Successful stories are full of sensory details (colors, shapes, textures, smells, sounds, flavors. When your stories portray a vivid world (“three sweet-scented roses”) rather than a vague one (“some nice flowers”), you make it easier for readers to take the leap of faith into the world of your writing.

Abstraction kills a story

If your story has abstract and vague wording like “After a while, absence from home made fidelity difficult for him and he committed adultery…,” your readers will be less interested in (and less swayed by) what you have to say than if your narration is filled with concrete details.

Here’s a more sensory way of writing the above information necessary for a memoir. “One evening, four months after he left his wife, he went into a bar. He had worked in the sun all day building houses and he was very tired. Somebody played a love song on the jukebox, and he began to ache with loneliness. A waitress with piercing black eyes asked him how he was doing, and he told her a story. He made it into a funny story because he didn’t want her to know how lonely he really was. When he had finished, she laughed, and her laughter rang in his ears. He had not talked to a woman in this way in a long time and…”

The sensory details not only make this story more vivid but transform this lonely man into an Everyman.

Greek myths understood the value of sensory details.

The Greek myth of the Labyrinth illustrates the need for sensory and material details in stories. The Labyrinth was a maze of passageways at the center of which lived the Minotaur, half man/half bull. In the story, a young man, Theseus, entered the Labyrinth to slay the Minotaur.

Many young men had entered the Labyrinth before him only to become lost in the maze and perish. Theseus, however, connected himself to the outside world by a material detail: he used a string. After slaying the Minotaur, he followed his string to retrace his steps out of the Labyrinth and thus re-entered the outside world.

The Labyrinth story provides not only entertainment but also guidance and reassurance for us as memoir writers. As memoir writers, we enter a literary maze at the center of which is “the truth” about our lives. If we are not to get lost in the psychological and emotional labyrinth of characters and events, we and our readers must be connected to the world by sensory and material details just as Theseus remained connected to the outside world by a string.

Good luck writing your memoir and remember to fill them with sensory details.

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