Creative writers use sensory cues to help readers imagine what they have not experienced.

Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera describes pain synesthetically, encouraging readers to cross-connect sensations.

Synesthetic descriptions engage readers cognitively, motivating them to imagine more intensely.

How do creative writers guide readers to imagine beyond their experiences? How can carefully chosen words make unimaginable pain imaginable? Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera’s novel, The Stone Virgins (2002), describes a woman’s recovery after she is raped, mutilated, and forced to watch her sister’s murder during the violent conflicts of the early 1980s. To help readers sense what her character Nonceba is feeling, Vera cues them to cross-connect senses as synesthetes do.

Vera’s technique doesn’t require readers to be synesthetes. All people integrate sensorimotor information to produce unified, multimodal experiences, but synesthetes (about one in 40 to 100 people) experience some sensory qualities as connected, such as colors and musical tones (Ramachandran et al. 2020, 5). In the minds of synesthetes, these sensory cross-connections are conscious, systematic, idiosyncratic, and uncontrollable (Spence & Deroy 2013, 174-75). Having a vague feeling that the musical tone G should be green does not make one a synesthete. For a sound-to-color synesthete, G is automatically green, visually as well as auditorily.

To help readers imagine unfamiliar sensations, Yvonne Vera takes advantage of people’s tendency to compare information from different sensory channels. In some respects, all innovative writing is synesthetic. To describe a color so that a reader can feel it, an author needs to recruit senses beyond vision (Fitch 2020). Throughout The Stone Virgins, Vera offers multisensory cues to describe Nonceba’s experiences. She uses the same kind of multimodal prompts to open the mental world of Nonceba’s attacker, Sibaso, not so much to arouse sympathy as to show how the psychological damage caused by war can spread (Gagiano 2007, 64-70). The beauty of Vera’s language contrasts with the violence she describes (Norridge 2008, 170; McCann 2009, 85), but her synesthetic metaphors serve her........

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