There is a particular road trip that has become a summer ritual for me, a journey that takes me to another time as well as another place: going to The Lake.
No other place has been such a constant in my life. I spent early summers there dive-bombing off the dock with my cousins and listening to my grandma’s stories of the moon spinners. I spent teenage summers there playing mud volleyball and yearning over the boys next door. More recently, I’ve spent summer weekends there watching a new generation pick up where the last one left off.
It is the place I go back to when I need to find myself again.
Sometimes in the middle of a hard-frozen winter I will pull something out of a closet that I carried home from The Lake months before, and as soon as the familiar scent of that place reaches me, I jump straight back into some of my deepest memories.
Our sense of smell holds that ability to instantly relocate us to another place and time because it is deeply entangled with our memories and emotions. And yet as writers, our sense of sight too often dominates. When seeing a scene for the reader, we focus on what our eyes perceive, and forget what the nose knows.
Encourage your young writers to allow the sense of smell to sneak its way into their writing. For the youngest writers, you might challenge them to perceive a story seen “through a dog’s nose.” For more developed writers, you might ask them to write a scene where all the emotions are signaled through smell.
You might find, with a little encouragement, that smells are powerful enough to transport your young writers on their own evocative journeys.