I’ve always heard that our sense of smell can trigger a memory longer than any of our other senses. I don’t know that to be true, but I do know that the smell of freshly cut grass is one of my earliest memories.
Pamela’s Prompt: Stop and Smell
Find a comfortable place to write and grab either a pen and paper or your laptop. For this exercise, I sat in my kitchen as I prepared dinner and did household chores. Since Thanksgiving is this week, you should be able to jot down some really wonderful smells!
Remember though, in your writing, be sure to describe not-so-nice-smelling things, too.
Set a timer for five to 10 minutes and get to sniffing! Jot down everything you smell. Here’s what I wrote down:
- An apple pie baking in the oven.
- The smell of cut onions.
- Maple syrup.
- An orange.
- Peppermint ice cream.
- Gingerbread.
- My stinky trashcan (Yes, I took out the trash.)
- The smell of lemony dish soap.
- Chicken and dumplings bubbling in a pot on the stove.
Next, take one of the things you sniffed and write a sentence or two, using as much sensory detail as possible.
For example, instead of:
“The trashcan stinks.”
I might write:
“The odor coming from the trash can smelled like rotten eggs smothered with a layer of sewage and Joseph swallowed hard to keep from retching.”
Yuck, right? (I promise the smell of the dinner I cooked was a thousand times better!)
Smells, of course, are subjective to the, uh, well, smeller. For instance, you may love the smell of garlic while your best friend can’t stand it.
In an online article posted Feb. 17, 2020 and titled “What’s the World’s Worst Smell?”, New York Times writer Randall Munroe examined the malodorous concoction called “Stench Soup.”
“In 1998, Pamela Dalton, a cognitive psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, was tasked with developing a stink bomb for the Department of Defense,” the article states. “Her experiments found that people from different backgrounds and different parts of the world, who grew up smelling and eating different things, often completely disagreed about which smells were good or bad.”
“The best candidate Dr. Dalton found for a universally distasteful smell was something called “U.S. Government Standard Bathroom Malodor,” a substance that was designed to mimic the scent of military field latrines, in order to test cleaning products,” the article continues. “She chose the aromatic liquid as the base of her stink-bomb recipe. The resulting formula, which she called “Stench Soup,” may well be the worst smell ever created.”
Ugh, no thanks.
Anyway, remember to add in sensory details to help your readers “smell” your way through your story.