This week: Taste and Smell and the Five Senses Edited by: Joy  
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“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.”
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
“Smell bypasses thought, jumping from the cerebral cortex straight to the limbic system, an ancient section of our brain.”
Laura Deutch
“None of it was a bad taste, so much, but there was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste, hollow, like the lemon and chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness. My mother’s able hands had made the cake, and her mind had known how to balance the ingredients, but she was not there, in it.”
Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
“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.”
Joanne Harris, Chocolat
“Boris’s hotel was the dirtiest hotel in the street. From its dark doorway there came out a vile, sour odour, a mixture of slops and synthetic soup—it was Boillon Zip, twenty-five centimes a packet.”
George Orwell, from his 1933 memoirs, Down and Out in Paris and London
“Now He is being fed baby food. How he longs for a large piece of bovine flesh, stringy with sinew and marbled with fat, how he dreams every day of thick pork chops, oozing with grease. He cannot bite, he cannot chew, he cannot grab the ribs with his hands.”
Pablo Medina, The Cigar Roller
“I’m Nigerian by blood, American by birth, and Nigerian again because I live here. I have West African features, like my mother, but while the rest of my family is dark brown, I’ve got light yellow hair, skin the color of “sour milk” (or so stupid people like to tell me), and hazel eyes that look like God ran out of the right color. I’m albino.”
Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about the importance of the five senses and using the senses of taste and smell in our writing.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
Please, note that there are no rules in writing, but there are methods that work for most of us most of the time.
The ideas and suggestions in my articles and editorials have to do with those methods. You are always free to find your own way and alter the methods to your liking. |
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
The best stories always use the five senses to develop imagery and add details that bring the writing to life. In fact, material addressing the senses--sights, sounds, tastes, scents, and textures—are all around us. Here in Writing.com, we have had many a contest involving the use of the five senses and for a good reason because noticing what conveys material involving the senses takes practice. Most of us are good with describing and using the sight and sound, but what about the other senses?
At this time, let’s think about taste and smell. Just ask yourself how often you use these two senses connected to each other or alone. More often than not, we refer to smell when describing taste because of the way our brains work, with the sense of taste—sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami
| a full-bodied, savory, pungent, meaty flavor |
Chefs who create dishes and write books and fiction writers who put cooking and baking in the background or in the center of their stories focus on these two senses together. In one of the most sense-employed novels, Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel writes, “Combine the onions, chopped chiles, and the ground oregano with the sardines. 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.”
In Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet – Charlie N. Holmberg writes, “Today, I am mixing the batter for love, which I flavor with cocoa beans and pepper….Love. I think of the scent of corn roasting in Arrice’s oven and the perfume of sun-warmed leaves.”
In Pomegranate Soup, to describe two sisters making stuffed grape leaves in a Tehran restaurant, Marsha Mehran writes, “Among the neat, aromatic green fingers expertly tucked by Marjan and Bahar would be the younger girls’ unmistakable burst parcels of golden filling. And for some strange reason, they always smelled of Layla’s signature scent—rosewater and cinnamon.”
Then, there is that term synesthesia for the neurologically based phenomenon in which our senses become mixed with one another and, as cognitive patterns, lead to remembering our past experiences. As an example of synesthesia, in H, G, Wells'The War of the Worlds, Dr. Forrester theorizes that Martians may have the ability to smell colors.
The senses of smell and taste are especially linked to memory and concise past experiences. In the same vein, they can also point to the mood in the present with modifiers and details heightening their impact. “I took a sip. The tiny bubbles melted in my mouth and journeyed northward into my brain. Sweet. Crisp. Delicious," says John Green, in The Fault in our Stars.
Have you ever thought of using the sense of smell and taste as a character trait? Just imagine a protagonist or a secondary character with a strong sense of smell who can figure out the name of perfume on a person and can immediately know the ingredients in a dish from one mouthful.
In some writing workshops, they pass around fruit slices or other finger foods and ask the students to chew slowly, savoring the taste and smell, and then ask them to write a piece on their entire sensory experience, staying in the moment or fleeing into a memory.
As strong writing is specific, not ambiguous, using the five senses adds to its clarity. Most importantly, through good writing, we can connect deeply with our readers.
Until next time!  |
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 This Issue's Tip: Take an action scene or take a quiet scene from any one of your stories and add some or all the five senses to it. You may find that you like those scenes with the new additions much better.
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Feedback for "Turning a Short Story into a Novel"
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Quick-Quill 
This is a great NL. There is(was)a class in the Horizon's Academy I took twice. It expanded a short story into a novel, in steps. I love the class and it was there I found the snippet that launched my first published novel now in its second printing (with a new cover) The Vanishing of Katherine Sullivan. It's doing well as is my Crime novel Silent River.
Thank you, and congratulations for the success of your novels.
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Bikerider
Another informative newsletter, Joy. I wrote a 2,000 word historical fiction short story for a monthly contest a couple of years ago. "Alicia" The story rattled around in my head for a year and I began researching the historical aspect of the story. Thanks to percy goodfellow  , I learned how to construct a novel using themes, strategies, and a complete outline. His advice was invaluable in turning the 2,000 word short story into a 120,000 word novel.
That is quite an accomplishment, Bikerider. Thanks for the input.
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TINMAN 4000
I've been developing a short story into a novel for a while now, this was very helpful!
Thank you and best wishes with that novel. Do send me a link when it is ready.
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Osirantinous 
Hi Joy, thanks for including my short story in this newsletter. It is actually one I've not gone on to lengthen, while there are many in my port that have been expanded off-site. I've been advised several times to write short side-stories as ways to market a novel but, of all the novels I'm writing, I've only ever really done that for one - my Reiki/Lucifer story here on WDC. Some were written for contests but all of them sort of act as back-story that I knew people would frown-upon being added into the novel :) No matter what, though, I've enjoyed writing them, and enjoy making short stories longer! Also - love your tip. Am going to try it out with a couple of characters/settings to see if things are very different.
My pleasure, and thanks for the feedback.
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Drama: May 29, 2019 Issue [#9558]
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