How To Describe A Smell

Maybe if we were dogs our languages would be clear on the olfactory level rather than heavily visual. The fact is, human language is bereft of words to describe how something smells. It’s either lovely or putrid (and everything in between), or it smells like something else (something we can actually see – since we are heavily visual creatures). Yep. This is the best we have.

So what makes some literary descriptions of smell stand out over others?

Original connections which ring true, but which the reader had probably never linked before.

The club was called Fez. They had to walk down a narrow stairwell lit by brass lamps with multicolored plastic panes to get to it. It smelled lightly of day-old beer, cigarettes, and plastic — like the inside of a mask from a Halloween costume.

- from Girl At Sea, by Maureen Johnson

But advice to ‘use all the senses’ and describe the smell of things as you’re writing fiction should not be applied too liberally. Some kinds of narrators are simply not good observers of subtleties. I’m reminded of the husband in The Pension Grillparzer by John Irving:

She [the wife] did not remind him that he was a heavy smoker who never smelled the soup simmering; the aroma of horses in the fresh air was too subtle for him.

Related Links: Do Smells Really Trigger Particularly Evocative Memories? from BPS Research Digest

The Real Reason You Hate The Smell Of Sulfur, from io9

Links for People Studying Stuff

10,000 hours to mastery. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concern pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.

- Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

by Caleb Alvarado

GENERAL STUDY TIPS

1. On iTunes U (free), Wired Study Tips.
2. Study Hacks Blog: Decoding Patterns of Success
3. Focusing Your Attention when reading boring stuff

MEMORISATION

1. The Learning Secrets of Polyglots and Savants.
2. All about Feedback Loops
3. You might learn more effectively if you write by hand rather than type.

PROCRASTINATION and time management

Binge writing—hypomanic, euphoric marathon sessions to meet unrealistic deadlines—is generally counterproductive and potentially a source of depression and blocking.

- Robert Boice

There’s a difference between hard work and hard to do work:

• Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day…it also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation.
• Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you…feeling tired and stressed.

- from Study Hacks

1. Beat Procrastination More Easily by Treating It Like an Involuntary Bad Habit, from Lifehacker
2. A Day Without Distraction: Lessons learned from 12 hours of forced focus.
3. A Handy Tip For The Easily Distracted  by Miranda July
4. Can’t Start, Won’t Start, Tricks for Overcoming Procrastination, from 99 Percent
5. Why Can’t I Finish?, also from 99 Percent
6. Procrastination As The Secret To Achievement from Big Think
7. A Master Plan For Taking Back Control Of Your Life from 99 Percent
8. 7 Distraction Fighting Strategies from Psychology Today
9. A Procrastinator’s Guide to Getting an A. Or at least not an F, from Rookie Mag

MOTIVATION

Dependency on External Motivation:  The world is more and more aligned in favor of those who find motivation inside, who would do what they do even if it wasn’t their job. – Seth Godin

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT, OR AT LEAST GOOD ENOUGH

1. Feedback Loops: How to get better at almost anything.
2. Practice triumphs over talent and intelligence.

SETTING GOALS

Over-worked and under-challenged? It’s time to set some goals.

Writing Essays

How to write faster.

How To Bullshit Your Way Through Any Essay, from College Humor.

FREE RESOURCES

Links to free online resources for lifelong learners.

REASONS TO GET SOME SLEEP

Learning in your sleep, from Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence

Related:

Everything You Think You Know About Learning Is Wrong, from Wired

Avoiding The Shoelace Situation

by Magic Madzik

There’s a game we had to play at school – usually for relief teachers who were stuck with a room full of students and no lesson plan – in which the class is divided into pairs. In these groups of two, one person tells the other how to tie up a shoelace, while the shoelace-tier isn’t allowed to do a single thing unless they are told, imagining, for instance, that they are an alien or a robot, or a computer programmer*. The instruction-giver ends up saying things like, ‘Put your left thumb and left forefinger together over the end of the lace, then lower your left hand towards your left shoe…” etceterah, etceterah.

The point of this exercise? To build a generation of computer programmers, I would say.

  If (shoeLace = knottedBadly)
{
DoFirstThing;
DoSecondThing;
}

Sometimes when I’m writing, I envisage an action – or a tic – or a facial expression and I know exactly what it looks like, and I’m sure my readers would too, if only they could see what’s in my head… and I wonder how best to convey this smile, this way of walking, this way of shrugging. I don’t want to end up with a Shoelace Situation. (There’s only one Rule Of Writing as far as I can make out and it’s DON’T BE BORING.)

I’ve been taking a hard look at what my favourite authors do, and this is one of those situations in which simple does best.

Here’s how it’s done. With simile.

Sara was standing in the doorway, one hand cocked on her hip and the other fiddling with her car keys as if to say, Let’s go.

The Old Man stared back at Alaska like a bull at a matador.

- looking for alaska, by John Green

*I’m married to one. It’s okay.

Lovely Adverbs

Use adverbs as if they were rationed.

- JULIET GARDINER

This isn’t a post by a rabid adverb Nazi.

I don’t have a problem with adverbs. Except when they’re redundant, frequent, or embedded poorly in dialogue tags. Apart from that, they’re cool.

There is a trick to placing adverbs, that’s for sure. The same adverb can sound cheesy in one sentence but fine if that same sentence is tweaked or rejigged. Here are a couple of cheap tricks to make use of. I nicked them out of books I have read.

COMMA

The boy sniffed, succulently. She wanted to hand him a kleenex.

- from Season of Goodwill, Penelope Lively

“You don’t even like computer games,” said Frankie, irrelevantly.

- from The 10pm Question, Kate de Goldi

Note how much better that adverb sounds when preceded by a comma. Imagine the same sentence with no comma. It doesn’t sound nearly as good to me. Without the comma, it’s overdone. ‘Succulently’ is such a wonderful word to use for sniffing up phlegm – and seldom heard in such a context – so the comma sets the adverb off nicely, affording ‘succulently’ its very own space. The adverb feels far from unnecessary. Likewise, Kate de Goldi’s example works, even though she’s making use of the dreaded adverb in a dialogue tag, because there is something humorous about the adverb. Perhaps that’s why adverbs don’t work so often when humour is not intended; because of the inherent take-the-pissness of a dialogue tag adverb.

INVERSION

They looked at each other now, and hugely grinned.

- The Clarinettist And The Bride’s Aunt, Penelope Lively

Not all styles of writing will allow you to get away with this. Penelope Lively’s voice is English and careful and articulate, in which case an adverb before the verb sounds right. (And better than ‘grinned hugely’, which for some reason sounds odd.)

There’s always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the back.

- Bill Bryson (of long-distance American travellers) from The Lost Continent

Here, ‘hugely’ adds to the comic effect. Tis true: adverbs are great for writing comedy, which is probably why they so often fail when writing seriously.

Related Link: Ever heard of a ‘flat adverb’? Explained here.

Characters Are People Too

If I were to pick the most common mistake that writers make, I would say it’s simply that they forget their characters are real people.

Does every detective, arriving at the scene of a murder, ask their junior colleague, ‘Okay, what’ve we got?’ I’m sure someone has at some time, but I suspect that line is heard in drama much more often than it’s said in life. Every policeman is no more nor less than a human being doing a job, and their response to any situation will be as individual as that of any other human being, yet we often feel compelled to write in ‘cop speak’ – a vernacular derived mainly from other police shows – as though the job defines the character. I was once lucky enough to have a serving policewoman as a student in one of my writing courses, and when I read her work I was astounded to discover exactly how far real police idiom is from what we’re presented with on the screen. (In fact, sometimes the terminology was so thick I could hardly follow it.)

- Nick Parsons, playwright, from the NSW Writers’ Centre Newsletter

What do you do when you get stuck writing?

• I go back to my plan
• I read over my notes
• I plot out what I want to achieve in that scene
• Every morning I walk for an hour thinking over what I want to write that day – by the time I get to my computer I’m raring to go.
• I ask myself questions
• I swap point of view
• I have a break and go do and do housework (that soon motivates me to race back to my desk!).
• I’ve been known to browse my bookshelves, select a book that calls to me and let it fall open to a page – it’s amazing the discoveries I make that gets my brain racing again!
• I brainstorm, or mindmap a word.
• And every night before I go to sleep, I think about the next scene I want to write and drift off to sleep, imagining it in my mind. I wake up in the morning with the scene delivered to me, courtesy of the subconscious, or my dreams.
• If I’m really stuck, I leave that scene for another day & move on to a scene that I have visualised clearly and I work on that. Eventually, I know, the problem will solve itself.
• I trust the universe to deliver the answer to me (and after 23 books, my stories of incredible serendipitous solutions are actually quite eerie and remarkable!). I trust to the story to tell itself.

- Kate Forsyth, from the NSW Writers’ Centre Newsletter

 

Voice of Truth

Writers must must achieve at least two things:

1) invisibility of delivery (where the physical act of reading becomes unnoticed as quickly as possible) and

2) this quality I call Voice of Truth, and this means knowing what to leave out as well as what to put in.

Once you have these things in place, you can add style and an individual voice, but without those two things, most writers probably aren’t ready to present their work in a competitive way.

- Terry Dowling, from the NSW Writers’ Centre newsletter

For Advice On Short Story Competitions

Short of reading heaps and heaps of unpublished short stories on peer review sites, or finding an opportunity to read piles of competition entries yourself, it’s not always easy to know what makes editors groan.

On The Premises magazine is a weekly competition, and their editor reads many, many competition entries. Then, he kindly compiles a newsletter outlining exactly what they see far too much of. You can get back copies of that newsletter here.

I don’t like my inbox filling up with newsletters either, but I think that one is worth it. Especially if you enter short story competitions now and then. Alternatively, just bookmark that page.