Note to Self: What Does That Book Smell Like?
Every book is a portal to a different world. As a child, I especially loved stories about animals. One of my favorites was Charlotte’s Web, which made me long to be a girl named Fern with a pet pig named Wilbur, because of its vivid descriptions of everything from the busy farmyard to the noisy fairground where Wilbur becomes famous.
Author E.B. White spins his spell as adeptly as Charlotte weaves her clever webs in that book partly by calling upon our senses. For instance, when Fern convinces her father to spare Wilbur and let her raise him, she returns to a kitchen smelling of “coffee, bacon, damp plaster and wood smoke.” That mixture of aromas not only helps us imagine that kitchen, but also carries with it a sense of menace: if Fern doesn’t save Wilbur from slaughter, he, too, could become bacon!
In another of my favorite passages invoking an olfactory description, Betty Smith writes in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: “The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.”
That’s exactly how I feel every time I go into a library and smell that unmistakable smell of books and librarians: like I want to fall on my knees in a prayer of thanks that such a place exists.
I also love it when writers play around with describing smells in unexpected ways, like bestselling author Neil Gaiman. Here’s a snippet from his novel American Gods: “The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”
It’s such a funny line, because you expect, with a musty old house, that there will be ghosts, or ghosts that smell like faded roses, but cookies? Really?
Now that I’m a working novelist, I try to remember to use all five senses to transport readers into the worlds I envision and create on the page. While it’s easy to describe what characters see, taste, hear, and even touch, I have to work a little harder to describe smells. It’s worth the effort.
In my most recent novel, Chance Harbor, which is set on the easternmost tip of Prince Edward Island, for instance, I wrote this description: “Catherine stepped out of the car and smelled the bittersweet tang of the ocean. She could hear the surf in the distance. Tall, tawny marsh grass hemmed the trailer park. The grass shivered and whispered in the breeze. Seagulls wheeled overhead, like white boomerangs flung into the sky. The bright day mocked her dark mood.”
My character is at the beach, obviously, but even though it’s a sunny day, she’s in turmoil and is acutely aware of the “bittersweet tang” of the ocean. I chose the word “bittersweet” because it captures the essence of what Catherine is feeling right now, as an adult, as she recalls growing up on the sea and having a happy childhood with a sister who then went off the rails and disappeared. The ocean air both reminds her of those happier times long ago and causes her to realize that life is much more complicated now than it used to be.
Describing what characters smell can deepen a reader’s experience of a book. As Helen Keller famously said, “Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.”
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Holly Robinson is a journalist and comic whose work appears regularly in national venues such as Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Huffington Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, More, Open Salon and Parents. Her first book, The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter: A Memoir, was published by Harmony Books in May 2009 and was released in paperback in June 2010.
Ms. Robinson holds a B.A. in biology from Clark University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She and her husband have five children, two cats, a single gerbil and two very stubborn small dogs. They are currently renovating an antique house north of Boston, and will probably never finish it.
To learn more about Holly Robinson, please visit www.authorhollyrobinson.com
Buy her latest novel Chance Harbor HERE
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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