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How To Describe A Smell

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Maybe if we were dogs our languages would be clear on the olfactory level rather than heavily visual. The fact is, human language is bereft of words to describe how something smells. It’s either lovely or putrid (and everything in between), or it smells like something else (something we can actually see – since we are heavily visual creatures). Yep. This is the best we have.

So what makes some literary descriptions of smell stand out over others?

Original connections which ring true, but which the reader had probably never linked before.

The club was called Fez. They had to walk down a narrow stairwell lit by brass lamps with multicolored plastic panes to get to it. It smelled lightly of day-old beer, cigarettes, and plastic — like the inside of a mask from a Halloween costume.

- from Girl At Sea, by Maureen Johnson

But advice to ‘use all the senses’ and describe the smell of things as you’re writing fiction should not be applied too liberally. Some kinds of narrators are simply not good observers of subtleties. I’m reminded of the husband in The Pension Grillparzer by John Irving:

She [the wife] did not remind him that he was a heavy smoker who never smelled the soup simmering; the aroma of horses in the fresh air was too subtle for him.

Related Links: Do Smells Really Trigger Particularly Evocative Memories? from BPS Research Digest

The Real Reason You Hate The Smell Of Sulfur, from io9



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