Sensory Writing: Smell (Part 5 of 6)

This is part five of the Sense Series. We’ve covered sensory writing, sight, sound and touch. Now we’ve come to smell.

Helen Keller described the power of smell like this: “The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief.”

Experts say that smell is the sense most closely related to memory. The one that can transport us in time. It is also the sense I am least able to discuss. I was born without the sense of smell (congenital anosmia). I have not smelled anything in my life. Never will (so please do not ask me to smell things, especially things like ammonia. Been there—done that—can’t smell it).

Since I cannot smell, you will never see a description of smell in anything I write. If I can’t experience it, it’s awkward discussing it. However, assuming you can smell, you should include smell in your work. It’s an important element in creating a fully realized world. I would love to add it in as another layer in my work and my world, but the only way to do that would be to borrow descriptions from others and I am not willing to do that.

Smell is a powerful sense. Not only can a single whiff bring entire moments in time to mind, scent is also a way people share experiences. If I made a list of common smells — old books, cut grass, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies — I could make you smell them (or so they say). There is a collective response to smell (or so I’m told). But don’t be afraid to turn those expectations around. Maybe your character hates the smell of cut grass because every tragedy in her life happened during the heat of summer when the world smelled of grass cuttings. Or perhaps your character loathes the scent of chocolate cake because he only got a piece after a beating as a way of apology.

Marcel Proust described it like this:

When a distant past nothing subsists, after people are dead, after the destruction of things alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and flavor are still long , like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, the ruin of everything else, and bear unfaltering, in their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
In Search of Lost Time and Love, Marcel Proust

Layering in scents will enhance your scene. As Patrick Süskind, author of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer said, “Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.”

But for as universal as many scents are, it is incredibly difficult to describe a scent without relying on an understanding of smell. It is akin to describing color to a blind person, although they did a great job of that in the movie The Mask. The Smithsonian is trying to catalog scents without using common terms as they work toward cataloging and preserving scents by examining their chemical signature. It is a study I am following closely. I know this is not an easy task because I have yet to find anyone who can describe scents to me in a way that makes sense. Most of the time, they relate smells to food. It is a fair attempt, but not complete. I still don’t have a clue how old books smell.

Luckily, most people are able to smell and will understand what you mean when you include common scents, like urine, skunk spray, baby powder and other common smells. You may struggle if you use more arcane references, but with a bit of description, most readers should understand your meaning.

The bottom line is that adding scent in your writing will give your reader a deeper experience. Since this is not my area of expertise, I will leave you with some examples of scent in fiction:

This scent had a freshness, but not the freshness of limes or pomegranates, not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles, not that of a May rain or a frosty wind or of well water… and at the same time it had warmth, but not as bergamot, cypress, or musk has, or jasmine or daffodils, not as rosewood has or iris… This scent was a blend of both, of evanescence and substance, not a blend, but a unity, although slight and frail as well, and yet solid and sustaining, like a piece of thin, shimmering silk… and yet again not like silk, but like pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk – and try as he would he couldn’t fit those two together: milk and silk! This scent was inconceivable, indescribable, could not be categorized in any way – it really ought not to exist at all. And yet there it was as plain and splendid as day.
Perfume The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Suskind

He put on his inevitable overcoat in spite of the budding heat of the morning and set off to do what he had to do. Miraculously the perfumes of the Skeleton went ahead of him and smoothed his way. Instead of shooing him off and telling him to go to the gate on the city’s far side, to wait in line for permission to enter the Courtyard of Public Audience, the guards went out of their way to assist him, sniffing the air as if it bore good news and bursting into improbably welcoming smiles.
The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.
1984, George Orwell

The air reeked of hot metal, overheated electronic components, scorched insulation – and gasoline.
The Bad Place, Dean Koontz

The circus looks abandoned and empty. But you think perhaps you can smell caramel wafting through the evening breeze, beneath the crisp scent of the autumn leaves. A subtle sweetness at the edges of the cold.
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

As this happens, my sinuses ignite with a new smell, something similar to the life energy of the Living but also vastly different. It’s coming from Julie, it’s her scent, but it’s also mine. It rushes out from us like an explosion of pheromones, so potent I can almost see it.
Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

Straightening up, he was struck with a humid waft of boiled hot dogs and some kind of furry bean-based soup that threw him right back into tenth grade.
Samaritan, Richard Price

The air smelled of warm brandy punch. There was a yeasty undertone of spilled beer. I assumed this must be the room where the actors and singers celebrated their performances lat into the night. I stepped in the circle of the lantern.
Mozart’s Last Aria, Matt Rees

She noted the table had been set for two. A pair of seductive high heels stood near the couch, facing her, like a ghost was standing in them, watching. The apartment was still, the slider closed against the cool December night. Good for scent. She closed her eyes. Salt air. Baked fowl. Coffee. Goddamned rubber gloves, of course. A whiff of gunpowder? Maybe a trace of perfume, or the flowers on the table—gardenia, rose, lavender? And of course, the obscenity of spilled blood—intimate, meaty, shameful.
She listened to the waves. To the traffic. To the little kitchen TV turned low; an evangelist bleating for money. To the clunky someone in the old walkway. To her heart, fast and heavy win her chest. Merci felt most alive when working for the dead. She’d always loved an underdog.
Red Light, T. Jefferson Parker

We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausages and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hot plate right there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters like an idiot antidote to winter. There is a febrile excitement in the crowds that line the narrow main street, necks craning to catch sight of the crêpe-covered char with its trailing ribbons and paper rosettes.
Joanne Harris, Chocolat

The smell is like daylight trapped for years until it has gone sour and rancid, of mouse droppings and the ghosts of things unremembered and unmourned. It echoes like a cave, the small heat of our presence only serving to accentuate every shadow. Paint and sunlight and soapy water will rid it of the grime, but the sadness is another matter, the forlorn resonance of a house where no one has laughed for years. Anouk’s face looked pale and large-eyed in teh candlelight, her hand tightening in mine.
Joanne Harris, Chocolat

Even from outside, she could smell the tight, hot, closed-in scent of the interior, like old linens left in a dryer for too long.
The Sugar Queen, Sarah Addison Allen

As I stepped through the door, my nose was treated to an amazing bouquet of aromas: wood smoke from the stove, floral shampoo (or maybe soap), burned coffee, the steamy smell of drying sleeping bags, muddy boots that stank from within and without, bug repellent, the distinctly sweet odor or consumed alcohol being exhaled, and some sort of freeze-dried curry dish being heated on a propane gas stove.
The Precipice, Paul Doiron

He smelled like the deep winter outside, where people were slipping in the frozen streets, and snow had turned to filth in the gutters.
Memnoch the Devil, Anne Rice

A sour stench of wetness and rot issued from a crack opening in the ground, like the reek of morning breath from a yawning earth. She stared uncomprehendingly at dirt and rocks and small trees falling into the widening gap as the cooled shell of the molten planet cracked in the convulsion…The girl trembled in wide-eyed horror as the foul-breathed gaping maw swallowed everything that had given meaning and security to the five short years of her life.
Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M. Auel

When my father returned from some name on the European map that hung on the wall in our dining room, he smelled like other times and places, spicy and tired.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

The room was filled with the pleasant smell of candles just snuffed, a smoke that was sweet and wholly unthreatening. A smell that meant it was late now, time to go to bed.
Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

Let the mixture stand before filling the rolls.
Tita enjoyed this step enormously; while the filling was resting, it was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. Tita liked to take a deep breath and let the characteristic smoke and smell transport her through the recesses of her memory.
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel

Some smells were sharp, an olfactory clatter of heels across a hardwood floor. Others felt like the warmth in the air at the far end of summer. Lillian watched as the scent of melting cheese brought children languidly from their rooms, saw how garlic made them talkative, jokes expanding into stories of their days. Lillian thought it odd that not all mothers seemed to see it—Sarah’s mother, for instance, always cooked curry when she was fighting with her teenage daughter, its smell rocketing through the house like a challenge. But Lillian soon realized that many people did not comprehend the language of smells that to Lillian was as obvious as a billboard.
Perhaps, Lillian thought, smells were for her what printed words were for others, something alive that grew and changed. Not just the smell of rosemary in the garden, but the scent on her hands after she had picked some for Elizabeth’s mother, the aroma mingling with the heavy smell of chicken fat and garlic in the over, the after-scent on the couch cushions the next day. The way, ever after, Elizabeth was always part of rosemary for Lillian, how Elizabeth’s round face had crinkled up into laughter when Lillian had pushed the small, spiky branch near her nose.
The School of Essential Ingredients, Erica Bauermeister