notes and deciding or not if we like the song.

We don’t know why, necessarily. Rarely think about it.

There are the obvious issues, like the first paragraph of a book is so long and convoluted that I can’t slog my way through it before the cover is closed and the paperback is slid back into the dust of the used bookstore shelf.

I’ve also thrown books across the room because the end was wrong. To me. Or there just wasn’t an ending.

Or I knew where it was going and I did NOT want to go there (I really, really, REALLY prefer happy endings.).

And sometimes the writing is so good it takes me all the way to the end of a story I didn’t want in me. A heart-twisting tale so vivid and real I feel like it was my own.

(I still wish I had never read that story.)

But how? Why? What made the writing that good, powerful? What snagged me by my reading feelies and dragged me all the way to the last word.

Would you believe me if I said…my taste buds?

Yep. Hard to believe, but my actual little nobb-ules (that’s totally a word) on the pink whale that lives between my teeth is the culprit.

Here’s why–

One of the first things I learned in one of my first true and eye-opening writing classes was to hook the reader you need to put the five senses into your writing.

Five senses.

Touch, taste, smell, sound and sight.

Sight is easy, unless you are writing someone blind.

Joe sees Jenny doing something.

Touch.

Joe picks up Jenny, her silk dress making her slippery to hold.

Sound.

Joe picks up Jenny with a grunt, her silk dress making her slippery to hold.

But here are the most powerful senses – taste, smell. They are also so related they are more like two avenues to the same place.

Joe picks up Jenny with a grunt, her silk dress making her slippery as a sardine to hold and just as smelly. 

(Poor Jenny.)

If you look at the first couple paragraphs of the beginning of your favorite books you will likely see taste. Food. Even food colors. Something in their mouth. Odor in the room.

Orange, even written as a color, is also a food with a strong taste memory for most people. Who doesn’t drink OJ? (It even has its own acronym, so come on!)

Colors as taste: Walnut, cranberry, eggshell, orange, lemon, buttercream, olive, lavender…

And so much more.

So check through the beginnings of your favorite books, even the start of each chapter of your favorite book. How many tastes (smells) do you find?

And if you are reading along on something and it’s not catching you, maybe you’re hungry for a four-course meal of reading and it’s just not hitting the spot.