Due to a Noreaster that knocked out my power, phone, and internet for a few days, I was unable to finish the piece I was working on. So, I’m offering a vintage post from the archives of my website’s old blog before I moved to Substack. I like to think of it as recycling (ooh, upcycling?) a slightly modified piece in the interests of literary conservation, as it would be irresponsible to allow otherwise legible to words go to waste… Enjoy!
Odors are everywhere. They are primal: prompting instinctual reactions, stirring deep memories, evoking emotions, and triggering fears and desires over which we have no conscious control. A whiff of pheromone or the scent of decay can put our brains on alert and cause our bodies to respond in kind.
So, smells should be an author’s best friend—keys to a secret door in the unconscious minds of readers, which let the writer slip stealthily into their emotions by evoking just the right scents. The only trouble for me is I have none of these secret keys. I have no sense of smell, a medical condition known as anosmia. Consequently, smell is one of the most challenging things for me to understand and describe as a writer.
I don’t remember ever having a sense of smell, though maybe I did when I was younger. I remember faking being able to smell around my friends when I was a kid so they didn’t think I was a freak. Yeah, that smells sooo good; eeww, gross, that totally stinks; whatever you all say…. But there was nothing there. Eventually, agreeing with others about something I couldn't judge for myself seemed pointless and weird. It was my first lesson in the absurdity of peer pressure.
There has been a push in the ever-expanding social justice realm for more acknowledgment of anosmia as a bona fide disability. While it technically is, as anosmics lack one of the primary senses, it hardly ranks among the more debilitating ones, and it’s unclear what sort of practical accommodations modern society could possibly make on our behalf. I do remember seeing how deodorant companies hire subjects to test their products while technicians score their efficacy; I suppose my employment options are somewhat limited in that I will never become a professional armpit sniffer, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to endure. So, please, no need to march on my behalf! However, that has not stopped activists. I came across a somewhat hysterical article describing (a vocal minority of) sufferers’ deep offense at an air freshener commercial, which they mistakenly claimed made light of the condition with the supposedly derogatory term “noseblind”—which would be funny if it wasn’t so unhinged.
Besides, anosmia also does have its advantages. I never have to pretend to detect hints of blackcurrant or lychee (whatever the hell that is) in a glass of wine or perform a low-stakes CSI forensic analysis of the soil the grapes grew in (volcanic?). I get to just drink the stuff without all the pompous foreplay because who cares? Taste and smell are subject to the same deficiencies in acuity as sight and hearing, yet people feel very free to snootily criticize others over a lack of tasting or smelling capability, which seems pretty bold, as one would hardly do this to a person wearing glasses or a hearing aid (philistine! so unrefined!). There are no smelling aids, and it never occurs to snobs that some people might be hard of tasting. But the joke is on them, as I can never be charged according to the law of “Whoever smelt it dealt it.” And I’m immune to skunks, dog farts, and dutch ovens. (Onions, however, will still melt my face like the Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
But it has its obvious disadvantages as well. For example, I’m pretty paranoid about BO, to the point where I shower more than is probably healthy. I also don’t wear perfume because, in addition to being unable to choose a scent, I can’t tell whether or not I smell like a cheap hooker. Unless evident by visual inspection, I can’t be sure if my clothes are funky, so I do more laundry than I probably need to. Worst of all, unless it has obvious clues like mold or slime on it, I can’t always tell if food has spoiled.
There are also some less material consequences….
How does all of this affect my writing?
It means a lot of guesswork. It means inferring an entire sensory world I’ve never experienced just from hints and clues so that I can create a complete world and experience for readers.
With the advent of COVID and its common symptom of smell loss, many people have experienced this strange sensory deprivation for the first time in their lives, and not without considerable distress. While I’m about as far as you can get from your typical Vogue reader, I did come across a thought-provoking article by Leslie Jamison about the effects of such temporary loss of smell and the unrecognized importance this sense holds for us as a species. It’s often difficult for someone like me to wrap my head around this, and I appreciate it when writers can articulate their experiences, as it gives me a little foothold in an alien world.
Smell is an undervalued sense and the one most of us would sacrifice if we had to lose one. Those who suffer blindness or deafness deal with sensory deprivations far more challenging than a lack of environmental odor input. Yet, according to the article referenced above, some claim—call me highly skeptical here, as one with firsthand knowledge in this arena—that lacking a sense of smell is more traumatic because smell is so closely tied to emotion:
[S]mell is underappreciated and misunderstood, and most people fail to recognize how integral it is to our experience of pleasure, our emotional lives, and even, on a fundamental level, our identity… While patients who lost their vision were initially more traumatized, over time they acclimated more significantly than the patients who had lost their sense of smell—who, a year later, actually reported a more enduring decrease in their quality of life than the patients who had gone blind.
Emotion and identity over basic functionality? That’s an interesting—and very modern, first-world—way to prioritize and value human senses. I’m not sure everyone throughout history would agree, but that’s perhaps a discussion for another time. Let’s just say that if I am an early human responsible for hunting or gathering food, and I live in an environment with dangerous predators, I’m probably gonna dwell less on my feelings and identity than on starving or getting eaten. How our priorities have shifted….
In the article, Afif Aqrabawi, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at MIT, is paraphrased speaking about the emotional effects of anosmia:
[I] t’s not that you don’t have the memories anymore but that they aren’t being triggered with the same level of visceral immediacy. To put it simply: You have fewer emotional experiences each day.
Perhaps this is true of those who lose their sense of smell, but as someone who has long lacked a sense of smell, I have plenty of vivid memories, and my days are not lacking for intense emotional experiences. I’ve never needed a sense of smell for that. The fact that others apparently do is just bizarre and alien to me. This is another challenge for me to overcome in writing about “normal” people with normal functions—understanding how they experience the world and how it differs from mine. And, does it really vary as much as they claim?
I came across this article on Masterclass.com offering advice on incorporating smell into your writing, which may help those who already have access to this sense.
As I mentioned, when I was a child, I learned to mimic a sense of smell, and observant writers are very good at picking up clues from their environment or even from other texts and adapting them to their writing. However, I didn’t simply want to repeat stock phrases about smelling the roses or whatever. I wanted to develop some tips and tricks to help evoke sensations I had no direct experience with. Writing, after all, is about putting ourselves in the shoes of others, imagining lives and experiences we’ll never know, and making them feel authentic to readers.
Below are some techniques that I employed, and maybe there’s something useful here for others, whether writing about scent or something else beyond your immediate experience.
Smell for the “Noseblind”:
Association:
Evoking atmospheric scent simply by referencing fragrant or malodorous items or objects that the reader is likely to be familiar with
For example, though I personally rely on visual and sometimes tactile cues to emotionally connect with an environment, I’m aware from the testimony of others that, for example, lilacs, low-tide, baking cookies, coffee, refuse, a litter box, sawdust, gasoline, wood fires, wet dogs, cut grass, etc. all have distinctive smells and associations which will resonate with readers just as they will for characters. Being aware of their presence in a scene and remembering to include them in descriptions can help orient the reader to the atmosphere.
Sometimes as a writer, I feel at a bit of an advantage because I’m not proceeding from a scent memory to conjure these things but a visual one. I can reverse engineer a scene’s sounds and smells from a vivid image, trying to infer (or hoping the reader will) scents from the objects within it.
Conjuring the specific smells of an imaginary place may be more complicated than simply visualizing the scene, including the relevant detail, and allowing the reader to process the sights, sounds, and smells emanating from it according to his or her own experience.
Metaphor:
Creating scents that enhance character, symbolism, or even foreshadowing.
So long as I am not tied to scent as a fact, I have felt free to play with it and use it like any other story element to enhance character and help develop my plot. Not being tied to specific rules of scent frees me to write things that suit the character rather than things I have observed in real life.
For example, when my novel’s protagonist first meets the seer who will feature prominently in the story, she notices he smells of honey and cannabis. She will learn later that he is a beekeeper and that the Scythians use mead and cannabis in their rituals. Here I’m using scents to reveal character and story, although I have no idea what these things would smell like in real life.
I have other events and characters in the story marked by specific scents: incense, leather, campfire smoke, dried sweat, fermented mare’s milk, a bear skin. These recurring scents signify recurring themes throughout the story. It’s not essential that the reader should be familiar with the smell of fermented mare’s milk or bearskins (I’d be surprised if they were!), just that they represent histories, evoke specific emotions in the character, and connect those elements of the story.
The Unknown:
Using scent to create mystery
Scent is an insubstantial, invisible sensory input, but one which can have a powerful effect on our thoughts and emotions. We can’t see or touch smells, but they touch us deeply. It lends them a hallucinatory, phantasmic quality, which affects us each very differently (if they affect us at all.) Playing with this aspect is the most unusual of the methods I have explored but the most interesting for me. Illusory scent emanating from within the brain is one type of aura people can experience prior to a seizure or migraine. Because my novel’s protagonist is plagued by these disturbing visions, she has an uneasy relationship with a particular phantom odor throughout the series. Because odor is invisible, describing this otherworldly scent and trying to discover its source is a significant source of frustration and anxiety for my narrator throughout the story. This is a kind of “smell” I have personally experienced—the only kind, actually—and it is extremely disconcerting.
Translating this method
Can this be translated to other experiences and sensations? I believe it can. Whether writing about a real-life experience the author has never personally had—like skydiving, a sword fight, being crowned monarch of a kingdom, a first kiss, riding a horse, dying of hypothermia—or writing about a humanly impossible experience—flying, combat with magic spells, ruling an alien planet, making out with a ghost, riding a dragon, being awakened from a cryogenic state—these few techniques can help anchor the writing meaningfully in the story.
Using the example of “skydiving” from above, let’s see how it would work:
Association:
Evoking atmospheric visualization/emotion simply by referencing items or objects that the reader is likely to be familiar with
This method is the most common and probably the easiest to use. In the case of the skydiving example, the author would probably do a little research on skydiving and simply reference the airport, plane, safety equipment, etc., to give the event an air of authenticity and legitimacy to readers. This is perfectly valid and works well when integrated smoothly and with tact.
Metaphor:
Creating actions/emotions that enhance character, symbolism, or even foreshadowing.
Using skydiving or an element within the experience as a metaphor for a character, her journey, or to foreshadow an event in the plot. Maybe the character’s life is in free-fall, she’s struggling to let go of something, or this is a test for something more significant later in the story. Whatever it means, when using this technique, it’s less important to focus on the skydiving itself and more valuable to focus on the character and how the events will shape her story moving forward. Describing the color of her jumpsuit won’t matter.
The unknown:
Using action/emotion to create mystery
This is both the hardest and easiest to translate because the unknown is individual to every writer and character. How will your unique character react to jumping out of a plane, especially if you never have? You can make your character do anything you want. He can laugh, cry, crap his pants, see a UFO, or have an out-of-body experience. We all have certain expectations about what skydiving is probably like—scary, exhilarating, life-changing. What aspect of this experience is entirely unknown and unknowable to anyone looking from the outside—that only your character could know? There are no rules here. What has happened to others in similar moments is irrelevant; what’s important is what happens with your character. What don’t we know? What would surprise us?
There is the cliché about how the absence of one sense sharpens the others. I don’t know if that’s true. But I believe that lacking this sense has forced me to hone and sharpen some other skills. I’ve had to become more observant, rely on visual cues, develop organizational strategies, cleaning routines, safety awareness, etc. If I only relied on my nose, I’m sure I’d be less vigilant, perceptive, and creative. Because my original toolkit lacked some tools, I built others and sharpened the ones I already had.
Writers constantly explore experiences they’ve never personally lived—particularly fiction authors. It comes with the territory. So, feeling their way through emotions and even senses that are foreign should never be a deterrent to curious artists. While challenging, the task of artists is to try to bridge the gaps in their knowledge and experience with observation, empathy, and some educated guesses. Some portraits are more flattering than others, but all should be honest attempts at understanding their subject. Part of the beauty of art is the diversity of portraits produced by these unique attempts at capturing and reflecting the mysterious world around us. The ones that resonate with us are the ones we treasure. Some authors just speak our heart’s language. They open a secret door into a room we thought was forbidden to us or allow us to look through a lens at worlds we never even knew existed.
Is there something you, as a writer, have a tough time describing? Something as a reader you have difficulty visualizing? What helps you wrap your head around it?
This was an absolutely fascinating read! I found your description of hallucinatory scents extraordinary (and disturbing, actually).
My husband doesn't have a sense of smell - he lost it around five years ago - and now he finds that he's missing out on flavours. I'm not making light of it at all - I'd hate to lost my sense of smell, or to have my sense of taste dulled - but it does mean that I can be much more generous in the kitchen in my use of seasonings and flavours that he didn't used to enjoy (think mustard, vinegar, ginger, lemon), and we're both equally enjoying what we eat.
I'm in awe of how beautifully you describe scents and the feelings associated with them in your writing - I had NO CLUE about your anosmia from reading your beautiful work.
I enjoyed this deep dive into the sense of smell in writing. I can sympathize with you and think it's awesome you've found ways to convey scents and aromas in your writing. I bit through my tongue as a toddler and it severely limited my sense of taste as I aged. I still have a hard time eating several types of foods because they are just a non-descript bland when I eat them. I end up gravitating to foods that have stronger seasoning because they're easier for me. to taste and enjoy.