We have a million ways to talk about what we see, or touch, or hear. But smell? It’s the stealth sense, hard to describe. Most of its adjectives are borrowed from the thing itself— something smells smoky, or fishy or spicy. It’s a take-a-noun-and-add-a-y approach. Functional, but hardly inspiring.
Writers often turn to metaphor and poetic language, which have all kinds of added benefits. When you stop worrying about what something is and think instead about what it feels like, the world becomes a huge and beautiful thing. Scents can whisper, move, have heat and stories and emotions. They come alive on paper.
When I was creating “The Scent Keeper“ that skill became crucial, because I was working with a handicap. Just as I was starting to write the book, our family went on a backpacking trip on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island. It’s a magnificent, treacherous hike, full of old trees and endless ocean, muddy trails and ladders and tides that can catch you unaware. And bears. I really don’t like bears.
We had a can of bear spray, and at one point it accidentally went off in the tent. Think mace, a jet-propelled cloud of cayenne pepper. Half a second, but that’s all it took. My kids and husband missed the worst of the blast, but my lungs and nose were on fire.
For weeks, everything smelled like bear spray, and even afterwards, any scent seemed to come to me through a layer of wool. A daunting problem for someone writing about a girl with an extraordinary sense of smell. So I ordered a range of single-scent essential oils. I chose one a day and put a drop on my left wrist. I would let the scent sink in, noting how it changed with the warmth of my skin. I kept a journal and imagined what that scent would be if it was music, weather, a person, a landscape, a color, a tree, a voice, and so on. I tracked how it affected my mood, and it was astonishing how much one drop could change how I felt. Citrus made me happy, light and uncomplicated. Labdanum was soft and calm and made me feel as if nothing bad could happen. Galbanum, however, put me in such a grumpy mood that my husband begged me to scrub it off.
Drop by drop, I got my sense of smell back. But in the process, I got something more. I had done my research before I started writing, and I knew how marketers and doctors and even teachers are using scents to influence our moods and choices in ways that can seem almost magical. But now I believed it in my body as well as mind. As I worked with my own scent bottles, reality and metaphor fused. Scents became movement, music, emotion, and Emmeline’s incredible talent began to feel like something any of us could achieve, if we only paid attention. That experience infused “The Scent Keeper“ in a way that never would have happened otherwise.
I guess in the end I need to thank the bears—even if I will never touch bear spray again.
