Living the Fictional Dream

The power of the sense of smell is fairly amazing when you think about it. Especially considering that humans are so much less dependent on that sense than the other four, especially sight. But it is so crazy how a certain aroma will take you back to a specific memory almost instantly.

When I was a kid, I loved going to the library. For much of my childhood, the small town where I grew up didn’t have its own library, so on Saturdays and during the summer my mom would take me to the main library branch in the larger town about 30 minutes away.

I remember the smell of the building that would waft over me when I stepped through the doors. It was kind of musty and old, but not in a bad way. I loved that smell, and I loved how it clung to the books when I would take them home. When I was young, I always assumed the scent had something to do with the books themselves, but now I think that it probably had more to do with the age of the building.

The library I went to as a girl was built in… I guess the 50s or 60s. It had a bomb shelter in the basement, if that helps date it for you. There is a building across the street from where I work, a bank, and every time I walk in there (there’s a Subway on the first floor where I like to pick up lunch sometimes) I catch a whiff of that library/old building smell.

One whiff, and I’m suddenly 11 years old clutching an arm load of books and waiting for them to run my library card through their little machine. Though they later got scanable cards, the ones in my memory are the ones they had when I first got a card — they were pink and made of paper and they went through some kind of machine that pressed them and made them warm to the touch after when you checked out books.

Another scent memory that sometimes strikes me unawares is the smell of sun on grass. It’s been a while since I got a really good whiff of this one, but I used to smell it a lot when I was in college — I guess because they were always working on the grounds. The smell of sun-baked grass used to cling to my first dog’s coat when he would come back in the house from his back yard time. Sandy (a cockerspaniel) was an inside dog, which made smelling the outdoors on him all the more unusual. Sandy passed away while I was in college, but whenever I inhale that sunshiney, grassy smell, I’m transported back to when that little stinker used to sit on my feet or want to play tug-of-war; I can totally see him standing in front of me wagging his little stump of a tail.

The power of various smells and aromas can be utilized to great effect in one’s writing, in my opinion. The more senses you invoke in the story, the richer and more detailed your fictional world will be come, which makes you better able to draw in your reader and hold him there, right where you want him.

Hearing and sight are the dominant senses we describe in stories, but if you add the scent of woodsmoke; the taste of the cool, crisp water; or the way the fur carresses your main character’s fingertips, it gives the story an extra layer of depth. And, every detail you add has the possibility of resonating with your audience in ways you can’t anticipate — we all have our own associations with sights, sounds, smells, etc., and the more we can tap into those within our readers, the more bound they will be to our stories.