Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

We are surrounded by scents, but they often go ignored as people have a poor sense of smell (at least compared to other animals, such as dogs and cats). Further, in American culture most scents are suppressed; we prefer an antiseptic home, workplace and body.

For those reasons, writers rarely describe scents in a story. As with sound, when the sensation does appear in a story, it’s often to draw attention to some characteristic of an object or to raise dramatic tension.

Writers ought to find a way to incorporate at least one appeal to the sense of smell in their story, if only to make the story more real. The key is to get it purposefully into the story and not just to make the writing more vivid for vividness’ own sake.

Novelist Kevin J. Anderson appeals to the sense of smell in just such a way in his novel “The Ashes of Worlds”. The book’s opening chapter, set aboard a spaceship bridge, makes no appeal at all to the sense of smell , which makes sense as one wouldn’t expect to smell anything (other than ozone perhaps) in a setting with an artificial atmosphere. In the next chapter, the sense of smell only is implied when smoke and burnings coals are noted in the description of a tree city under attack. A scent finally is directly described to good dramatic effect after the chapter’s climax as the city’s inhabitants flee what once their homes: “Green grass smoldered around them, making the smoke burn like acid in their lungs.”