The Touch (and Taste, and Feel) of Inspiration
By Sophie Masson | March 4, 2025 |
When it comes to creating a believable setting or background for a work of fiction, sensory inspirations are very important. Writers need to evoke a world in the reader’s mind which doesn’t just involve the visual and the auditory, but also hopefully bring the other senses into play—touch, smell, taste. It’s always been important to me, as I’m sure it is for many other writers, to experience the atmosphere of places I’m evoking through my stories: I like to actually walk in their streets, to see small details, to hear the soundscapes, whether that be birds, sirens, music, machines, to listen to the tone of voices. I like to experience the smells—good or bad, strong or faint—of those places, and their tactile textures, and the taste of the food you might find there. The sensory impressions you gain from all of it are invaluable. Even if a place is imaginary, I always base it on real locations, so the sensory aspects still ring true. And that means also being able to call up those impressions even when you are back home, and not just through your memory, but through aids such as notes, photos, and video and audio clips.
That works well for the visual and auditory aspects. But what about the other senses—touch, smell, taste? Their effect cannot be fully recaptured through photos, notes, or video/audio. More ephemeral than the visual or the auditory, those three senses are nevertheless crucial to evoking atmosphere: think for example of Proust’s famous madeleines. And it’s not just about place—it’s also about many other elements in a story that will make your fictional world feel absolutely real in a reader’s mind. How, for example, to describe the taste of a dish, if you haven’t tried it? How can you evoke the scent of a particular perfume, if you’ve never smelled it? Or the feel of a particular fabric, if you’ve never touched it?
For me, the answer is to collect concrete objects that bring my story-brain into direct hands-on contact with the sensory experience itself. Over the years I’ve done a lot of that. For example, for a novel I’ve been working on, I needed to understand how different types of silk fabric and lace embellishments might interact with each other and be used in design. I didn’t just rely on my imagination, my lived knowledge of how silk feels against the skin and my observation of a seamstress at work. I also purchased a range of fabric and lace samples which would enable me to see and feel first-hand just how a particular design might work with types of silk fabric. For the same novel, where there is a small but significant mention of the perfume Joy, I didn’t just rely on my memory of my beautiful grandmother’s favourite scent, I managed to find a miniature bottle of the vintage fragrance online, so I could experience the full power of it, and be able to describe it properly. Similarly, in another novel, recently published, where I wrote about the look, smell and feel of various flowers, I needed to actually have some on hand so I could accurately evoke them. In yet another novel, which is centred around food, I didn’t just cook several of the dishes mentioned, so I could fully experience their taste and record it for the reader, but also kept things that would remind me of them even when I didn’t have the dish in front of me, such as an empty but still aromatic jar that had contained a particular spice. In that case, smell and taste are so intricately linked that one recalls the other perfectly.
As well as being an invaluable aid to my creative process, collecting these sensory impression tools, if you can call them that, is also a lot of fun. It’s a different kind of research to the usual sort, but one which I’ve come to realise brings a whole new dimension to description. The only drawback is that it’s pretty easy to get sidetracked—but sidetracks can sometimes lead to unexpected, serendipitous discoveries. And what’s not to like about that?
I’d love to hear about your experiences. As a writer, what kinds of ‘sensory impression aids’ inspire you to recreate a taste, smell or touch? And as a reader, what examples from fiction have you been most impressed by, in terms of evoking those three senses of taste, smell and touch?
Born in Indonesia of French parents, and brought up in France and Australia, Sophie Masson is the award-winning author of over 70 books for children, young adults and adults. Her latest books include Sydney under Attack (children’s historical novel, Scholastic Australia, 2022) A Hundred Words for Butterfly (adult novella, ES-Press, 2022) and Cock-a-doodle-doo (children’s picture book, (illustrated by Kathy Creamer, little Pink Dog Books, 2022). In 2019, Sophie received an AM (Member, General Division) award in the Order of Australia honours list.
“Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?”
“The smell.”
“Computers don’t smell, Rupert.”
“I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer, it has no texture, no context. it’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then the getting of knowledge should be, tangible, it should be, smelly.”
― Rupert Giles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Exactly!
Thanks, Sophie.
Sensory descriptions can add to a story — if they’re in the right places. As a reader, though, I hate it when a writer gets so bogged down in details that the threads of the story disappear, especially in the first chapter or in action scenes. That’s when I start skimming, and I might miss something that’s important later in the book.
Tongue-in-cheek remark: I chuckle as I think of my credit card groaning about buying all the support paraphernalia. Thrift stores and garage sales might make good targets?
Good tips!
Yes, absolutely, Kathy, that sensory detail needs to be judiciously used, to make the impact on a reader. It’s easy of course to get carried away with creating sensory impressions–but without the right amount of them, the story feels flat. Balance is important…
Yes–thrift stores are definitely great places to find what you need, in terms of sensory triggers for fiction!
Hello Sophie. I laud you for the care you take in getting sensory impressions to ring true. As I understand it, you risk getting lost in detail, because the process immerses you in the particulars of a time and place, and makes it more likely you will bring those particulars to life for your readers.
These days, I pretty much focus on my own immediate experience and my memory. Probably because of my age, I now subscribe to a “theory” of Norman Mailer’s. Whether he put it forward whimsically or seriously I don’t know. This quote is taken from my website:
“I now rely on Norman Mailer’s metaphor to explain memory. Mailer’s image is that of a Swiss cheese. He said the holes in his memory were there as a natural part of the process of creation, the way the holes figure in Swiss cheese. This means only the edible still remains, the valuable. Everything forgotten—the holes—is part of the process of preserving what’s worth reflecting on.”
So, that’s how I now operate as a fiction writer: I draw on daily life and my Gruyere-like memory, and do my best to refine what’s there. But I certainly admire those like you who go much further to enrich their work. Yours is the only way for a serious, career writer to approach her craft. I have a special admiration for writers who succeed in bringing different times and places to life for me. That’s a very special gift.
Thanks for your nice words, Barry. All of us have our own particular methods of working, of course, and I love the Gruyere analogy of memory! I was the sort of kid who zeroed in on sensory details very strongly, really absorbing things through the senses including touch, texture, taste etc so I guess I carry through with that as an adult into my writing. But I think all ways of writing are equally valid, they just have to fit with your own instincts.
Until the last couple of years, I’ve tended to look at the world and not touch it. I’ve always been sensitive to the patterns of things, though, and sharply felt the difference in (as an example) how it feels to look at an emerald cut into an octahedron or a rounder, gentler cut. My favorite sensation in books has always been cosmos, or the sense of a whole world or city—Like in Kipling’s “Kim” or Pratchett’s “Guards! Guards!”—where all the city’s moving parts and people are described in action in such a way the whole, many-faceted world and those in it begin moving around you, inviting your imagination into every nook and cranny, physical and spiritual. Lo and behold, I recently found out that effect depends exactly on the physical, lived knowledge that you describe in this post! That, and of course a sense for the histories of things, and the stories of people. Thankfully, now I’m actively collecting experiences, my natural, introverted receptivity to sense is already letting me put what I have so far to flexible work.
What has your journey been like in learning to use your collected experiences to weave story? Do you find yourself sometimes discovering patterns in the language of experience, like Kristin’s recent discussion here about sound symbolism? Thank you for the post!
Thanks, Bryan, for a very thoughtful comment. Interesting re what you say about patterns and the emerald analogy-I think that because our senses are integrated, even if we’re not always aware of it, we can ‘see’ the ‘feel’ of something on a certain level, even if we don’t actually touch it, because the sensory integration means we see a whole pattern. That’s why also, say the deep red colour of a particularly fragrant rose, is part and parcel of the ‘smell’ of it, just as the fragrance is part of the ‘look’ of it. Similarly, as Kristin pointed out in her post on the sound of names and what they convey, we ‘hear’ the name even if we are only looking at it written down, and that makes us create a (sometimes erroneous) picture of the person who bears that name.
As a non-native speaker of English, who learned the language as a child at school (my native language is French), I instinctively found it easier to learn how to read and write in English from the look of the words rather than the sound, which was foreign to me. For instance, to me, the word ‘smile’ looked to me like lips stretched in a smile because of the shape of the letters, and ‘happy’ looked like it was jumping up and down, because of those shapes, and so on. It might sound odd, but that was how it worked for me! Sound came later, burrowing into the look of the letters…Also, I was the sort of child who, partly because of rather tumultuous family circumstances, found a calm haven in observing details through all the senses to create a pattern of a whole thing and I still do that today…
I have read that the sense of smell is a strong enabler to brings back a memory, an experience. In a scene of terror where a human closes her eyes, it is smell that later can provide clues to the place, the people involved. But writing about smell is a challenge. As writers we are often visual, laying out place and a description of character before anything else. Touch could certainly be used in a scene where a character is fighting darkness, or remembering moments of love, tenderness or the exact opposite. What your post provides today is an awareness of our use of the senses, a skill that readers relate to, that will stay with them long after they turn the page.
Hi Beth! Your comment reminds me of Patrick Süskind‘s novel “Perfume.” It’s a shocking novel about a serial killer and his daimonic fixation on smell. All of the description is done as smell. The character is avaricious and lustful for smell, and he doesn’t care about people. But I think even Süskind runs into the problem you’re describing, because he often uses metaphor and imagery drawn from the other senses—His trick seems to be a toolbox of ways he transposes those experiences out of other fields of life into smell.
In your post you seem attuned to the relational meanings of sense experience—belongingness and lostness, gentleness and hostility, closeness and distance. Are there other patterns of experience you’ve noticed that transpose between the concrete and these very universal things?
Bryan, you are making me think. Ironically, I was blind for a week at the age of five. It was a surgery that they decided required that the eye after surgery must be heavily bandaged, but also my other eye. My memoires of that time are very vivid, how lost I felt, how sound became my Facebook, so to speak. I would listen to the footsteps in the hallway, trying to decide if that WAS MY MOTHER, or if those footsteps would turn into my room. I have always valued my sight, and found as a mother that touch is more meaning to humans than we realize. I also believe that some people react more powerfully to SMELL than others do. But as a mother, a nurse, I know that body functions are part of life. Get a grip, be kind, be helpful. Thanks for you comment.
Sophie, just looking at your scraps of silk and lace reminded me of a dress my mother made for me, with puffed sleeves and ruffles. Like Barry, I rely on my memory full of holes, but I also enjoy getting the things I need. I had the most fun writing about the physics of toys. My kids had fun with all the toys too. I’ve been told that my stories make people hungry for Indian food…
Love that the pic triggered that memory for you, Vijaya! Although my own mother wasn’t keen on sewing herself, she did love beautiful fabrics and every year us girls got a special dress at Christmas, chosen together in a department store. They often featured embellishments like lace and puffed sleeves and the fabrics were heavenly to wear–fine cottons and muslins and velvets–Maman had a couple of silk special-occasion dresses but we didn’t have any in that fabric till we were teenagers and could take better care of our clothes–that was the theory, anyway :-)
That sounds perfect, re the toys! I can just imagine your kids encouraging you to do more such excellent research :-)