You know all those sensory moments that overwhelm you with the emotions they conjure up? A great work of music, a spectacular vista, a childhood scent, the atmosphere before a storm? The moment your balance tips and a fall is inevitable, with all the subjective time in the world to watch it happen?

How can you achieve the same effect on your reader, just using your words?

Well, you can’t, directly… not really. You have to trick them into doing it to themselves.

How does it work when it happens to me? How can I get a handle on it? Well, there’s a sort of reverse process for me. I may feel the shiver first, and then I may realize what caused it, almost simultaneously. And then I revisit the shiver with intent to understand why that happened so that I can deepen the perception, and that can set off a feedback loop that makes the moment deeper.

So if I want to try to trigger the same feeling in a reader, I have to surprise him first, then elaborate on what happened, using the characters in the story as the the instruments. Let’s say the character he’s reading about is catching his first glimpse of a woman he will eventually marry. He may miss his footing, stumble, and look down to catch his balance again. And then he wonders, why did I trip over myself? What was it? And then he turns and sees the woman, and takes his misstep as some sort of tap on the shoulder by a friendly spirit, telling him “pay attention”. And so he stops and stares.

And the reader has gone right through all that with him.

What works on you will work on your readers if you can recognize how it works for you and then feed that to them through the medium of your characters.

Got any tips you find especially useful, yourself?