There are a few pieces of classic advice you come across again and again in creative writing instruction. Show, don’t tell. Kill your darlings. Use all five senses.
The latter, at first, seems fairly easy. Easier than killing one’s darlings, at least. Describe the scene. Evoke what the character’s seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. Give the world texture and depth. Make it real.
It all works pretty well until you get to the nose. Scents, it turns out, are tricky to put into words.
Let’s sniff around and find out why.
It’s Thanksgiving in the United States today. For many people, this will be a very different Thanksgiving. Mostly we’ll be missing the people who have always made the holiday what it is, and missing the rituals we share with those people. Rolling out pie crusts in the kitchen with an aunt. Throwing a football in the backyard with a cousin. Too-tight hugs in the foyer from Grandma, her big soft coat still a little cold against our cheek.
That’s one way to think about what we’ll miss. That’s likely the first way to think about it, too, because it’s often the way these ideas appear in our minds. Flashes of images, almost like photos or bits of a movie, memories from past Thanksgivings overlaid and combined, part fiction, part truth, all emotion. Mostly sight, and maybe a little sound.
But another way to tell that story would be through smell. We could talk about the way our hands smelled like dough all afternoon after making the pie crusts. The way the sweet, raw smell made us think about the story our aunt told us about her time in college, how it helped us figure a lot of stuff out. We could talk about how the backyard smelled like fresh-cut grass. How that was unusual for November, and when our cousin dove for a football, he stained his jeans green at the knees. We could talk about how Grandma’s coat smelled like Chanel No. 5, and her hugs always smelled like that, and every time we walked through an airport or a department store, for the rest of our lives, we’d stop and smell that perfume and think of her.
In her master’s thesis on scent and writing, author Emilie Burack talks about some of the limitations of the English language where scent is concerned. She cites poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman, who calls scent “the one without words”––that is, the sense we have neither the verbs nor the adjectives to effectively describe.
This, in my experience, is unfortunately true. Spend a lot of time trying to write about scents and you’ll find yourself using the word “wafting” more than any reasonable person should. Burack talks about her own travails in her thesis, including how––at her wit’s end with a scene featuring burning peat––she went so far as to buy a brick online and set it on fire in her front yard in an attempt to get the description right. Taking all necessary safety precautions, of course. ;)
Perhaps because of this lack of good, tangible language with which to conceive of our relationship to scent, in the day-to-day, it can be easy to forget how crucial smell is to our experience of the world. But it’s there. Thrumming under the surface of our perception. Threading back to our memories and emotions in a deep and powerful way. Every once in a while, scent thrusts itself to the forefront. When someone melts butter for our favorite sea salt blondies. When a stranger brushes past us, wearing an ex-lover’s perfume. When it rains in autumn and the fallen leaves get damp and, for a week, the whole town smells inexplicably like that one October in high school.
When it comes to scent in storytelling, I never quite feel like I get there. I never quite have the words. It’s more of a writing toward than an arrival. But it’s still worth it. And the moments I get close to capturing this very human experience are the moments I feel the most connected to the characters, their story, and their world.
Happy storytelling, and happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating!
xoxo,
Erin
-------------------
Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
PS: Love the newsletter? Please forward to a friend who might be interested, too!
PPS: New to the Storytelling Weekly? Subscribe here!
PPPS: Interesting in my communications consulting, speaking, or storytelling mentorship service? Find out more here. :)