As far as which senses you use for description, or whatever else: you use them as you need them, the way the pov uses them.

For instance, what senses do you use while cooking? All of them (unless you are blind, or you are hearing impaired, or you have a cold that impairs your taste of taste AND smell — but you must touch in order to cook — but if you don’t that is a telling detail by lack, because it must be some robotized, digitized, microwave form of cooking (which I will never believe is cooking, but nevermind). But one will be mostly dominant at particular parts of the process.

I use the sense of hearing to considerable extent while cooking. Hearing what was cooking on with the steaming vegetables, the rice steamer, boiling water, etc., enables to gauge time, the point of that process, while I am away from the stove and doing something else. I’m not using any other sense.

When I can smell the aroma of a baked potato, I know the process of baking it has reached the point where the potato will be fully baked in about another 10 minutes. I am only using my sense of smell then. To be sure the potato has baked all the way through, I put on my oven mitt and squeeze it gently. By the sense of touch I can tell if it is finished baking. I am only using my sense of touch then. If it is baked, I take it out of the oven. At no time has my sense of vision been in play.

This is allows me to do something else while making dinner. Which usually means watching dvds — watching tv! because no matter how much experience I have, it is impossible for me to write and successfully cook simultaneously. The food is always ruined because I am always missing the signals, which are again, almost all about time. Cooking is so much about time …

Love, C.

Besides which, following the character trait rule, if you completely avoid the kinesthetic, for example, readers may assume that “Look but don’t touch” is part of your character’s internal programming.

Taste is about the hardest sense to incorporate, but you don’t need to have your characters run around licking everything in sight, especially since gustatory and olfactory are linked. Something as simple as “the air hung thick with greasy smoke” will serve for sight, taste, scent and even touch, since that’s the sort of thing that stings the eyes and even collects on the palate.

I would disagree with this. Not only does it potentially break the pov point you made just before — not every character is going to pay attention to smells, or sounds, or whatever — but if an author adhered to this too enthusiastically, the descriptions would start to feel like checklists. (”Okay, now I need the character to lick something . . . .”) I support using all five senses in general — touch and smell in particular are frequently overlooked, except for stereotypical uses — but not in every description.

It could be a useful exercise, though, to broaden one’s descriptive capabilities.

I should have said that I was trying to intimate a high class opium den, with pretentions to being a nice Chinese-accented Victorian bedroom, but Laura is especially right in that the characters and dialogue would inform the scene. That set might work as the personal bedroom of a high class madam, though someone seeing the bed might guess that she has an opium habit or that the bed had previously belonged to a client who was one.

Of course part of this springs from me being a bit of a furniture buff and thinking that opium beds are really cool.

With the jacaranda, also agreed. Someone not knowing the names of the trees intimates either that one or the other is not local or that the viewpoint character is particularly oblivious and has simply never paid attention to such things.

Of course, it’s also completely possible for an inquisitive child to grow up oblivious because the adults don’t know anything either. My street growing up was planted up and down the block with carob trees, but hell if we knew what they were as kids. We called them “stink pod trees” and threw them around like boomerangs. It wasn’t until ten years ago that I saw them for sale at an herbalist at ridiculous prices that I realized what in the hell they were.

Also, a child of the area probably would know ‘jacaranda’–I remember I was six or seven when I asked what the purple trees were on my grandmother’s street and I adored the word jacaranda. We talked about them at school when they bloomed, and the blossoms blew over the blacktop from the street behind the school during the hot winds.

This is all not to argue with your main point, which is excellent, just that one has to be careful one’s details do not mislead, or that one does not assume knowledge in the reader that isn’t there.

But I agree with you, too, on the main point of this blog. I’m often torn between describing scenes in full or really only focusing on one aspect of them at a time. I used to stop in the middle of writing, think to myself, “I really haven’t described much recently,” and then start describing away at the scene. The result was, to say the least, clunky and narrative-breaking. But when I started imagining the scene fully but only writing about the details that jumped out at me, or describing the bare bones that someone would need to fill in the rest, my descriptions started sounding more natural and it was easier to picture the scene in subsequent readings because I didn’t have as many details to keep track of, but I still had enough. I guess what I’m saying is that the less I concentrated on how I was describing things, or how much I was describing things and just described them, the better I got at it.

I do practice all the time, though. When I’m bored (such as when I’m on a bus or a train with no book, or walking somewhere) I often try to describe my surroundings in my head, focusing on all the senses and all the minute details I can pick up. Does anyone else do this?

For example, a room with red silk hangings, an elaborately carved lacquerwood bed, and curling smoke in the air is fairly obviously an opium den

It is? I read that description and immediately imagined a luxurious bedroom with scented smoke curling out of a fireplace. Not a pipe or a drug in sight. I obviously don’t have the connections you do in my mind, as the fact that this was an opium den never even flickered in my mind.
Not that this negates what you are saying in any way. I just felt compelled to point out that your obvious image wasn’t obvious for me at all.