Write Description Using the Sense of Smell
How Scent Can Help Create Better Descriptive Details
Jun 11, 2009
Memories are stored in the hippocampus inside the human brain, which is how certain smells trigger people to remember. Smell is one of the most important senses because mammals use it to recognize food and detect poison. Due to this basic yet vital role, smell is one of the most used parts of the brain. Writers often miss the opportunity to exploit this sense to its fullest effect.
What's that smell? The windows are open because it's warm out, and scents from the neighborhood drift inside the house. It smells like the neighbor next door is doing laundry. And she's using fabric softener sheets. The floral scent smells exactly like Aunt Fannie's perfume.
Start With Something Simple:
The tile was green and shiny. The air smelled like a swamp.
That description is too bland and needs some help:
Green tile glistened in the sunlight. A humid scent like wet moss and mud floated on the air.
Readers may identify better with a mossy, muddy scent than a swamp scent. It creates a good olfactory image.
Simile is an excellent way to communicate a strong description, and so is metaphor. Similes compare one thing to another. Here are some examples of similes:
"He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." Raymond Chandler
"She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat." James Joyce, "The Boarding House"
Metaphors, on the other hand, are more revealing if subtle, and more direct. They offer an immediate impression. Things aren't like other things, they are those things. Such as: He's a pig. A sea of trouble. All the world's a stage. The walls have ears.
Dos and Don'ts
DO use metaphor and simile to spice up your descriptions, just keep them toned down so they don't call attention to themselves and appear amateurish. A little goes a long way.
DON'T rely on cliché for similes and metaphors. Take something like "raining cats and dogs" and make it original by turning it into a more appropriate image for the scene. If not cats and dogs, what about mice and men? Hamsters and guinea pigs? Siamese and Labradors? Point is, take a familiar saying that's recognizable and twist it into something clever.
Examples of the sense of smell in description:
He smelled like bad cologne and breath mints and a sour aftertaste of alcohol left over from the night before. His hair implants still looked like seedlings, but he'd cover them up with the toupee before going on the air, Visine the reddened eyes, and do a quick white-up on his teeth.
Ian smelled like cotton and starch, and beneath that, strangely, like sand from the seashore. His cologne was soft and nutty, like a weakened almond extract, though I decided this guy was as vanilla as they came.
The Taste of Night by Vicki Petterson
An Exercise for Using the Sense of Smell in Description
With eyes closed, take a journey back in time. What scents are the strongest? Where do they come from? What memories do they provoke? Write the experience down using 100 words or less. It can be from either a first person point of view, or the POV of a character in a story you're working on. Don't be afraid to combine olfactory senses with other senses, but try to focus on scent for this exercise.
Make a good story even better by utilizing the senses when writing description. Keep in mind the sense of smell is strongest for inducing memories.
For a related article, see Write Description Using the Sense of Sight.
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