Getting extra sensory
You've got five senses. Use 'em.
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Craft: Scents and the senses
I live in a city by the ocean, and one of the things I love most about this place is the smell of it. There are foggy days where both the sounds and scents of the harbour carry further on the thick damp air, and you can almost taste the metallic tang of salt. Summer days, where the scent of the wild pink roses that grow at the beach’s edge dances with salt spray in the heat. Others when the tide has been sucked out to sea, and the smell of rot and seaweed drifts in from the shoreline. Winter days when the air smells so sharp you think it might cut your nose as you draw it in. Spring days where the rain’s sweetness meets the ocean’s brine over the green, alive scent of new sea grass.
I’m also a perfume-hound, and so I’m always sniffing perfumes that purport to capture the ocean’s scent. Most are a disappointment, but two top the list of my ocean go-to’s: Heeley’s Sel Marin and CBIHatePerfume’s Eternal Return. One I love because it smells like the ocean to me; the other I adore because it makes me smell the ocean in a new way. Sel Marin is sun, sand, breeze. There is a hint of citrus that means it doesn’t smell like “my” ocean—we’re too far north for citrus to be in the air—but it’s close enough to make me remember that summer exists as I sit in December’s darkness.
Eternal Return is different. An “ocean perfume” or “beach perfume” is common in fragrance lines, but perfumer Christopher Brosius approaches the idea from a unique direction—literally. Most perfumers try to capture the scent of the ocean as you stand on the shore. Brosius was intrigued by the idea that sailors say they can smell land before they see it—and so he created a scent that attempts to capture what the land smells like as its scent reaches the sailor across the sea: ocean air, wooden ship, cypress trees growing on a cliff.
One of the ways we put readers inside the scenes on our pages is through sensory details. To do that, we need to pay attention to our own senses. I’ll admit that my fall-back as a writer has always been to describe what I see: I’m an observer, most comfortable at the edge of a party, at the back of a room, watching what is going on. It wasn’t until about a decade or so ago, when a friend introduced me to the wide, wild world of niche fragrances, that I started paying more attention to my other senses. Through perfume, I started really, truly smelling things, trying to decode the notes of this flower or that; this spice or that; this funky, pungent odour or that. I learned to love indoles, which smell like gorgeous jasmine—or literal shit, depending on their concentration; to breathe deeply of sexy musks and sweaty ouds; to appreciate bitter birch tar and its leathery associations. And once I started paying attention to my nose, I couldn’t help but pay more attention to my sense of taste as well, teasing out flavours and the scents that accompanied them. Texture became more interesting too: the play of various fabrics over skin, the differences in textural perceptions when felt with fingers, across the back of a hand, the arch of a foot, the nape of the neck. Even sounds became more interesting, as I stopped, sniffed, listened. The key, there, of course, is “stopped.” I stopped. And noticed.
Some examples
From Kyo Maclear’s Birds Art Life, in a scene where she is watching with a group of birders for a migrating flock of whimbrels, as sound is transformed into sensation:
“Suddenly a voice cried out from behind: “Here they come!” We hurried back to our post as the air filled with a choppy whistling sound. I saw a wavering blur transform into a fast dark cloud as a shoal of whimbrels passed right over our heads. The way their tapered wings pumped without rest showed such earnest effort. They were so close I couldn’t take them all in. But I felt the chorus of wingbeats in my chest.” (p. 139)
From Mary Oliver’s “Dog Talk” in her book Dog Songs, writing of her dogs Ben and Bear, and what they smell and hear that she cannot perceive:
“Of night and the dog: you cannot elaborate the dark thickness of it as he can, you cannot separate the rich, rank threads as they make their way through the grasses: mouse, vole, mink, nails of the fox then the thin stream of his urine, drops sticking to the grass blades, necklaces of pale gold. And the rabbit—his paw smell, his juice or a single strand of fur, or a bleat from a gland under the white tail, or a bead of excrement, black pearls dropped off here and there. I have seen Ben place his nose meticulously into the shallow dampness of a deer’s hoofprint and shut his eyes as if listening. But it is the smell he is listening to. The wild, high music of smell, that we know so little about.
“Tonight Ben charges up the yard; Bear follows. They run into the field and are gone. A soft wind, like a belt of silk, wraps the house. I follow them to the end of the field where I hear the long-eared owl, at wood’s edge, in one of the tall pines. All night the owl will sit there inventing his catty racket, except when he opens pale wings and drifts moth-like over the grass. I have seen both dogs look up as the bird floats by, and I suppose the field mouse hears it too, in the pebble of his tiny heart. Though I hear nothing.” (p. 111)
In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish” see how her word choices of “ancient wallpaper” and “rags” suggests texture:
“He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.”
Notice
As you consider which images and words are most evocative in the examples above, notice that they are generally not adjectives and adverbs. More often they are vivid nouns and verbs, and even when accompanied by qualifiers, it is the strength of the noun or verb that is doing most of the lifting—and the qualifiers that are there are precise and compelling. It’s not “old wallpaper”—it’s “ancient wallpaper.” It’s the “beat of a gland” or a “bead of excrement.” The whimbrels’ wings “pump” and create a “chorus of wingbeats in my chest.” Even when the words are plain, they paint a picture: “tiny white sea-lice”—the t’s in tiny and white are clipped and compact, sliding into the slippery insect-ness of the sibilants in sea-lice.
Exercises
Pull a Brosius: If you’re looking at an object or a landscape, resituate yourself. Get a drone’s-eye view. Look at it from the ground—or floor—up. Get under it. Go around to the other side. What do you see when you shift your position?
Good and bad: Describe a scent from a new perspective. If it’s a “bad” scent—consider how you would describe it if everything else you had smelled that day smelled worse than the scent you’re describing does. What words would you use if this bad smell was the best thing you’d smelled today? If it’s a “good” scent—how might someone who doesn’t like this odour describe it?
Sense-swap: Describe a sound using textural images and associations. Describe a texture as if it were a sound.
Describe the sillage: “Sillage” is the scent that lingers after the person wearing the perfume has moved past—a scent-echo, you might call it, a lingering after-taste. Pick a sound. Don’t describe the sound—describe what the moment after the sound sounds like. Pick a taste. Don’t describe the taste—describe the sensation you’re left with after you swallow.
Search and replace: Review what you’ve written, and circle adverbs and adjectives. Can you strengthen what you’ve written by cutting them out and replacing their pairings with more descriptive verbs and nouns? Where you decide to keep the adverbs or adjectives, are they precise?
P.S.: Looking for some sensory inspiration? Check out the perfume reviews—yes, perfume reviews—in Perfumes: The A-Z Guide or Perfumes: The Guide 2018 by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. You don’t have to like perfume to enjoy their sharp, opinionated and evocative sketches. And if you are intrigued by their reviews and want to sniff some of the fragrances they describe, check out perfumeniche.com, the website of the pal who introduced me to perfumes, where you can purchase samples of high-end frags from around the globe.
What I’m Reading
I’ve been dipping into a book that, to be honest, is a bit weird. Edited by Maria Popova (of Brain Pickings) and Claudia Bedrick and titled A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, it is a collection of letters from prominent writers to young readers. The book is gorgeous: each letter is accompanied by an original illustration inspired by the letter, and because the letters are about reading, the illustrations depict reading and imagination and creativity. Some are whimsical. Some are heartbreaking. All are compelling. The letter writers include Neil Gaiman, David Byrne, Rebecca Solnit, Alexander Chee, Roz Chast, Judy Blume, Mary Oliver, Susan Orlean and many others. The illustrators include Samantha Cotterill, Peter Brown, Sophie Gilmore, Nahid Kazemi, Yara Kono, Marc Johns and more. Oddly, though, I can’t imagine a child—even an enthusiastic reader of a child, as I was—reading this book, filled with adults’ encouragement to read. Instead, it seems to me to be the perfect book for writers, because in writing to children about why they should read, each author is really writing about what they learned from reading and what has fired their desire to write. And did I mention the illustrations are spectacular? I’m almost tempted to snip a couple out to frame them. I think I’ll be dipping into this book myself, when I need a little encouragement, a spark to light the way on days when I’ve lost my creativity in the dark.
Other Good Stuff
Read I’ve been enjoying the Kelsey McKinney’s Written Out e-newsletter, about “the women who have been written out of the literary canon, written out of history, and written out of contemporary literary coverage.” This week, she writes about why we should pull ourselves away from “the year’s best books” and read into the backlists: older novels (and, I would argue, older nonfiction). Check out her post “The years without women.”
Watch I had the pleasure of attending a concert with Indigenous vocalist Jeremy Dutcher and Symphony Nova Scotia recently. I’d heard about Dutcher and listened to a couple of tracks of his recording, but nothing prepared me for the throat-fluttering emotion of listening to him live. Many of the works that Dutcher performed are based on traditional songs captured on wax cylinders over 110 years ago by anthropologist William H. Mechling, who recorded the voices and songs of Dutcher’s Wolastoqiyik ancestors. As he performs, Dutcher integrates the recordings, so that you hear both his voice and the voices from the past, such as Jim Paul, whose voice crackles across the century and joins Dutcher in the powerful song “Mehcinut.” What struck me in listening were the commonalities between Dutcher’s approach to music and a nonfiction writer’s approach to source materials: the research, the interplay, reacting and engaging with materials that speak to you across time and place and space. You can watch and listen to Dutcher on this NPR Tiny Desk Concert video.
Listen If you’re looking for inspiration in structure and pacing, give The Power of One, a short-run podcast by friend and colleague Sarmishta Subramanian, a listen. The podcast is classic storytelling: each episode is about one person whose life has had an impact on the world, told through Sarmishta’s narration and clips from two subject-matter experts. The scripts, Sarmishta told me, are generally about 4,000 words long, and as you listen, you’ll hear how gracefully they are structured: conflict rising through a twist or two to climax, with the point of each being just a bit more of a surprise than you might have anticipated at the opening, artfully connected to a current theme or concern. A definite “add” to your podcast playlist.
+ A Bonus Listen! Looking for sounds to inspire your descriptive skills? The BBC has made 16,000 sound effects available online. I enjoyed Medieavel Cloth Fulling Mill, Electric Typewriter (of course), Fizzy Liquids and Jumble Sales.
Book Industry Stuff
Too much memoir? Sutherland House Books publisher Ken Whyte published a critique of what he says is a narrowing of the Canada Council’s guidelines for funding nonfiction books. Whyte says a colleague (anonymous) was told by someone (anonymous) at the Canada Council that the personal voice is what is being considered to be key in funding decisions, which Whyte then extrapolates to mean that only personal memoir, essays and other forms of personal writing will be funded. This extrapolation seems a bit shaky to me, given that the writer’s voice can surely shine through in third-person, objective journalism as well as in personal writing, and it is made shakier given that it’s balanced on a “he told me he was told” conversation. The Council has publicly said that literary non-fiction will continue to be funded, based on artistic merit, and that it is up to jurors to define artistic merit. Worth reading his arguments, though, and checking out some of the critiques of it on Twitter:
Jane told me to listen: Jane Friedman mentioned this podcast in her e-newsletter and I’ve added it to my playlist: What Editors Want, an interview series with book editors.
Book-lover’s gift: It’s expensive, but I have to say I love the idea of this gift: a 45-minute consultation followed by a personalized list of the books you should read in the next year.
Tis the season for book recommendations: “Best of” lists are everywhere. Here are a few of ‘em:
—CBC best Canadian fiction and nonfiction
Tweets & Stuff
The Grinchiest cat ever (and I love him)
Good doggo!
And a great explanation of why that Peloton ad was so irritating: it’s all about whose perspective the story is told from. (One minor disagreement: it’s also the sexism.)
Obligatory photo of Buddy
Buddy says it’s time to get cozy by the fire—with a book or two, of course!
