Enhance Your Fiction with the Magic of Aroma

Nose of chihuahua, my lovely dog

Photo © bimka1 | DepositPhotos

I picked the sense of smell to start with first because it’s one of the hardest senses for me to add to the story.

Moreover, it’s not always well-described how to do it. Most of the examples I found associated it with a memory.

Yet, if you add it every 500 words, or once a scene, memory cannot be the only way to add it.

I think it’s challenging for a lot of reasons:

There are only three words that describe what something smells like. That’s it. Every other word is based on the other five senses, or nouns. How would you describe the scent of flowers? Sweet (a taste)? Floral (sight)? Yet, a rose smells different than a cherry blossom. Describing it…we just don’t have the vocabulary the way we do for sight or touch.We unlearn using it. The book An Immense World eBook by Ed Yong discusses the powerful sense of smell a dog has. It’s a way of communicating with each other. Yet, dogs can forget how to use it. Owners take dogs out of walks that are to get from Point A to Point B, not allowing the dog to stop and investigate everything. So I think we lose our connection to it as well, for the same reasons.

So how do we add it to our writing and use it for emotions?

The challenges we face mean everything else around it has to contribute to it.

We’ll start first with the word smell and all its synonyms. Not all synonyms mean exactly the same thing. Merriam-Webster says smell “implies solely the sensation without suggestion of quality or character.” So maybe smell is a little generic.

Other, similar words will have more of an emotional punch associated with it (yay! Emotion!). Fragrance reminds us of perfume, potentially romance. Stench is foul. Stink is definitely an opinionated word.

I read Green Rider and still remember when the main character fell into the rose bushes. She’s trying to hide from the sentry. He walks past, complaining about the stink of the roses, not understanding why the smell is so strong.

Next up is the aforementioned memory. Smells can trigger memories, sometimes good, sometimes bad. That’s something you can use with your character to bring out powerful emotions.

When I was growing up, we had a leaking facet on the corner of the house. Wild mint grew around the facet, drinking up all the water. When I turned on the facet to play in the water or give the dogs some to drink, the redolent mint filled my nose. Every time I buy mint—my favorite among the herbs because of the fragrance alone—I think of those summer days and dogs lost past.

Surprise can help with the characterization. Your character catches a scent they don’t expect and instant memory.  Their reaction could be a punch to the gut or a moment of nostalgia. I think you probably only get one of these in a book, though.

Context is another great way to bring smell into the story. If your character is in a forest, running from the bad guys, the first hints of wood smoke might be pretty alarming. Or if they’re lost in that forest and starving, the smell of venison cooking might elicit a different reaction entirely.

Tags are another way to bring smell into the story. Tags are a shortcut for the reader that they can associate with a certain character or place. L.K. Hill talks about them in Losing Track of Fiction Details? My #1 Hack for Not Embarrassing Yourself with Story Contradictions (authorlkhill.com) (she does not realize that’s what they are, though).

J.D. Robb uses them in every one of her books. There’s a nostalgic feeling of “home” when Eve takes in the smells of a futuristic New York street. She also compares the smell of different places to the smell of her homicide bullpen.

Other senses can be a way to bring in different smells as well. Taste is probably the most obvious, because smell and taste are closely associated. I think this combination can be challenging though; we don’t want it to sound like we’re channeling Food Network. But if you see or hear something, it may also have smell. A car grinding out a plume of gray smoke, for example. All you need to do is add “acrid” to that and you’ve got smell, sight, and hearing.

The last one’s probably the most fun, and hard to do: Dialogue. Characters can discuss the smell. I’ve seen this best used to J.D. Robb (she gets mentioned a lot here because she is really good at this). It shows up when the characters are under stress from the time pressure and investigating a scene. They will find something strange at the location and spend the entire scene discussing it. I can’t tell you the book, but Eve and Peabody discuss “boy farts” as they search a room. In Brotherhood of Death, it’s a large collection of dolls (sense of sight). It brings in a lot of humor and characterization, and dives into a sense to do it.

Obviously, it’s a challenging sense to do. But if you can make your readers smell the pine trees in a forest, it adds to their experience.