In any writing—non-fiction as well as fiction—try to use all five senses in telling your story. It will help to put your reader right THERE. Those five senses are: • Sight • Sound • Smell • Taste • Touch Sight is probably the easiest and most commonly used of the senses. And it is great to use colors and word pictures to make us “see” a scene. Use specifics: instead of saying “colorful flowers,” use “the delphinium’s bursts of magenta and blue” OR “the show-stopping red hollyhock blossoms.” But close your eyes and try to describe the scene with one or more of your other senses. Smell is perhaps the strongest sense of them all and certainly evokes the deepest memories and feelings. “My first boyfriend smelled like sawdust and Necco wafers.” Or “the potent brew of flowers, cigarettes and something musty I couldn’t identify.” Sound : How can you put the reader into this scene? Birds chirping, flowing water in a creek, the rustle of wind in the trees. What picture does t...

A friend recently called to share a special moment with me. She had just gotten a whiff of a sweet smell that immediately made her think of her grandmother who had talcum powder that smelled like a sweet gardenia. My friend recalled childhood visits to her grandmother during which she would sneak away to sniff grandma's talc. "And of course the powder on my nose gave me away." My friend, who says she is not a writer, but has written some of the most powerful poetry I have read, thought I would be interested in her little moment as an illustration of how to ground a character in a scene. We are urged to use all the senses to accomplish this, and we often mention smells. We have a character react to the odors of food cooking as they enter a restaurant. Or we have a character notice the tangy odor of salt by the sea. But how often do we go deeper to the memory the smell evokes? Or how often do we make an association to a pleasant, or not so pleasant, occurrence in the cha...