Describing Taste and Smell
Write a story from memory or imagined, exploring a sense of taste or smell.
Hydrangea flowers in evening sunlight. Photo: Tanya Clarke 2012
In the Evening Sunlight
I think the hardest thing to describe in writing is a sense of taste and smell.
I've talked at length about writing that involves your senses recently. I talk about it because I believe trying to write with all the senses in mind helps to give your reader an opening into your scenes, giving your words momentum and focus. If your reader can hear, see, taste, smell and touch where they are in the narrative of your story, you're well on the way to bringing your reader along with you. They will keep turning the page. They will be right there beside you. Of course, it is possible to overdo this and you might find your story hobbled by its own prose. As always, and I have said this before, there's a balance.
For this week, try to write by exploring the senses of taste and/or smell.
When I look at the photograph above, I smell a suburban street on a warm summer evening when everywhere around me turns orange in the low sun. The air smells thick and warm. If it's the weekend there might be the smell of a newly lit barbeque. Now my mouth is watering with the thought of cooking food mixed with the slightly acrid smoke of burning coals.
But these tastes and smells are from my culture and experience of growing up a white girl in suburban England. If your culture and place of residence are different from mine those tastes and smells might be very different. If you're writing a story based in an imaginary world or a country you have little experience of, describing it through the senses might be a good way to start. An approach to place your characters in time and place. Through your imagination and your lived experience, you can explore a place real or otherwise to make it seem as true as possible and bring that place to life.
All creative writing is an exploration through imagination, even when writing a memory. Those memories can be an exercise in imagination all by themselves. So let's get to work. How can you describe a scene using taste and smell? Remember phrases like 'smells like' and 'tastes like' are cultural. Not everyone will understand what you mean. Think about it.
Have fun! Until next time.
