It’s nothing new to say our sense of smell is an expressway to memory.
One whiff of black pavement on a hot day, and I am at Six Flags in the heat of summer during the late ’70’s.
My dad worked a mile or two away, so he would drop my sisters and me off for the entire day. We’d run circles through the amusement park, make repeat rides on the Shock Wave, cool off in the Cave Ride, and go home exhausted from the heat but charged in fun with our feet covered in black tar residue.
In Naming the World, Bret Anthony Johnston writes about the power of sensory details in fiction or in nonfiction, reminding us that great details simply pull at “snatches of memory and image,” allow readers to fill in the rest:
The most affecting descriptive writing results from an author’s providing not a linguistic blueprint of a library but the raw material (the air tinged with the scent of old pages, the shafts of dusty light diffused through window slats, the whispers, like trickling water, of the librarians behind the oval reference desk) from which the reader can erect her own library.
Recently, Kim Suhr from Red Oak Writing visited the group of writers at Harwood Place. I love inviting visiting teachers to this group not only because they bring a fresh perspective on craft and critique but because they often bring new exercises as well.
Kim talked about sensory details and walked the writers through the beginnings of a wonderful exercise that taps into memory through smell and opens the door for story.
She asked the group for a list of smells that evoke strong reactions, good or bad. The exercise: choose one from the list and write on it, starting with the sentence, “I smell ________, and I am _______.”
I smell skunk, and I am on a two-lane road in the middle of Texas….
Where are you?