Prompt: Write About a Scent

Posted by David Duhr in ABCs of Writing      64 comments

Oct
3

Discussion questions: Write about a scent. Something from your past that triggers a memory and the feelings/thoughts/images it summons. What do you smell right now? What is your favorite smell? In what ways do you use scent in your fiction? Your nonfiction?

In last week’s post, “Write About Your First Job,” WriteByNight Christina wrote this about the memory of a typewriter: “I used carbon paper and can still smell it some 45 years later.”

It’s believed that smell is the sense most closely linked with memory. One famous example from literature — often confused as smell but in reality is taste, though the two are tightly bound — comes in Swann’s Way, volume 1 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, when the narrator dips a petite madeleine in his tea and takes a sip, and the taste, along with the feel of the crumbs, takes him back to his childhood… and not just in a passing way.

Here’s one of the loveliest passages I’ve ever read:

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

Isn’t that beautiful? “the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us.”

Here are a few scents that can trigger me:

— A baseball, especially if it’s dirty, especially if it’s dirty and has grass stains

— Freshly mowed grass

— A baseball mitt, especially just after being oiled (pattern?)

— An old book (you know exactly what I’m talking about)

— My dad’s cologne on his shirts

What about you? What smells “remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind” you of something from your past? What kinds of feelings, thoughts, and images do they summon?

If you can’t think of anything, describe what you smell right now. And/or what are some of your favorite smells.

And in what ways do you use the sense of smell in your fiction? Your nonfiction?

WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is fiction editor at the Texas Observer and co-host of the Yak Babies podcast, and has written about books for the Dallas Morning News, Electric Literature, Publishing Perspectives, and others.

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