Smell - Exploring Your Writing Through Your Senses
Sniff, sniff. Sniff. Do you smell that? Is that the scent of creativity filling the air? Of all the senses, this one can really affect you in multiple ways. According to the now-defunct Sense of Smell Institute, the average human being can recognize approximately 10,000 different odors. They said, “And a connection between artists and scent can be traced back at least as far as Leonardo da Vinci, who had such an abiding interest in fragrances that he listed among his many duties for Ludovico il Moro in Milan the practice of court perfumer.”
Typing at your computer limits you to the screen in front of you. Using a journal can give you more sensual opportunities. Choose a journal not just for its visual pleasure but for the smell of the new leather and paper in the journal. Have you ever walked into a room and sniffed the air? Your mood can shift completely by its smell.
We have a long memory regarding scents. Our childhood is full of scent experiences. Discovering our own body odors is a revelation. A smell can send us back to our earliest memories. Places have a smell of their own. Incense lingers in churches, hospitals have a medicinal smell, subways, at least in NYC, have a multitude of smells that can assault the nose and our memory.
The sense of smell is complicated. Many fun things have to happen to get our nose going. It is a defense mechanism. If you watch a show on animals in the wild, you can observe that their sense of smell kicks in. A lion may be deep in the grasses just observing its prey, but the prey has already picked up its scent. An antelope is quietly sipping water and suddenly its head bounces up. You can see it sniffing the air and taking off in the opposite direction.
There are many products out to eliminate bad smells. Watch TV and you will see candles for the kitchen, sprays for offensive sneakers, cleaners that will leave their lemony scent clean smell long after we have mopped our floors. We seem to want to eliminate smells from our repertory of senses. In doing so, we can lose something vital to us. Do we want our olfactory memory to be a floor cleaner?
As writers, we do ourselves and our audience an injustice if we don’t include this potent sense in our writing. But it’s difficult to write about a sense of smell. What if someone has never smelled a gardenia? How can you describe it? It is our job to search out the words to describe what may be elusive. Smells are so visceral, taking our readers to places buried deep into their memory. The smell of a particular food can unleash memories and feelings associated with it. We have a vast storehouse of story ideas just from the sense of smell.
The sense of smell plays a vital role in our sense of well-being and quality of life. The sense of smell brings us into harmony with nature, warns us of dangers, and sharpens our awareness of other people, places, and things. It helps us to respond to those we meet, can influence our mood, how long we stay in a room, who we talk to, and who we want to see again.
Whether a scent is unpleasant or delightful, we can gain much from exploring everything it offers. We can create great poetry or terrifying prose. The smell, as a sense, it is hard to do without. When combined with our other senses we become masters of our creative universe.
Creative Writing Prompts: Smell
• Go on a smelling adventure. Travel to a food court and see if you can identify the food by the smells. You will need a discerning nose to get past initial prejudices of how you think a food court might smell.
• Raid your refrigerator and sniff things out. Remember, some foods release their smell as they warm up.
• Use your thesaurus and look up some synonyms for the word, smell. Describe five things you sniffed out on your smelling adventures.
• Write a piece of poetry or prose around the sense of smell.
• Sniff out some smelly tales that have already been written.
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Typing at your computer limits you to the screen in front of you. Using a journal can give you more sensual opportunities. Choose a journal not just for its visual pleasure but for the smell of the new leather and paper in the journal. Have you ever walked into a room and sniffed the air? Your mood can shift completely by its smell.
We have a long memory regarding scents. Our childhood is full of scent experiences. Discovering our own body odors is a revelation. A smell can send us back to our earliest memories. Places have a smell of their own. Incense lingers in churches, hospitals have a medicinal smell, subways, at least in NYC, have a multitude of smells that can assault the nose and our memory.
The sense of smell is complicated. Many fun things have to happen to get our nose going. It is a defense mechanism. If you watch a show on animals in the wild, you can observe that their sense of smell kicks in. A lion may be deep in the grasses just observing its prey, but the prey has already picked up its scent. An antelope is quietly sipping water and suddenly its head bounces up. You can see it sniffing the air and taking off in the opposite direction.
There are many products out to eliminate bad smells. Watch TV and you will see candles for the kitchen, sprays for offensive sneakers, cleaners that will leave their lemony scent clean smell long after we have mopped our floors. We seem to want to eliminate smells from our repertory of senses. In doing so, we can lose something vital to us. Do we want our olfactory memory to be a floor cleaner?
As writers, we do ourselves and our audience an injustice if we don’t include this potent sense in our writing. But it’s difficult to write about a sense of smell. What if someone has never smelled a gardenia? How can you describe it? It is our job to search out the words to describe what may be elusive. Smells are so visceral, taking our readers to places buried deep into their memory. The smell of a particular food can unleash memories and feelings associated with it. We have a vast storehouse of story ideas just from the sense of smell.
The sense of smell plays a vital role in our sense of well-being and quality of life. The sense of smell brings us into harmony with nature, warns us of dangers, and sharpens our awareness of other people, places, and things. It helps us to respond to those we meet, can influence our mood, how long we stay in a room, who we talk to, and who we want to see again.
Whether a scent is unpleasant or delightful, we can gain much from exploring everything it offers. We can create great poetry or terrifying prose. The smell, as a sense, it is hard to do without. When combined with our other senses we become masters of our creative universe.
Creative Writing Prompts: Smell
• Go on a smelling adventure. Travel to a food court and see if you can identify the food by the smells. You will need a discerning nose to get past initial prejudices of how you think a food court might smell.
• Raid your refrigerator and sniff things out. Remember, some foods release their smell as they warm up.
• Use your thesaurus and look up some synonyms for the word, smell. Describe five things you sniffed out on your smelling adventures.
• Write a piece of poetry or prose around the sense of smell.
• Sniff out some smelly tales that have already been written.
Photo by Jabo Elysée
Thank you for wanting to share this post. Please share it with correct attribution. It is appreciated.
All works are the original content of Sandra Lee Schubert.
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