My favorite reviews of my books always include something along these lines: “Weinstein did his work so well that I was startled anew, each time I looked up from reading it, to find myself still in the here and now.”
A fellow author—the delightful and talented Diane Thomas (The Year the Music Changed)—wrote that about Hardscrabble Road. A reader from India sent me the following comment about the same book: “This afternoon I was reading the part where Bud eats scrambled eggs and hog brains, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed with tears—I remembered my grandmother frying goat brains Sunday for lunch when I was a child and when she made goat curry. Nothing ever tasted as good!”
These quotes are testimonials about how writers grab your attention and hold you in a scene. As Proust demonstrated with his epiphany-producing madeleine dipped in tea in Remembrance of Things Past (aka In Search of Lost Time), taste is a powerful inducer of memories. By suggesting flavors, we transport you to your own recollections. Rather than bump you out of the scene as you glide down memory lane, the writer has now created a bond with you. Once you return from your brief bit of time travel, you want to read more.
Smells can literally captivate you as well. I wrote a blogpost earlier this year where I mentioned the overhead projector that most children of a certain age-range recall from school. Dozens of people wrote back to me about how their minds skipped from that unique feature of the classroom to another one that they never experienced in any other setting: mimeographed paper. The funny thing was, I’d written and deleted a paragraph devoted to this pre-photocopier technology because I thought it distracted from the transparency metaphor I was laboriously constructing. And what did we all want to talk about? The unique sweet-cucumber-chemical smell of those worksheets, the damp quality of the paper, the purple ink. We’ve long-forgotten the lessons and tests stenciled on those pages, but the word “mimeograph” triggers an instant series of sense-memories for many who grew up before Xerox became a verb.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High captured this “high” perfectly:
I’ll give you a moment to return from your visit to those classrooms of yore (especially you teachers, who must’ve been regularly overcome by the fumes). But now don’t you find yourself rereading the mimeograph paragraph or at least smiling to yourself about those long-ago days? And you’re continuing to read because you want more of the same—I’ve seized control of your attention by evoking deep-seated memories. Actually, “invoking” is more appropriate, because this is like casting a spell.
Freshly mimeographed paper is, in fact, an updated (albeit now-obsolete) version of Proust’s cookie. It has many of the features that writers use to grab you: that smell, the damp quality of the paper under your fingertips, the purple ink you never saw anywhere else (but the color of which you could accidentally reproduce if Welch’s grape jelly dripped on your white shirt). Those of you with an oral fixation can also recall how it tasted. No comment, other than a vague recollection that it paired well with powdered Country Time Lemonade.
Smell, taste, and touch are the time-machine sensations we use to transport you. When you’re not engaging with a book you’re reading, one of a multitude of potential problems is that the author is relying on sight and sound to convey each scene. However, when an author immerses you in the more potent sensations, you’re likely to experience that bit of memory-lane magic where you look up from reading it, each time startled anew to find yourself still in the here and now.
Elaine Grey
May 23, 2019 at 12:40 am (5 years ago)George, Thank you for sharing this awesome/ post with me. It is fascinating. I am enjoying it very much. You have revealed insights that I am embracing.
I am grateful that you have included me.
Elaine Grey
Susan Crawford
May 23, 2019 at 8:00 pm (5 years ago)Love this, George!
Patrick Scullin
May 24, 2019 at 5:30 pm (5 years ago)An excellent post and so true. We have five senses and many times writers only appeal to one or two of them.
Thanks, George.