“Taste” Writing: 5 Senses

Now that we’ve taken a deeper look at two of the senses, sound and sight. Let’s take a more in depth look at one of the hardest senses to describe in some settings—taste.

All great authors write using the five senses, and the best know how to incorporate just a touch of taste to highlight an emotion, experience, or mood, or to fill out a setting. These masters draw their readers deeper into the world, scene, or setting of a story by embracing utilizing the five unique qualities of tastesavory, sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.

The tongue alone has over 10,000 taste buds that are able to work together to taste over 100,000 different flavors. Simply describing a taste as sweet is like describing the Mona Lisa as just “some painting”.

Writers have the ability to create masterpieces out of taste descriptions. A word picture written in a book has the ability to not only connect with the reader, but if done properly, it can cause the reader to salivate or unconsciously experience that same sensation while they read. As an author, you have the ability to be like the famous bell-ringing scientist Pavlov. Each taste you craft into your manuscript helps heighten your reader’s sense of connection to your story world.

As an exercise take sixty-seconds and write what you taste in the scene shown in this picture.