Smell, Don't Tell 👃
Fosterverse Weekly #10
Hi Writers!
After over four years of dodging it like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix, I finally got COVID. As a result, I’ve spent the better part of the past week quarantined in my bedroom. I’m feeling mostly better now, thankfully, although I still have some lingering congestion.
But the weirdest thing has been losing my sense of smell.
A couple of days ago, I found myself trying to write a text to my wife describing what it was like to eat a cherry without being able to smell it. I could certainly tell that it was sweet. Yet if I closed my eyes, I couldn’t decipher if it was a cherry or a grape since they have such a similar mouth feel. She assured me that they smelled delicious, but I had to take her word for it.
This experience got me thinking about the common “Show, Don’t Tell” writing advice.
How could I show her what the absence of something was like?
I couldn’t write a passage like this one from Natalie Toren who hosted a Sensory Writing workshop at Foster back in May:
A loud wheeze from the bottle, but only a few rounded drops make it onto my palm. My throat is submerged in the sharpness of the main fighter ingredient, alcohol, but not in any way I associate with fun. I register something else, too, the tickle of some tiny metallic cloud up my nose. And then the smell is gone; banished, germs with it. Or maybe it’s still swirling, it’s just that I’m interrupted by the electric alert of a papercut on my thumb, and also the checkout woman telling me my grocery total. I rub my hands together one last time and reach for my wallet.
As you can see, tapping into our senses can make our writing more evocative and memorable. That scene reminds me of the early COVID days when we were more anxious about an unsanitized doorknob than the chatty, coughing, checkout clerk less than six feet away from us without a mask on.
When you’re writing about experiences from your life, preferably at one of our upcoming Public Writing Circles, try challenging yourself to draw upon sensory details to level up your prose and bring the reader more into the scene with you.
I’ll be doing the same, but without my sense of smell for a while.
Lyle
📅 Events
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⚡️ Published
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TRUSTWORTHY TRUST by
On Turning Outside When Perhaps I Need to Turn Inward by
That raw honest thing I wrote when I didn’t write what I thought that I was going to write by
(m)othering by
The Optimist’s Manifesto by
✨ Foster Effect
Love how losing a sense can heighten our awareness of its impact on our perception and memory. Another fun twist on sensory detail is incorporating elements of synaesthesia -- using one sense to describe another. A friend once captured the smell of fresh-cut grass as "deep green" -- a logical impossibility, but evocative nonetheless!