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144 Part III: Painting the Picture with Description
Unpleasant smells are particularly powerful and can repel you instantly. I’ll
never forget the smell of the cabbage soup on the stairs of Raskolnikov’s
apartment block in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), nor the list
of foul smells from the opening chapter of the bestselling 1985 novel Perfume:
the streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank
of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage
and mutton fat . . . The stench of sulphur rose from the chimneys, the
stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses
came the stench of congealed blood.
—Patrick Süskind (Perfume, Diogenes, 1985, translated from the German
by John E Woods, published in the UK by Penguin, 1986)
Write two scenes in a story involving smells that your character experiences:
the first about a smell the person loves and the second about one she hates.
Don’t overload the pieces with adjectives – try to find the telling word that is
just right.
Tantalising with Taste and Food
Food is important to humans on many levels: emotionally, psychologically
and socially. Everyone needs food to survive, and most people spend a great
deal of time thinking about food, shopping for food, preparing food and
eating it. Yet in some novels you’d think the characters never have to eat
at all!
Describing the taste of food is one of the best ways to get your readers
involved in the story. A well-written description of the sharp taste of a lemon
can get your readers salivating, the sour taste of turned milk can make them
wrinkle their noses, and the sweet taste of sugar or the succulence of roast
meat can make them hungry.
Many writers have mixed writing fiction with describing food and even recipes.
Here’s just a taster menu to get your mouth watering:
✓ Laura Esquivel’s bestselling 1989 debut novel, Like Water for Chocolate,
is divided into 12 sections named after the months of the year. Each section
begins with the recipe for a Mexican dish. The chapters outline the
preparation of each dish and tie the meal to an event in the life of the
main character, Tita.