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Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan, Writer’s Digest Books, 1999
Chapter 4: The Nose and Mouth and Hand and Ear of the Beholder (Part 1)
We usually think of description in terms of seeing. “Ignoring the other senses in your writing is like sitting in a gourmet restaurant wearing ear plugs, work gloves, and a surgical mask over your nose and mouth.”
The sense of smell is the one with the best memory. The scent of a certain cologne can remind you of a high-school sweetheart.
The scent of a particular disinfectant slammed me back eight years to my mother’s nursing home.
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Description of an odor often employs its effect on the character: nauseating, intoxicating. Another technique is to describe a smell in terms of other smells, which is especially effective if a reader might have no firsthand experience.
In my WIP, I describe the odor of an autoclave (a sterilizing device) as a “burning, moist smell.”
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Other techniques for evoking a smell are to confine it to a particular place or to combine several smells. You can also put your character in a situation in which he can’t rely on his sight alone, such as in a darkened room.
I like the idea of putting yourself in a character’s shoes and smelling through his nose.
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Taste is difficult to separate from smell. Sometimes just mentioning a specific food such as fried chicken or buttermilk biscuits will evoke the taste as well as the reader’s association with the food. Saying something is sweet, salty, sour, or bitter can only carry the description so far, since both a lemon drop and sour cream can be described as sour.
Scientists today no longer map the tongue into areas of sweet, salty, sour, or bitter. Taste buds for each are scattered all over the tongue.
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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Press, 2008
Just the sound of his voice twists my stomach into a knot of unpleasant emotions like guilt, sadness, and fear. And longing. I might as well admit there’s some of that, too. Only it has too much competition to ever win out.
The girl is a bit conflicted. Emotions are seldom pure.
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In my mind, President Snow should be viewed in front of marble pillars hung with oversized flags. It’s jarring to see him surrounded by the ordinary objects in the room. Like taking the lid off a pot and finding a fanged viper instead of stew.
The protagonist doesn’t like Snow if she’s comparing him to a viper.
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The smell of blood . . . it was on his breath.
What does he do? I think. Drink it? I imagine him sipping it from a teacup. Dipping a cookie into the stuff and pulling it out dripping red.
Ewww.
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That’s all for today. I’ll have another post on Thursday. See you then!
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