Terry Hodges' eloquent presentation on writing tips at the Mendocino conference in 1999 reminded me of a technique that works well for me--and, it certainly works very well for Terry. The technique is evoking the senses--sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. Terry calls it "the music of good writing," the knack of using words to create pictures and sensations in the mind.

In his book, Tough Customers, Terry creates a visceral reality, using words to lower the temperature and raise goose bumps: "Santa Rosa Island . . . lay silent beneath its damp cloak of ocean fog. But, it wasn't the chill air that caused Warden Ken Nilsson a brief shudder, rather an uneasy sensation that had crept over him and was plucking at the hairs on the nape of his neck."

Terry's writings are a good example of how, even in a story loaded with information and facts, a writer can arouse sound, movement and feeling.

I have learned the hard way to record my senses in my notes, rather than recording the facts and figures on every museum and historical site, every state park visitor's center, every hotel and restaurant. I still collect background material--brochures, guidebooks, menus and postcards. But, the notes I now take in the field describe the acrid, salty smell of a seaweed-strewn beach; how the sagebrush scratched my legs as I rode a skittish horse; how it felt to be elbowed aside by artisans in Otavalo, eager to set up their goods in the marketplace. Weeks after I hiked in a Costa Rican rainforest, I used my notes to write about how it feels, looks and sounds to be at the mercy of wild animals:

"Huddled together in a dripping cathedral of impenetrable green, we flinched under the angry, ear-splitting screams of a dozen spider monkeys about fifty feet above our heads. Teeth bared in furious grins, the monkeys raced from branch to branch, raining leaves and monkey diatribes down on us. When they leapt away to distant trees, I start breathing again.

The sudden silence began to fill up with a steady murmuring, the white sound of the jungle, as a thousand birds, insects, frogs and snakes resumed their lives around us."

In Last Chance to See, the British writer, Douglas Adams, evokes a number of our senses in a rather shocking way, as he recounts meeting up with giant lizards--the famous Komodo dragons--while they devoured live goats:

"We clambered and slithered down the slope, almost too scared to know or care what we were doing, and within a few minutes were standing just two feet from the largest of the dragons. A length of dripping intestine was hanging from its open jaws, and its face was glistening with blood and saliva. The inside of its mouth was a pale, hard pink, and its fetid breath, together with the hot foul air of the gully, produced a stench so overpowering that our eyes were stinging and streaming and we were half faint with nausea." Try eating lunch after reading that!

In his "Outdoors" column in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tom Steinstra graphically conjures up the sound of a trout: "That is when you hear the giant rainbow trout slurping up their dinners across acres of near-still waters. . . . like a plumber suctioning a plunger. Schlurp, schlurp, schlurrrrp!"

One of my heroines in the writing trade, the Welsh travel writer, Jan Morris, is a master at producing mystery, movement, sound and color, and even the character of a people, all in a few sentences. In her book, Spain, she describes the annual festival of Feria in Seville:

"In the evening the binge begins, and the fairground, blazing with flags and lights becomes a stupendous kind of night club. The air is loud with handclaps and the clicking of castanets and all among the huge ornamental buildings . . . groups of young people are dancing in the shadows--suddenly swooping like so many flocks of chirping birds, from one corner to another, from one alcove to the next . . .

Everywhere there is the beat of the flamenco, the clatter of heels and castanets, the creak of carriage wheels, the smell of horses, the swish of romantic skirts and the noise, like the shuttle of distant looms, of twenty thousand clapping hands."

You can always retrieve the basic information about a place, months after you have been there. Recalling the assault on your own senses is another matter. When making notes about my impression of a place or an experience, I sometimes say to myself, "How do I feel right now? What colors do I see? What do I hear? How does the food taste? What does the sky look like? What is the temperature? What are the people saying?

Longtime feature writer for the Associated Press, Hugh Mulligan, wrote, "I find it helpful to copy down emotions, observations and passing thought on how I feel about what I'm witnessing or hearing. I take endless notes on everything I hear and see and smell and think or moon about."

The Associated Press Guide to Good Writing maintains that creating color and a sensuous experience for the reader is a matter of detail: "Color is a way of seeing a story. Grand generalizations and indistinct noun-adjective combinations don't add color; particulars do. When you want to describe, do it with precise detail." The book shows how reporters rely on specific visual details to give evocative, intimate glimpses into the nature of a subject, such as in this passage by Red Smith:

"Through the fragrance of the wood fires burning under the elms in the stable area, wreaths of morning mist curled up to be burned away by slanting rays of sunshine. Grooms swathed horses with soapy sponges and rubbed them dry. The rhythmic throbbing of hooves could be heard from the track itself, where the horses were working."

With almost dreamlike, very simple detail, Norman Maclean creates a virtual windstorm in A River Runs Through It:

"As if a signal had been given, not a fish jumped. Then the wind came. The water left the creek and went up in the bushes . . . The air along the creek was filled with osier leaves and green berries. Then the air disappeared from view. It was present only as cones and branches that struck my face and kept going.

The storm came on a wild horse and rode over us."

In the (tongue in cheek) spirit of seasoning your writings by evoking the senses, here is a winning entry in the 2001 Bulwer-Lytton competition that asks entrants to write the first line of a bad novel. The annual contest is held in honor of Victorian author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton who wrote the novel that began. "It was a dark and stormy night".

"The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming madly, "You lied!"