Is your character in a dark room? Evoke the scene using only SOUND and SMELL. Remember to describe the senses the POV character is experiencing.
Darkness strips sight away, so the senses left behind carry the full weight of the scene, and readers trust what a character hears and smells more than any description of shapes they can't actually see. It also forces restraint, which reads as realism. Picture a character in a basement: the tick of a cooling furnace, the wet mineral smell of concrete, a drip somewhere she can't place. That's enough to make the room breathe without a single visual detail. The caution is pacing — stack too many sensory beats in a row and the prose turns into an inventory list, stalling tension instead of building it. Pick two or three details that matter, let her react to them, and keep the scene moving rather than cataloguing the dark for its own sake.
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