What do you feel?

Lets get one thing straight. I'm not here to post about my boring things that happen during my day at work. Lets be honest, financial administration is a dull dull world and even the people in it don't want to hear or read about it. I'm not going to tell you about how my cats are, nor my housemates or anyone else I know is either. You're not going to want to hear about what I ate for breakfast nor how many cups of coffee I drank today either.

What I am going to talk about is writing, I am here to learn, practice and think about my skills as a writer. I hope to complete a variety of tasks on a nearly day-to-day basis. I have a long list of tasks to do which I will post the results for here and hopefully learn some tricks and tips along the way. I will also put details of what I am currently working on and any of the trials and tribulations I face while fighting my way into the publishing world.

So, for the first exercise...

I follow a variety of people on Twitter and one of them is an author who posts regular links to articles. Some of them I follow and one came up the other day about what we feel. Often, when writing, I tend to focus too much on the merely visual aspects of the five senses and this article suggested. One idea it had was to sit and really pay attention to what is going on around you, so here goes.

What can you hear?

I always assumed the room where the PC is, also the bedroom, was a quiet room but in fact it is rather noise-filled. I can hear:

• A van engine waiting outside for someone.
• Some metal object, which I can only guess is rather large, being dragged across the floor.
• Voices from someone passing by outside the house.
• The hum of cars driving past the top of the street.
• A motorbike thrumming past.
• The whir of the laptop as it does whatever it is that makes it work.
• The wind rustling the curtains through the open window.
• The kittens chasing each other around the room.
• The smack of the keys as I am typing.
• The hum of the router when its plugged in, its a bit old and we need a new one that doesn't hum.
• A crow cawing as it flies by.

This is a lot of noise for what I thought was the quiet room of the house. It's amazing what we hear that doesn't register in your brain. The same relates to the small things that we feel but don't bother to acknowledge, for example right now I can feel:

• The fabric of my jeans pulled against my thighs.
• The cold air blowing against my toes from the open window.
• The ache in my middle finger where I landed on it last week after tumbling off a chair.
• Where my watch is sitting on my left wrist.
• The rings on my fingers.
• The dull soreness in my back from sitting in the chair at work all day.
• I have a vague itching notion in my left armpit where my bra has been rubbing, its not painful and I can barely feel it but its still there.
• My lips feel tight due to not having enough water to drink today.

It's these small details that I really need to start bringing in to my writing, these things should make my characters come alive more so than they do now. It's not just these two senses either. There are things I can smell that when I really sit and think about it, come alive, rather than just being in the background. I guess small details make a big difference.