Improve your Travel Writing
The sensory detail of touch helps readers visualize the experience, whether we’re describing the sensation of what we’re touching, or what is touching us. Certain parts of your body have more nerve endings that others, which is why the touch sensations felt through our fingertips, lips, face, neck, tongue and fee feature more heavily in travel writing.
In travel writing it’s important to write with all of your senses, not just sight. But one sense that is constant in our lives is the sense of touch, and you should always try to drop in a touch descriptor into each scene your describing.
Touch and taste are the most specific of the senses, because they’re unique to the individual experiencing them. Sound, sight, and smell are available to others nearby. Laurie
Sense of Touch
Other sense are located in specific parts of the body, but the sense of touch is different – it’s located all over your body, and in your mind too. A vast network of nerve endings controls our sense of touch and touch receptors, and there are four main types:
- Mechanoreceptors: perceive sensations such as pressure, vibrations, and textures.
- Thermoreceptors: perceives the temperatures of what your skin feels, and the highest concentration of thermoreceptors are found in your face and ears.
- Pain Receptors: perceives pain or stimuli that could cause damage to your skin or body.
- Proprioceptors: sense the position of your body parts in relation to each other and your environment.
Touch is our most versatile sense. It can bring us pleasure or pain (a smooth fuzzy peach vs. a cactus), it can warn us of safety of danger (e.g. smooth pebble vs. a pain of broken glass).
Emotional Response to Touch
In addition to our fact-based touch systems, you also have a discriminative touch system based on the emotional response to a touch. This system changes your physical reaction to touch, based on the social context. Being hugged by a friend vs. a stranger could both physically feel the same, but your emotional response to the hug would be different. This occurs because your brain gets information about the situation’s social context from other parts of your brain.
When writing about touch, the physical is very important to describe, but even more important is the invisible.” —Kellie McGann, The Write Practice
Touch strengthens your connection with your reader
The sense of touch is personal, and when you include narratives about the touch sensation in your travel writing, this intimate glimpse links you with your reader. Touch is real, it’s immediate and is less subjective than smell or taste, so it’s much easier to verbally share the touch experience with a reader.
Numb to your sense of touch?
If we were attuned to our touch sensation all the time, it would result in sensory overload, so our mind filters out the mundane. For example, I’m sitting here fully clothed, but I’ve automatically tuned out the feeling of my clothes against my skin.
But when you’re travel writing, those mundane elements can help to transport your reader into the scene you’re describing. Rather than filtering out your reaction of a touch sensation because it’s a constant in your life, you have to train yourself to become aware of the touch sensation, and your emotional reaction to it.
Get Attuned to Touch
When we encounter unfamiliar destinations or experiences, our touch awareness is heightened so it’s easier to tune ourselves into it to describe it, but our everyday touch sensations are a little harder to capture the feeling and interpret it.
- Become deliberately aware of your touch senses for the next minute. As you sit there you should alternate between closed and open eyes, to see how your interpretation is altered.
- Experiment with how different textured feel using different parts of your body (fingers, lips, arms, palms, feet, leg, etc.) to assess wether the feeling or your reaction or emotional response to it changes.
We all have dominated senses, ones that we rely on to experience the world around us, and I’m primarily a visual personal, but I can’t walk through life without touching things. Whether is stroking a cat or dog, running my fingers over fabric at a market, or as I did yesterday, feeling the texture of a pair of rust colored suede shoes in a shop. For me, it’s an instinctive reflex to reach out and touch something. I have a memory of what it should feel like, but I still reach out to touch an object to make sure it meets the expectation in my mind. It’s almost a reassuring experience that what I think and feel are in tune.
Examples of Touch Elements
- Hot/Cold
- Hard/Soft
- Tingle/Itch
- Rough/Smooth
- Pain/Tickle
- Loose/Stiff
- Wet/Dry
Set a scene using the sense of touch
This example clearly shows the physical and emotional response to a handshake. It’s brief, but it gives the reader a clear sense of the imposing figure I’ve just met. It’s clear I’m not shaking hands with a small child, or else why would I feel so intimidated. But there’s enough leeway in the sentence to let the reader’s imagination go wild:
His iron fingers gripped tight around my hand; I felt caught.
This next example gives more detail, but still leaves some of the scenes setting to a reader’s imagination:
Taylor crawled through the tunnel, wincing as the sharp rocks sliced into his hands and knees. He had to keep head low, so he wouldn’t bang it on the rocks jutting out of the low ceiling. He took a deep breath. Susan Leigh Noble
If you’ve written or come across a travel article that uses the sense of sight effectively, please add the links to the comments below.
Using your sense of touch creates a physical and emotional reaction to your #travelwriting, and provides a scene your reader can relate to. Click To Tweet
For more articles in this fives senses series:
