Follow Your Nose by Poppy Gee

CRAFT If you were teaching a writing workshop, what’s a great writing prompt for writers to get started on a piece of writing? Or is there a method you find helpful when you’re sitting at your desk and can’t think what to write about?

One of my favourite writing prompts is using the scent of smell to trigger a memory for the character, sending them back in time to a significant or interesting moment. I use it when I’m teaching my crime fiction writing workshops - it’s a good way to access a character’s backstory, without overthinking it. As a pantser – someone who writes by instinct, not according to a plan – this technique often opens up new character trajectories for me.   

 

Scent Memories... they might be sparked by fresh flowers, a hearty meal, or seaweed and surf.

Our sense of smell is the strongest and most powerful of all the senses. There is a scientific reason for this: our olfactory bulb is located at the front of the brain, and acts as a relay station, sending signals to other areas of the brain that control emotion, memory and mood. Evolutionally, our sense of smell guided us to make vital decisions about food, potential dangers, who to mate with, who to fear.

Certain smells create a powerful scent memory that can cause an emotional response – this is a great way to give texture and depth to a character.

For me personally, if I catch a whiff of someone’s cigarette as I’m walking down the street, I inhale it happily. The sweet, pungent smell of cigarette smoke reminds me of carefree childhood summer holidays at my grandparent’s house on the Gold Coast. Gramps smoked a pipe and cigars, and Nana smoked slim cigarettes she kept in an elegant silver tin. In the early evenings, Gramps would smoke in his chair in the front living room overlooking the Broadwater, drinking rum. Often there was a bowl of burger rings on the table. In the early morning, when the lawn was still damp with dew, Nana wandered her beautiful, tropical garden alone, cigarette in hand. This was her daily ritual, surveying her pawpaw tree for new fruit, admiring her bird of paradise and flowering ginger, her dressing gown floating elegantly around her, her cigarettes and lighter hidden in a deep pocket.

My grandparents had an array of ashtrays: chrome spinning lidded ashtrays; pretty crystal-cut glass bowls; ashtrays set on tall stands that could be moved around the room. They had a huge glass bowl jar of matchboxes that they had collected from hotels across the world. Back in the 70s and 80s, when you could smoke anywhere, upmarket hotels offered branded matchboxes for guests, like they do drink coasters. As a kid I loved playing with their matchbox collection. My parents hated the idea of smoking, they told us it was smelly, dirty, poisonous, that it ruined your teeth and skin. I didn’t see any sign of this on holidays at Nana and Gramps’ place. I know smoking is bad for you, but I still connect the sweet scent of burning tobacco with summer holiday feelings: beach days and movie nights, ice-cream and amusement parks, and my grandparents, living the relaxed, graceful life of retirees with time to make smoking a pleasant ritual.

A scent memory in a narrative could be deeply meaningful, such as the scent of fire triggering a traumatic experience; a certain perfume reminiscent of an unfaithful lover; the fresh, clean scent of a new baby reminding a character of their own private, terrible loss. But it could also be something simple: the yeasty smell of beer a reminder of a pub where a person used to work; the salty, warm smell of movie popcorn jolting someone back to a first kiss; or the smell of two-stroke diesel on cold air prompting memories of snowmobiles, boats or even a lawnmower and a story associated with that.

Using the sense of smell is a simple, effective technique to add colour and texture to your story, and it has the potential to extract something really interesting from your subconscious.