““Here’s what I thought: what if randomly, gratuitously stimulating our senses through detail and description could generate emotions that would help make the reader feel inside the imagined worlds we create? Whenever I offer, by way of written language, a sight, a sound, a smell, a texture, a taste, a temperature, a pleasing or painful sensation, I might be activating emotion and feeling at some level in the brain, regardless of the specificity or function of that detail to the novel’s plot, or the character’s psychology et cetera. If that’s the case, exuberant description, even when apparently unnecessary, becomes a tool of immersion.””
