This week: Making Scents Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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When you walk into a room, you inhale memories. Some places harbor distinctive scents. Coffee houses. Libraries. Hospitals. Some scents linger in memories of times past. Jasmine and juniper with sensuous nights. Lilies and carnations with funerals. Popcorn and peanuts with circus clowns.
Odors go directly from nose to brain. In fact, they go to a particular part of the brain, the limbic system even before they go to the conscious parts. We share this system with our most ancient mammal ancestors. It plays a major role in mood, memory, and emotion.
Scent is one of the most important senses humans possess. People used to think the human nose was limited. Compared to a dog’s nose, or more accurately, a dog’s olfactory lobe, it is limited. But recent research shows that humans can distinguish over one trillion distinct scents. What we apparently can’t do is pick out distinctive scents when thirty or more are mixed more or less equally in a sample. Dogs, on the other hand, can discern the faintest of scents. The difference between us and our canine companions is one of discernment as opposed to perception.
Since smells go directly to the limbic system, they are one of the most intimate and immediate of all senses. They can lift us up or slam us down. They can make us smile or bring a tear. As authors, we can use scents to add mood to our fiction, and to deepen characterization, setting, and even plot.
In the last couple of decades, marketing researchers have claimed many connections between specific scents and moods. For example, they recommend patchouli to ease the stress that people feel when buying big ticket items. They claim lemon enhances worker performance and attitude, while lavender heals and reduces stress. The fresh scent of jasmine is supposed to soothe frazzled nerves and stimulate positive feelings. Many high-profile companies such as Nike and Hilton have hired consultants to formulate proprietary scents for their stores and hotels.
The bad news is that many of the claimed connections between scent and mood appear to be cultural, with wide differences even between the US, the UK, and Europe. Even bigger differences arise where cultures assign a higher value to scent, which is historically degraded in the West. Just think about it...what does it mean if we say something “smells?”
Still, scent possesses a visceral power. Unlike any other sense, the brain processes smell before we are consciously aware of smelling—the thalamus is the last part of the brain activated when we encounter a new odor. Using scent makes your fiction more real. Necessarily, readers will bring their own expectations and culture to what we write. In fact, we want them to do that, to be our partners in imaging our fictional world, since it makes our fiction more real for them.
It’s tempting to write things like, “Ruby smelled jasmine and juniper.” The problem is that this tells the reader what Ruby smelled. This filters the scent through Ruby and distances the reader from the sensation.
Now, it’s true that in third person limited, the most ubiquitous narrative choice for fiction today, you want the reader to have a fictional dream playing in their mind, a dream that puts them inside Ruby’s head and experiencing the fictional world through her. But you wouldn’t tell us Ruby is afraid. Instead, you’d show her fear by having her heart thud or adrenalin sending prickles out her fingertips. Similarly, don’t tell the reader what she smells. Instead, describe the scent directly. That’s more immediate and intimate for the readers. If you are using third person limited, the readers are already in Ruby’s head, so they will infer she smelled it. If you want to emphasize this fact, you could have her react in some way. So, instead of writing “Ruby smelled juniper and jasmine,” you might write something like this:
The breeze carried a whiff of jasmine and juniper. Ruby's throat tightened and she blinked back a tear. Like Roscoe’s cologne, like love, like death.
The passage never says Ruby smelled anything. We infer she did even without knowing she’s the point-of-view character because she’s reacting to the scent. The passage never says she’s sad, either. The nature of her reaction shows that.
Finally, the passage never tells us what Ruby’s thinking—there are no thought tags, no “she remembered,” no italics. These all distance the reader from the emotional content of the moment. Instead, the passage simply reports what she’s thinking.
This method of reporting Ruby’s internal thoughts, memories, and emotions is called free direct discourse, and is the topic of a future newsletter.
I said earlier it’s our job as authors to make our fiction real. That’s not just my opinion. I’m quoting Hemingway, who said, "I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea, a real fish, and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough, they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."
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For Authors: June 02, 2021 Issue [#10791]
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