The Language of the Senses

For some time now, I've had a note on my desk that reads, "Blog about that comment about smell/language." There was a time when I knew which comment this note referred to -- one of you posted something interesting and should be recognized for it, even if I can't for the life of me remember which comment or commenter it was. (My brain has been a sieve all summer. Counting down until school starts again, and can I get an amen on that one?)

Oh, well. If any of you remember posting a comment about writing the sense of smell, please pipe up in the comments so I can credit you appropriately. Luckily, I do still remember what I wanted to say. This is all about the words we have at our disposal to narrate the physical senses. Our language doesn't treat the senses as equals, and this can sometimes present writing challenges.

Vision

We have an extensive vocabulary to describe what we see:

• concrete nouns
• verbs of action
• verbs of appearance
• verbs of being (sometimes)
• adjectives
  
• some other modifiers

Usually, when we narrate an action, we're doing it by accessing the sense of sight.
The little girl skipped rope.
Bobby tapped his bat on home plate.

When we read these words, we get a visual image from them. Each of us may get a slightly different visual. Doesn't matter. The point is that most of the words in most narratives will draw on the sense of sight. Our language is rich and evocative and packed with possibilities for describing what we see.

If you don't get what I mean, try an exercise just for kicks. Write 150-words about a woman grocery shopping for ingredients for a dinner party. Now write the same piece from the point of view of a blind man. What is the experience like when you strip out the sense of sight? How does it change the narrative? What words can you use with the sighted woman that you cannot use with the blind man? There are probably quite a few changes that have to be made, if only because what we see is such a large part of what we narrate.



Sound

Look again at our sample sentences about the kids on the playground. Either of these are suggestive of the sounds, too -- the slap of rope against asphalt, the thud of wood against plastic. We see the images first, and perhaps we also hear.

Sound creeps into the narrative in many ways through action verbs, but there are more obvious uses of sound, too. Dialogue is spoken by characters, and if you're anything like most readers, you "hear" those words differently in your silent mind as you read them. (How many of you shifted your inner ear to accommodate the quotation marks around the word hear in that sentence?)

Then we have words we use, usually verbs and adverbs, to describe the quality of the character's speech. People yell and whisper. They speak throatily or brightly. This manner of conveying sound qualities in speech has fallen out of favor, but we still have the vocabulary to accomplish it.

Then there are the fleets of nouns to describe non-spoken sounds -- hoots, thumps, scrapes, rustles, and so on.

If you look at the vocabulary set for vision and sound, the words directly describe the sensual impression conveyed. When you read the word hoot, you get a direct and instant knowledge of what is being heard. When you read the words little girl, you get a direct and instant knowledge of what is being seen. No need for translation or further interpretation.

Smell

Not so with the sense of smell. For narrating scents, we have a blended vocabulary, you might say. Some of the words are direct -- pungent, acrid, cloying, and other similar terms all describe the native characteristics of a smell.

But this vocabulary in English is not as well developed as the vocabulary for sight and sound. We just simply don't have the words to accurately convey a sense of smell as directly as with sight and sound.

Take, for example, cloying. We know our response to a cloying scent. We don't like it. It's invasive, and not in a pleasant way. But is it sweet like cheap perfume? Or disgusting like roadkill? Either of those scents can be cloying, but they're cloying in entirely different ways.

We can work around this as writers by drawing on comparative language. When I asked the questions above about cloying, I used the word like both times. This is no accident. Our vocabulary for the sense of smell almost demands this kind of usage if we're going to be precise about what we're trying to convey. It's not always necessary -- we do have some good, robust, precise words for smells -- but this particular sense does often demand an indirect approach in the narrative.

There are other work-arounds. Sometimes context will control the way a reader interprets a word meant to describe a scent. Yeasty, for example, can be used to describe the smell of bread (a pleasant smell) or the smell of an infected body (an unpleasant smell). If the word is used in a hospital ward, the reader will know which way to lean.

The bottom line is this: Pay attention to the way you're using language to evoke a sense on the page. Not all senses are handled alike.

Theresa

Fixing Your Nasal Passages, Part Two: Changing Predicates

As you may have noticed in the first post about fixing nasal passages, sentence combining sometimes requires a bit of finesse to achieve good results. And it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.


Not all nostril-plugging sentences will be immediately followed by an action which results from the scent. Sometimes, other material will interrupt the stimulus and the response, or maybe the scent is purely descriptive and there is no response.


The scent of fresh-brewed coffee permeated her nostrils. Could it really be six a.m. already? She opened her eyes slowly.


In this case, the order of the sentences could loosely be labeled as: description, interior monologue, action. The rhythm of this paragraph is better than our original example from the other day, but it still contains the problem of the permeated nostrils. In this case, to preserve the rhythm, I might connect the scent to a different action and forget about combining sentences:


The scent of fresh-brewed coffee teased her awake. Could it really be six a.m. already? She opened her eyes slowly.


Now the order is: action, interior monologue, action. The paired actions highlight her resistance to getting up and, as an added bonus, bracket the related complaint in her interior monologue. This is a paragraph with some integrity, but it still keeps moving forward with new actions.
It’s worth noting that the new predicate describes a response to the subject. The scent causes her to wake up. As we’ve mentioned before, one of the most effective ways to leverage the sense of smell is by linking it to a chain of causation.


One other thing I have to point out here. We’ve replaced a sentence of description, which is passive, with a sentence of action, which is, well, active. There’s a body in motion now, a character whose physical state is changing from asleep to awake.


What we had before was an intangible (a scent) permeating a hole (nostril, from the Old English, literally means nose hole). (Side question: is it even possible to permeate a hole? Doesn’t permeate imply some intermingling of elements, such as water permeating a cloth or chemicals permeating a membrane? I don’t know -- just thought I’d throw that question out to the wordsmiths.) You might think that the first sentence was actually an action rather than a description, but I think that if you have a non-object in an empty space, it’s a stretch to call it action.


In any event, the best storytelling focuses on bodies in motion, people and things caught up in a chain of actions and reactions, stimuli and responses. So as a general rule, you’re better off with more action and less description.


So change your predicate to something more active, and then you can leave the rest of the sentences alone.

Theresa

Fixing Your Nasal Passages, Part One: Sentence Combining

My inner 9-year-old boy loves the title of this post. Apologies to those of you who are grown-ups. ;)

Several of you have commented that you’re going to comb through your manuscripts for instances of scents doing things to noses. I have some examples that might help you with your editing, but before we get to them, I’d like to say something about our examples.

We Protect Our People

Every day, Alicia and I work with writers to shape their manuscripts for publication. We also evaluate submissions, read our friends’ pages, give second opinions to other editors -- in short, we confront a whole lot of manuscript pages for a whole lot of reasons.

Here’s what we don’t do. We don’t -- and we never will -- pull examples directly from any of these manuscripts. The editor-author relationship depends on mutual trust and respect, and we won’t ever compromise that. We might get ideas for blog posts in the course of our interaction with writers and manuscripts, but all examples are ours, with the occasional exception of literary sources.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s roll up our sleeves and get into some edits.

Sentence Combining

How you edit a flabby scent sentence (scent-ence? nah…) depends a lot on what’s around it. When your nosey moment causes an action of some kind in the very next sentence, sentence combining might be the best editing method to use.

The scent of fresh-brewed coffee permeated her nostrils. She opened her eyes slowly. Could it really be six a.m. already?

So we have two simple sentences (subject-verb-direct object), one of which is dressed up with a prepositional phrase in the subject, and one of which includes an adverb in the predicate.

What’s the nosey moment? She smells coffee. And what action does it cause? She opens her eyes slowly.

If you ditch the flabby back half of the first sentence, and combine the smell of coffee with the action it provokes, you might end up with something like:

The scent of fresh-brewed coffee made her open her eyes. Could it really be six a.m. already?

Hmm. It’s a passable sentence, but made isn’t a very strong verb, is it? It’s not quite as invisible as a verb of being, but it’s still a bit on the flabby side. Especially because the stronger verb, open, is no longer doing the heavy lifting of the sentence but has been shoved into a lesser, object slot.

Maybe this would work better if we flipped it around so that open could be the main verb of the sentence.

She opened her eyes to the scent of fresh-brewed coffee. Could it really be six a.m. already?

That’s better. It’s more linear, less cluttered, but now I’m a little bothered by the eyes and the scent being right next to each other. You can open your ears to a sound and your eyes to a sight, but I’m not sure you can open your eyes to a scent. It feels off.

So instead of opening her eyes, let’s give her another equivalent action.

She woke to the scent of fresh-brewed coffee. Could it really be six a.m. already?
Or,
She rose to the scent of fresh-brewed coffee. Could it really be six a.m. already?

Either of these is cleaner. Tighter, too. And there’s one further advantage that has to do with impact and flow within the paragraph, but that’s a pretty complex topic we’ll save for another day.

Theresa

Big No-Nose

I, Theresa, as Co-Queen of This Here Blog, hereby declare a moratorium on scents doing things to noses in fiction manuscripts. This prohibition includes but is not limited to:
--Any scents, smells, odors, fragrances, et cetera, et cetera
--Which invade, permeate, fill, soak, assault, et cetera, et cetera,
-- Any character's nose, nostrils, nasal passages, sinus cavities, or any other part of the proboscis.

This ban is permanent, final, and irrevocable. Examples of prohibited senteces include:
The scent of cement filled her nostrils; or
The odor of cavalry horses charged his nasal passages; or
The smell of hairspray teased his nose hairs.

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These examples may be a bit extreme, but this is exactly the problem with having an odor act upon a nose. The verbs can create the illusion that the fragrances are doing things which are both impossible and ludicrous.

Scents are passive. They don't do things to us or to any part of us, even though they may stimulate a response. So, then, how do we communicate a fragrance in good writing?

There are three methods for that: the direct method, the descriptive method, and the active method.

The Direct Method:

Have the character smell it directly.

She smelled soap.
He caught a whiff of her perfume.

The sentence structure is simple: subject-verb-direct object, maybe with a prepositional phrase or other tidbit to dress it up. But as a general rule for this approach, hit it and move on. Use a verb such as "smell" or a close synonym to it.

The Descriptive Method:
You can take a few more liberties with your verbs if you're incorporating scent into a descriptive passage. Imagine a romantic heroine escaping a crowded ballroom for a moment's peace in a solitary garden.

Not even a breeze disturbed the tranquility of the garden. Moonlight glittered off the small pond's surface, a reflection of a reflection. The fragrance of sweet tea roses hung thick in the air, though she couldn't see the bushes anywhere.

Here, the fragrance in the context of a setting works because even with active verbs, description is static enough not to conflict with the way scents operate on the physical plane. In other words, we're not suggesting that the scents are doing things that violate the laws of physics.

The Active Method:
But you want your prose to be dynamic. Fresh. Inventive. You want to incorporate the sense of smell into active scenes, and you want it to have an impact on the reader. So how do you do that?

By treating the scent as a stimulus which creates an active response in the character who smells it.

The scent of vinegar jerked her back to consciousness.

There are two actions contained or implied in this sentence. First, she smells vinegar. Second, she jerks back to consciousness. The second action is caused by the first. These kinds of linked actions are an effective way to include the sense of smell in your prose.

Does this make sense? If not, ask your questions in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.