For this post, we’ll give the fab five (sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell) a break. They’re a trusty bunch, and we know they’re important to creating believable worlds for our characters and immersive experiences for our readers, but we can use other senses to make our fiction great, too.

What about thermoception?

Our sense of heat and cold. Do your characters live in Antarctica or Indiana in January? (Basically the same thing.) If so, this sense will be important in your writing. Actually, it’s important, whether the temperatures are extreme or not.

Every time we walk into a room, step outside, turn on a fan, put on a jacket, don a hat, remove our gloves, or change our environment in any way our bodies sense changes in temperature. Think about all of the changes of settings your characters experience and the changes in temperature that come along with them.