Your Life As Story:
Writing Narrative Nonfiction
What Did You Smell Today?

What makes you fall in love with a story? What makes you feel you are living it at the moment the words enter you from the page?

For me, it’s the details. Certainly, I care about the music of the language and what the writing has to teach me about people and life; in the end, I want those bigger, universal themes to change me. But as I read narrative nonfiction, and the world of story rises before me, I want to see it, taste it, smell it, hear it, and feel it on my skin.

Sensuous details, I call them.

I used to open my college writing classes by asking students: “What did you hear today? What did you smell?”

At first these earnest young writers, who shuffled classes eyes on their feet, sat mute.

“smelled toast,” one said.

“heard my alarm clock.”

Yes, well. . .

Over time, they got excited and started to pay attention. They came to class eager, shooting hands into the air before I’d finished taking attendance.

“ heard a bird!”

“What kind?” another student countered.

“That one with the orange stomach.”

“You mean a robin.”

“Cool,” said the first student, grinning: “I heard a robin.”

Over time the reports grew richer and more original.

I believe we must become students of our senses, awe-struck again like babes toddling through life, eyes wide at all that swirls around us.

Pay attention.

What did you smell today?

The more we catalogue quietly in our minds the details of our days, the more those details work their way into our narrative nonfiction and perpetuate the dream that is story. The more we spin the dream, the more our writing captures readers.

“I was in a dream,” a reader reports after finishing a book. “I wish it had never ended.”

How many of you have said those very words upon finishing a great book?

It is a different place we go when we read a world of imaginary pictures and feelings that we create in our minds as the words translate from ink on the page into the language of the dream space called story.

As writers we are responsible for creating that dream space. We are responsible for the ink on the page that enters the brain that conjures the image that provokes the feeling that makes the story.

And we do that with details.

Taste.

Touch.

Smell.

Sound.

Sight.

These are your tools.

Spend a day paying attention, and I’ll lay you money your nonfiction grows richer and deeper, and more hypnotic.