Monday Ignition: Beyond the Eye Exercise 

Monday Ignition: Beyond the Eye Exercise 

Key Techniques

1. Multisensory immersion: Layering sound, smell, taste, and touch alongside sight to deepen setting.

2. Emotional resonance through sensory detail: Using sensory impressions to mirror or contrast a character’s state of mind.

3. Selective precision: Choosing the most telling sensory detail rather than piling on every possible sensation.

Prompt (approx. 500 words)

Write a scene in which a character returns to a place from their past that they have not visited in many years. The place can be a home, a café, a classroom, a church, a bus depot, or any location charged with personal history. The character is alone, but the reader should feel their past and present selves collide. Your task is to avoid the visual default. You may include sight, but it cannot be the dominant sensory mode. Anchor the scene in at least three other senses, making one of them the hinge for the character’s emotional response. The sensory details should not exist for decoration; they must shape the character’s thoughts, memories, or physical reactions in the moment. The final paragraph must suggest what this revisiting has changed for the character, without stating it outright.

Evaluation Criteria

– Success depends on sensory variety: at least three senses beyond sight must be present and purposeful.

– Strong writing fuses sensory detail with character psychology; weak writing treats sensory elements as inventory lists.

– The scene should move emotionally; the return should shift something in the character, even subtly.

– Precision outweighs excess: a single well-chosen smell can do more than six vague ones.

Examples

Strong: The bitter metal tang in the air of the old bus depot catches in her throat, the same way it did when she was sixteen, waiting for the bus to take her away. She tastes the rust, remembers the gum she had chewed to mask the nausea, feels her fingers curl into her palm, the same panic prickling back through her skin.

Weak: She smelled the air, which was bad. She heard noises of people. She felt the seat under her. The past came back.

Follow-up Questions for Workshop/Revision

– Which sensory detail in your draft feels most alive, and why?

– Where are you still leaning too heavily on sight?

– How do the sensory elements mirror or resist the character’s emotional state?

– Can one detail be sharpened or substituted to shift the scene’s meaning?

– Does the last paragraph earn its quiet shift, or is it underdeveloped?

Recommended Reading

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “A Temporary Matter” from Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri uses food, silence, touch, and small domestic textures to reveal grief and estrangement, offering a layered example of how non-visual senses can carry emotional weight.

This exercise fits into a two-hour session: 20 minutes close reading of the model text, 60 minutes drafting the scene, 20 minutes sharing excerpts aloud, 20 minutes guided workshop on sensory precision.

AI Disclosure Statement:

This writing prompt was created in collaboration with ChatGPT, an AI model by OpenAI, to support creative practice. ChatGPT assisted with idea generation and drafting; the final text was edited by the author. The illustration was created using Google Gemini.