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Post by torainfor on Jan 28, 2009 15:51:02 GMT -5
I was sitting on the couch last night, typing away on my friend's laptop, when my seven-year old came down and plopped next to me.
"Whatcha writing?" he asked.
"A story."
"What's it about?"
"A girl on a spaceship."
He looked at the screen. "Who are the people in it?"
"There," I said, pointing to the footer where I list the names of the main characters.
"That's not all the people."
"Go away."
He looked at the screen for a few moments, then out the window. "You have to think how it smells," he said, ticking off a finger. "How it smells. What it looks like. What's going on. What do the people look like--what are they wearing? What do you see out the window? What does it sound like?" He looks at me and points to his nose. "And what it smells like."
"You're right," I said. Then realized he was right. Because I was writing a scene wherein my MC was dreaming about an artificially implanted memory--and she wouldn't know what it smelled like. But in a few minutes, when what really happened leaked into her dream, she would.
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Post by Jeff Gerke on Jan 28, 2009 16:03:19 GMT -5
Awesome. Who is this boy? Let's get him teaching fiction workshops!
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Post by seraphim on Jan 29, 2009 10:59:55 GMT -5
A marginally interesting assay of the estate of scent in fiction: www.slate.com/id/2108033/But with that in mind, we really don't write so much about scents anymore, or if we do it's a grace note in passing. And that is strange because even in our santized world we still live in a soup of smells both good and grotesque. I doubt there no honest child who cannot tell...and who will all too willing tell the guest just whose odure de toilet is wafting down the hall, based on nothing more that the particular's of it scent. And which of us has not been at least a little surprised...and occasionally pleased to recognize the traces of our own gastronomic progresses in the moment of their departure. Was that a wiff of warm peppermint rising from the urinal? Must have been that candy cane a couple of hours ago. Yet so little of this makes it into anyone's writing. Yes you will find an occasional reference to sweat, or bread, or mold, but no real exploration and development of a character through scent of any significance.
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Post by morganlbusse on Jan 29, 2009 23:47:09 GMT -5
Perhaps its because I have a strong sense of smell, but it peppers my writing (no pun intended ;P). Anything from the acrid smell of smoke to the slight flowery scent of a woman's hair to the stomach lurching waft of fish stew.
Sounds are a good one too, a great way to paint an image: the snap crackle of a fire, the harsh patter of rain, or the splatter of someone's stomach contents across a wooden floor.
Using the five senses helps make our characters more 3-D in my opinion (we literally experience their world) and can intensify the emotion we want our reader to experience (one of my characters feels depressed/suicidal in one scene and I intensify that feeling by the lonely chill of the cave he is in, the harsh patter of rain outside, the hard cold stone he is lying upon... all of his surroundings help build a feeling of hopelessness without me having to say... "and he was lonely and depressed."
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Post by Jeff Gerke on Jan 30, 2009 18:16:44 GMT -5
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Post by Christian Soldier on Jan 30, 2009 19:10:38 GMT -5
*Sigh* In this case, I'm like a legally blind man trying to describe a room without his glasses. I can smell... just barely. It gets irritating when I get home and the misses takes a whiff and says, "Baby, the litter pan needs attention". Me? I smell nothing. *Shrug* In my line of work, it's a blessing. Trust me.
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Post by seraphim on Feb 3, 2009 13:05:58 GMT -5
It is interesting...though there exists a medical term there seems to be no common term for having a deficient capacity to detect smells. If you can't see you are blind. If you can't hear, you are deaf. If you can't speak, you are mute...or dumb. If you can't think well then for some reason you are dumb too...but that's another issue. But what are you if you can't smell? Nose-blind? Scent-deaf/dumb? Asnozic? Wiffless? "You'll have to pardon the boy, Ma'am, he's a bit wiffless. Couldn't smell skunk a stick if you held it under his nose."
Then there is the courious ability called blindsight. Some persons who are legaly blind...can't see at all, but can navigate a strange room full of furniture without bumping into anything. Apparently the eyes and optic nerves still work, but the things seen bypass the parts of the brain that register positive visual perception. All of which makes me wonder if that forces sight to work at the same level as pheremones. We are all profoundly affected by them, but not consciously so...no one is ever specifically aware that they are being attracted to a certain person's pheremones.
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Post by morganlbusse on Feb 3, 2009 13:54:58 GMT -5
More weird info on smells... I can't remember where I read this, but in France there is a university where you can get a degree in smelling (can't remember the actual term for it). Its a degree for the perfume industry over there. But the interesting thing is to even get in, you have to recall the smell of over 1200 scents (in other words, they tell you an item and from memory you have to recall what it smells like). Like I said, I read this years ago and as I age, the memory goes, but it made me wonder how many scents I could recall from memory...
Another weird thing (yeah, rambling ;P) is how closely associated our sense of taste and smell are. We can really only taste 4 things (sweet, bitter, sour, and salty) but its our sense of smell that gives us the unique nuances of each when we taste. I experience this every time I get a cold because I lose my sense of smell and consequently can't taste anything either. That's when I eat all the stuff around the house no one else will because I can't taste ;P However, texture is a different story (salads taste good, but if you only can feel the texture, its quiet disgusting to me, like a bowl of crunchy insects...)
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Post by Christian Soldier on Feb 3, 2009 15:39:12 GMT -5
I can smell food... and feet, but not some of the other unpleasant things associated with Army life, so I consider my wifflessness to be more a blessing than anything else. Oddly enough, there are certain foods that I can't stand that most people like if not love. Beans for instance. I like the smell, but not the taste. The cooking smell, btw.
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Post by pixydust on Feb 12, 2009 23:39:14 GMT -5
Oh, smells in writing are huge! Letting the reader know what something smells like will also get thim to picture it--it's like a double wammy. At least that's what I've noticed in my reading.
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Post by Spokane Flyboy on Feb 17, 2009 17:36:53 GMT -5
I doubt there no honest child who cannot tell...and who will all too willing tell the guest just whose odure de toilet is wafting down the hall, based on nothing more that the particular's of it scent. And which of us has not been at least a little surprised...and occasionally pleased to recognize the traces of our own gastronomic progresses in the moment of their departure. Was that a wiff of warm peppermint rising from the urinal? Must have been that candy cane a couple of hours ago. And then there are those moments you clear a room with a gastronomic emission that breaks several clauses of the Geneva Convention, sending victims gagging and gasping for breath while sending the unlucky few in close proximity sprawled out on the floor in deep comas. Garlic and onion seem to be adept at it for me.
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Post by Jeff Gerke on Feb 17, 2009 18:02:45 GMT -5
Stink bomb.
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Post by veritasseeker90 on Feb 17, 2009 22:24:56 GMT -5
An amazing thread, I must admit. One that almost killed me laughing.
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Post by duchessashley on Feb 24, 2009 11:17:05 GMT -5
A proud mama must always share...even if this has nothing to do with olfactory senses... My little Jack, age 3, told me that he needed his Bible. He has a little New Testament to play with. He said he needed to preach.
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Post by seraphim on Feb 24, 2009 11:57:01 GMT -5
That reminds me of my own tender childhood. I grew up in a Southern Baptist home and the first house my family owned had a few leftovers from its former inhabitants. Up in one hard to reach kitchen shelf were a dozen or so little bitty glasses that to my three/four year old eyes looked like slightly larger versions of the tiny little glasses we used for taking the Lord's Supper from time to time. They were in fact shot glasses, but what did I know at that age. So every now and again when I wanted to play preacher I would get my highchair/stool and set it up in the kitchen as my podium and then arrange our dinner chairs like pews and I would put a cracker and a little shot glass of grape juice on each chair...then preach with my own little New Testament...or one of my parent's bibles if I could get hold of it, then proceed to have the Lord's Supper...naturally I did all the communing at those services, taking my turn sitting in each chair.
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