When storytelling engages the senses, the words leap off the page and come to life in our minds. We’ve previously highlighted how copywriting can create illusions that tingle the skin and tastebuds, and with each additional triggered sense, the deeper the impression of the story. Join Wordsmith as we explore deeper into the world of multisensory writing!
Perfumer Holladay Saltz explains how major brands, like Tide, can manipulate our consumption behaviour (and to a certain extent, our memories) using various combinations of precise scents.
What’s that smell?
Unless you were reading a magazine with a “scratch n’ sniff” section, smell is something that rarely comes to mind while reading. However, it can have incredibly immersive properties when used to describe the environment of your scenes. Consider this article by David Chitty, where he quotes Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer:
“The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds…”
Without describing how anything looked, Suskind merely paired its presence with an associated stench to paint the desolation and squalor of life in a French slum – it’s not a pretty smell.
“Smell is also one of the more forgiving of senses. You can get away with being very vague with your descriptions and it still works to its desired effect,” explains Chitty. As humans, we’re hardwired to turn away from unfamiliar (often unattractive) scents and to be enticed by pleasant ones – for example, thick and choking smoke would indicate a fire and a potential hazard to steer clear from, meanwhile, the wafting scent of roasted pork and sizzling bacon would be a sign of a potential meal (or also danger if the roast was owned by a gang of bandits or hungry trolls, it depends on your context really).
The sense of smell can be used to reinforce memories as well. Consider the thought of visiting your grandma’s kitchen. From a stereotypically positive approach, we could write about how her kitchen was like a symphony of smells – bubbling slow-cooked stews with fragrant spices, buttery cookies baking in the oven, fresh potted herbs lining her window sill. However, since smells are subjective, they can also be used to subvert readers’ expectations. If you wanted to imply that grandma was a terrible cook and that her kitchen stank like a witch’s workshop, you could conjure up the smell of burning rubber or other noxious odours.
“Smells that are happy or neutral for one person can be traumatic for another if they trigger an association with unhappy memories,” says Scottish playwright and BBC radio journalist Jules Horne. “So they might become a reason for dramatic action [their motivation] – say, one character wanting to avoid a smell, or impose a smell on another.”
Furthermore, smells can be used to describe the distance between the subject and a target of interest without having to explain how far apart they are. “Salt smells at the seaside that reach deep into the lungs convey a different viewpoint to a fleeting sense of strange perfume on your lover’s collar,” writes Horne.
Soundsmithing with words
The most instinctive sounds in writing are onomatopoeias – sound effect words like crash, smash, whiff or zip. Their literal meanings make them easy to use for quickly illustrating a scene:
“The excitable dog zipped around the park barking at the local wildlife; squirrels squeaked in fear as they scrambled up their trees; ducks quacked as they enjoyed their afternoon swim.”
For more adept onomatopoeia users, the pronunciation of the words are also useful in reflecting the mood of a scene. For example, slither has soft vowels that better represents sneaking actions (perhaps it can be a thief trying to score a hit or a snake stalking its prey), whereas crash has a hard vowel that better represents violence or action (like a pair of wrestlers tumbling to the mat or looming storm clouds in the horizon). Pair these with assonance and you have a powerful mood manipulating tool.
Sounds can be used to symbolise emotions as well. In Chitty’s next article, he quotes Splinter by Carl Sandburg:
“The voice of the last cricket
Across the first frost
Is one kind of good-by
It is so thin a splinter of singing”
In Sandburg’s poem, he uses the chirp of a cricket (a nocturnal critter) to mourn the end of night and the transition into twilight. “By describing an event, such as the passage of time or an associated emotion, the loss, through sense creates a much more powerful image that can have a lasting impression on the reader,” describes Chitty. Putting the sense of sound into practise, let’s see how we can improve a hypothetical sales pitch for a vacuum cleaner:
The all-new Model X Vacuum Cleaner runs almost silently – say goodbye to high-pitched whirrs and loud buzzing!
Hear a pin drop with the whisper-quiet Model X Vacuum Cleaner – say goodbye to audio onslaught!
The first option only uses simple onomatopoeias to sell the new model’s quietness – it’s simple, but gets the point across. On the other hand, the second option references the sound of a pin dropping (difficult to hear at the best of times!) and also contains an assonance (audio and onslaught) at the end for a bit of extra zing.
Whether you wish to chill readers with darkness and suspense or to embolden them with vibrancy and confidence, smells and sounds offer fantastic ways for you to build immersive environments creatively. In parts one and two of this article, we’ve covered the first four senses. All that’s left is the biggest and most widely used form of sensory imagery – sight. Stay tuned for the conclusion!