Researching Scent & Stuff

Many years ago, I consumed the book A Natural History of the Senses (1991) like it was the most important piece of non-fiction literature that I would ever read. The book masterfully captured how we view the world through our senses and our knowledge of the senses through the ages. It may be one of the most important reads in my evolution as a thinker, considering I remember that work as a personal springboard for my own exploration of the senses. I loved that book and bought copies for everyone I knew. The chapter that stood out for me was the one on the sense of smell.

I thought about it when I was researching olfactory memory for my WIP. The research on the topic has come along way in the thirty years since A Natural History was published.

(Wow! Has it been thirty years?)

Reading up on how odors trigger thoughts and emotions, I realized that writing a book of fiction leads to the most disparate range of research topics. For my current WIP, I’ve researched photosynthesis, kinetic energy, and elemental composition of organic material.

I interviewed my sister several times to find out what it’s like working in a lab, what using the equipment is like, what it sounds like, what the lab smells like, what the social and organizational politics are like, and how they differ from academic environments, etc. My sister was very patient with me when she painstaking explained her research, even as I narrowed focus to questions about how she cleans her instruments.

Sadly, our extensive conversations will only be represented in about five sentences worth of prose. Not only that, but I am knowingly misrepresenting typical hierarchical structures of biotech firms to accommodate my plot. (She said I could, begrudgingly.) And I have gained a whole new respect for her work.

At one point, I wanted to understand the physiological expression of guilt in the body. Did you know that guilt and shame share neural networks in the frontal and temporal areas of the brain, although they differ in their brain chemistry? We feel guilt when our behavior conflicts with our conscience, and we feel shame when we believe we’ve damaged our reputations. I wanted to understand where guilt lived in the body so that I could develop the skills of one of my main characters.

Guilt and shame are themes that run independently throughout my WIP. My hope, despite all the research I’ve done on these emotions, is that my readers barely notice the research that went into developing the guiding themes.

It turns out that a driving force in my WIP are concepts associated with light energy, molecular chemistry, human physiology, and a type of kinetic magic that weaves this disparate range of topics into a cohesive story about two lovers exploring magic.

It’s funny how the randomness of the research comes together to paint a thematic backdrop on it’s own. I suppose its a testament to the skill of the writer if the reader never sees the research that goes into crafting a novel.

Can I do this? This is craft. So much more complicated than working around adverbs and finding strong verbs. I’m sure I can do it. My goal is to do it seamlessly.