Day 10: Your writing stinks! Good. It should.

How to use smell in writing.

Photo by okeykat on Unsplash

Did you know that we humans can smell 10,000 different odors?

Did you know that every time we breathe (approx. 23,000 times a day), we smell?

Did you know that when we breathe little odor molecules come on inside us and hang out for a bit?

How cool is that?

So damn cool.

And we writers want to use that sense of smell to make better novels and poems and essays.

Look at this brilliant bit of prose that evokes the sense of smell here:

“More than anything I was struck by the smell — for the plastic, pool-liner odor of masking tape had grown overwhelming from being shut up in such a small space, an emotionally evocative odor I hadn’t remembered or thought of in years, a distinct polyvinyl reek that threw me straight back to childhood and my bedroom back in Vegas: chemicals and new carpet, falling asleep and waking up every morning with the painting taped behind my headboard and the same adhesive smell in my nostrils.” - Donna Tartt, “The Goldfinch”

As they say over on DIYMFA, “A single sentence about smells can reveal more about a place than several paragraphs of visual descriptions. For example, the hero enters a home for old people. ‘the place smelled of boiled cabbage, urine and disinfectant.’

“These nine words are enough to convey what kind of old people’s home this is, and it creates a strong image in the reader’s mind.”

So let’s get started about how to use smell in our writing. . .

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RANDOM HOUSEKEEPING MOMENT

Hey! Hi! This is just me, Carrie, in your email. I wanted to give you a quick reminder that all these emails (and more) live over here on the Live Happy (and Write Better Now) site. And these daily writing posts are just for the month of February. I’ll go back to the regular routine for March. All these posts are here under the WE ARE WRITING tab on the site.