The KAV Cycle

Each of us is accustomed to taking in information, to learning, in our own way.  Some people learn things by doing.  For example, a mechanic might learn how to use his hands to manipulate wrenches and screwdrivers so that he can tear apart a car engine, virtually in the dark.  While another person might find it easier to watch someone else do it and then try to replicate the process.

If you’re a person who learns by doing, you’re what is called a “kinetic” learner.  If you learn well by listening to instructions, you may primarily be an “audio” learner.  If you learn by watching others, you are a “visual” person.  And if you process information by smell, then “scent” may be important to you.

Now, both you and your readers have a learning style.  Of the typical human population, people take in information in the following ways:

Kinetic—17%

Audio—20%

Visual—60%

Smell—3%

So you as a reader have a preference for how you learn information.  And you as a writer have a bias in how you present information.  Subconsciously, you might be great at giving certain kinds of details, but less aware of others.  For example, if you’re a visual learner, you will most likely describe what your protagonist sees when he enters a room.  However, if you’re a poor kinetic learner, you probably won’t describe how the protagonist moves very carefully.

This can lead to a disconnect with your readers.  If you’re an audio person, you might describe very well what your protagonist hears, but a person who learns visually will feel that you aren’t providing enough visual details.

This is one reason that a reader might feel that a story is unclear.  You think you’re writing great—but they find themselves confused.

So you might want to look carefully at your own writing.  When you open a scene, do you explain where your character is and what he is doing?  That’s important to people who learn kinetically.  Do you let the reader know what the protagonist hears in the background?  Hey, as an audio learner, that’s imperative to me.  How about what the character sees and smells?

If you want to appeal to 100 percent of the readers, you have to appeal to all four of these senses on just about every page.

But very few writers appeal to the major senses on a regular basis.  For example, I was looking at a story yesterday by a writer who is strongly “audio.”  She wrote dialog beautifully, as far as the voices and words of the characters went.  But she never described what the protagonist could see.  She never described the characters she was speaking to—their faces, height, hair color or costumes.  Stories like that will leave us readers with the feeling that the characters are just “talking heads.”  So even though the audio was great, the story was written in such a way that 80 percent of the population will feel that it is lacking.

The easiest way to overcome this problem is to make sure that when you are writing, you remember to use the KAV cycle.  In each paragraph, describe what the character is doing, hearing, and seeing in that order, and frequently add in what the character smells.

Professional speakers who study neuro-linguistic programming learn how to do this.  For example, when President Obama talks, he tries to reach a wide audience by using the KAV cycle.  Here is a paraphrase of a speech he gave last year.

Kinetic—I flew down to Louisiana last week . . .

Audio—because I had heard the cries of those who were still suffering from loss some ten years after Hurricane Katrina had landed

Visual—and I wanted to see for myself the destruction that was left, the abandoned homes with their mouldering walls and sagging roofs. . . .

Which of course then leads to another KAV cycle where he promises “So I have decided to fix this problem. . .” and so on.

But you aren’t the president.  You don’t have the thousands of dollars to get trained in how to use neuro-linguistic programming in your writing.

So here is a tip: when you are writing, your goal is to create enough imagined sensory input for your reader so that they forget that they’re reading and instead find themselves “living through the story.”  This means that you must substitute the sights, sounds, smells, movements, thoughts and emotions that they’re feeling with those of your protagonist.

In order to learn where you are weak in your own work, take a look at some of your prose—say five pages of a story that you’ve written.  Study it to see where you are appealing to those four major senses—kinetic, audio, visual, and smell.  If you find that you’re leaving out a sensory detail, say your character’s motions, then go through and add kinetic appeals wherever they are needed, and so on.

You’ll be amazed at how much your writing improves.  Not only will more people find that your story is accessible, that it really transports them, but you’ll also find that the process of writing itself will speed up for you.  That fear of the blank page will fade simply because with every paragraph, you know what elements need to appear.

 In theory, this will help you reach 100% of your audience. But as with most elements of writing, it can be done so poorly, that it can fail.

Let’s take an example of how it can be done badly:

Kinetic: As he raced through the woods,

Audio: a songbird squawked up above in the trees.

Visual: Peering up, he saw a shape flapping in the branches,

Smoke: and he caught a strange, pungent scent.

Do you see how bad that is? It fails to give any precise images, and therefore doesn’t communicate at all.

As a reader, you’re wondering who “he” is. He might be a young man, a tiger, or a robot.

As he is racing, is he sprinting, biking, driving or what?

As for the alleged woods, what kind of trees are we talking about: pines or palms or something else?

If a “songbird” squawked, what kind of songbird was it? You might imagine a squawk, but if you do, you’re probably imaging a jay or a member of the parrot family—which aren’t really songbirds.

As he peers up, can you really envision a “shape” flapping in the branches? You don’t even know what kind of tree to imagine, nor the size of the shape, or its proximity. So you probably don’t get much of an image.

And that strange pungent scent—can you smell it? Is it a citronella candle, a dirty diaper, a dead body, or none of the above?

So just because you know what kind of appeals to make, that doesn’t mean that you’re making them artfully. You need to be specific, and you need to word your appeals carefully.

In the example above, instead of saying “he,” maybe I should be more specific—Eleven-year-old Caleb is “jogging” instead of running, and he is racing among “aspen trees” instead of generic woods. He hears the squawk of a “blue jay” and glances up to see the bird flapping among the leaves, diving down to perch on a white aspen branch not ten feet above his head. I might then describe exactly what a male jay looks like—its crested head, the shades of its plumage, how it moves, and so on. Then I might address that “pungent scent” and let the reader know that it is actually the dry, acrid scent of smoke.

In short, just being precise will help your reader become transported into your fictive universe. But there are even better techniques. For example, in some cases you might find that a sound can be described more evocatively by a metaphor or a simile than a mere description. “The keening howl that came from the kitchen sounded more like a wolf than a human. The call was almost a moan, like something floating over the snow during a full moon, full of hunger and bereavement, rising and falling in ululating tones. I raced into the kitchen to see a woman’s form kneeling upon the floor, almost as if in prayer, and it took me several moments to realize that it Sarah, and that at her knees lay the body of our five-year-old daughter.”

So an appeal to a sense can be quite long, and indeed you might put two or three appeals to the same sense in a row, comparing and contrasting an image so that you heighten the effect.

My point here is that just appealing to the senses isn’t enough. You have to look at each appeal and ask yourself, “Is this enough to bring this image to life, to make it concrete in the reader’s mind?"

And yet, even if you use all of the KAV images properly, it still won’t bring your story to life. Not completely. You see, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we humans respond to more than just sights and smells and sounds. We also have touch and taste. Our perception of the world is colored by emotions, and peppered with thoughts and observations.

So we have to bring in the protagonist’s thoughts and motivations, deal with his or her emotional state, and bring in touch.

It might almost seem as if the art of writing relies upon the reader substituting one sensory input for another. The reader is sitting in a chair, and through words we as writers try to transport her to a hammock on the beach. She hears the drone of her air conditioner, and we substitute the cries of gulls and the shush of waves lapping the sand. She sees a book in her hand with black lines on white paper, and we lovingly create images of palm trees and cerulean waters.

But even that is not enough. In telling a story, we don’t just substitute the reader’s reality for the author’s imagined world. The author must actually provide a story that excites and teases a reader from one sentence to the next, building toward delivering a massive climax, creating surprise and wonder, worry and intrigue, working toward an epiphany so grand that ultimately it doesn’t just entertain the reader, it literally transforms the reader.

So an author must learn to deal with the KAV cycle, but there is so much more to telling a great story.