Smell is a sensory experience that triggers a rush of memories long past, or even seemingly forgotten. Envelop your reader in the heady perfume in your memoir, cookery book or biography.
SENSORY AND SENSUAL WRITING
Sensory and sensual descriptions make your work evocative. The famous Chilean writer Isabel Allende does it so masterfully in her book Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies. Notice how, with the first sip of soup, memories of long ago come rushing in for her main character, Tita.
“She noticed a smell that struck her… John opened the door and stood there with a tray in his hands and a bowlful of oxtail soup!… she ate, as she had done when she was little and was sick… the smells of boiled milk, bread with cream, chocolate atole, cumin, garlic, onion.”
WHY ARE WE IMMEDIATELY TRANSPORTED BY SMELL?
A scent is a chemical particle that floats in through the nose and into the brain’s olfactory bulbs, where the sensation is first processed into a form that’s readable by the brain. Brain cells then carry that information to a tiny area of the brain called the amygdala, where emotions are processed, and then to the adjoining hippocampus, where learning and memory formation take place.
Scents and smells are the only sensations that travel such a direct path to the emotional and memory centers of the brain.
HOW DO I USE THIS WHEN WRITING BIOGRAPHY OR MEMOIR?
“Episodic memories, or memories of specific events from a first-person point of view, are where the sense of smell is best connected to memories,” says Theresa L. White. Smell conjures memories up so well that it can feel as if you are experiencing the event again. Scents, smells and memories form part of our primordial brain, which means that it is a great, honest, and accessible place to start your writing from.
You want to access the primitive state of scent and memory to truly explore your experiences and to give a credible account of it. It is literally an autobiographic memory network that you have at your disposal.
USING THE EFFECT SMELL HAS ON YOUR CHARACTER
The important thing to remember is not to describe the smell, but the effect the smell has on you / your character. From John Fox this excellent example of the smell of a tree by Richard Powers in The Overstory:
“And in a few steps, she`s outside. The smell is on her before she reaches the trees – the scent of resin and wide western places. The clean smell of her childhood`s only untouched days. The music of the trees, too, tuning the wind. She remembers. Her nose slips into one of those dark fissures between the flat terra-cotta plates. She falls into the smell, a devastating whiff of two hundred million years ago. She can’t imagine what such perfume was ever meant to do. But it does something to her now. Mind control. It’s neither vanilla nor turpentine, but replete with highlights of each. A shot of spiritual butterscotch. A sprig of pineapple incense. It smells like nothing but itself, pungent and sublime. She breathes in, eyes closed, the tree’s real name.”
INCORPORATE SMELL AND SCENT IN MEMOIRS AND COOKERY BOOKS
Go deep into your memories and extract those scents and smells that make you YOU. Those smells have a context, find it and use it when you write. Your memoir or cookery book should overflow with scent, your reader must be enveloped in the heady perfume of your memories.
As an author coach I can assist you to dive deep and find the best ways to write and express yourself through scent and smell.