Expanding the senses

 We're often told when describing the worlds of our stories to use all the senses.  I've been sharply reminded of this advice this week while working on my novella.

One of my main characters is a lion.  Cats have a much better sense of smell than humans, but Snap's sense of smell is even better.  She's been bioengineered by humans, and one of the side-effects is that she can smell humans' emotions.

Great idea, you think, but the problem is that I don't have Snap's senses.  My sense of smell is very poor.  I can smell things burning, or foul stenches, but more subtle scents I often can't detect.

I wasn't aware of that until I  went on an open gardens afternoon with a friend.  She went into raptures about this wonderfully-scented rose she'd found, which she said had a delicious perfume.  I smelled it - and sensed nothing.  So you can imagine how much of a challenge it is for me to keep remembering to put what Snap smells into my story.

In fact, in a big chunk of the first novella, I didn't.  I had to do an extra editing pass, just to add in information about what Snap smells in certain situations.

Her sense of smell isn't just a novelty.  She's part of a team who regularly contact strangers to follow-up requests for help. And sometimes those requests for help come from people with, shall we say, less than pure motives.

That gave me the possibility of having characters say one thing, but their scent reveal something totally different.  Snap finds detecting stress scents and anxiety in contacts very useful when the team are trying to decide whether a contact is telling the truth.  The other thing the ability helps with is deciding whether the contact has hidden motives.  That kind of deception is likely to result in a person giving off an anxious - or even fear - scent whilst sounding completely calm.

I hit on this idea to extend Snap's sense of smell about half-way through the first novella.  That meant I had a lot of rewriting to do when I came to the edit.  I've lost count of the number of times Snap says a person smells nervous, but it's always useful extra data.

Concentrating on smell like this has been an interesting exercise, but now I'm coming to the end of the first draft of the second novella, and I know I've forgotten to mention Snap's smells for a big chunk in the middle of the manuscript again.  Guess what I'll be looking out for on my second draft?

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