David Madden: evoking sensory images by implication
"A writer for all genres," his blog calls him. David Madden, teacher, novelist and short story writer, is now Professor Emeritus after vacating the Robert Penn Warren chair in Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.
"Your reader expects to see, hear, touch, smell and taste...A cluster of sensory experiences may not be as effective in a given context as...a single sense. 'Fires on the dry mountain slopes surrounding the town had been smoldering for days.' We can see that, but we can also smell it... No other sense is as difficult to stimulate in fiction as smell. But senses are more sharply stimulated by implication than by direct attempts..'John entered the room, followed by a man who had to stoop.'"