One thing a lot of people take for granted, including me, is sight. Actually, all the senses are often taken for granted until something shakes us up. Maybe a sense is temporarily or permanently lost, or is permanently or temporarily impaired. Or maybe it's overwhelmed, or challenged, or seduced by something wonderful.
When a writer sits down to set a scene, they're advised to use all the senses. I think the advice should go one step further. Use all the senses, but exploit them to the full. I wish I'd heard that a long time ago.
Let's use sight as an example.
I woke early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I thought I'd surf online for a bit and then maybe do some gardening. I hadn't been to Pinterest in a while, so that was my third stop. I'm glad I did. Wow, did I find some amazing boards to follow. One in particular featured color photography. What an inspiration! It made me want to write. Why? The colors. The composition. The spectacular landscapes, interiors, the human faces with such expressions that go far beyond the classic supermodel smolder we've been inured to. BTW, I thought about whether inured is really the right term, but I kept it because although a model's face is on the surface beautiful, and the expressions are often poised, lively or elegant, they are in fact unpleasant and lifeless when compared to, for example, this:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/171559067029144126/
or this:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/305189312220781522/
I love this board, btw. It's expressions:
https://www.pinterest.com/zury2012/expressions/
But I digress (a bit.) You set a scene, and the mind is often limited by the sights you're used to, or the sights you have idealized in a shadowed way. The difference between the sight of the imagination combined with experience, and the full range of what can be seen and described, is pretty big. For example, when I went to describe Saphir, I thought a bit about mountain fortresses, and Yellowstone National Park, and exotic fortifications I half-remember from visiting Prague. But until I started looking at photos of these places, the descriptions didn't have a lot of fire. I still think I could have gone further with those. I needed to pace the character emotions and didn't have the luxury of going on for three pages about Lark's first view of Saphir, but still.
You live, you hopefully learn.
I also mentally catalogue flavors when I go to new restaurants. It's not as good as eating while writing, but it's better than not tasting something other than the daily fare you've gotten used to and then attempting to describe something exotic (or worse, having the characters eat what you eat even if it doesn't make sense. Better not to mention food at all, IMHO.) And sensations. When I cut myself on accident, for example. Crazy, I know.
The thing is, those photos (or better yet, seeing amazing things with your own eyes) can go so far beyond imagination, it can be jaw-dropping. When I grew up I'd been taught that the imagination can go way beyond what the world really is. That might have been true before long-distance travel was practical, and when photography was less prevalent and far less accessible. But now? Sorry. I've had my imagination blown away a bit more often by real photographs than I've had the work of someone's imagination blow away what exists and has been captured by film in our universe. Sometimes the imagination wins, hands down. But in the contest between imagination and reality, the imagination's superiority is certainly not the foregone conclusion I'd been taught.
So that's my rant about sight in particular and putting senses on the page. Now, back to looking at images of woods and hills. Because I need to set the scene. Again! How I suffer, being forced to look at gorgeous images for the sake of my art. Alas.