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Now: take back everything I said all week about isolating one sense from the others. To conclude with the sense of touch, we’re going to pull them all back together. The coolest poetic device I ever learned was synesthesia, which means one sensory experience is described in terms of another sensory experience. Like using a taste word to describe a sound: “her spicy voice,” or a sight word to describe an odor: “he smelled like the sun setting over the sea.” (I’m embarrassed by how cheesy that simile was, but at least you get the idea…)
I’m not sure you can feel something completely when your sense of touch is all you have to go on. I remember walking blindfolded into a haunted house when I was about ten, and being asked to touch a bowl of “eyeballs” that were actually peeled grapes. Without the sense of sight, taste, and even smell factored in, I was thoroughly confused.
The most important “touches” that occur in Fallen happen when Luce’s skin comes into contact with Daniel’s. There’s magnetism between them, and heat. And Luce has no idea where it comes from. We start to realize that it’s based on so much more than physical touch. The spark she feels at the lightest brush of skin is based on memories of scent and smell and taste and sound, of a past that Luce knows exists but can’t access.
Throughout this project, I’ve been nagged by the feeling that I’m leaving out something important: the inexplicable sixth sense. Maybe this whole week, I’ve been looking for its place, in my book and in the world. Blurring all these senses together, we arrive at something like a sixth sense: fused and yet distinct, and often full of magic.
Right around this point in my tour of the senses, I’m starting to realize that what I’m doing is isolating each sense from the others to examine how it works, why it matters, where my knowledge of it comes from, and what it’s place is in fiction. This feels like an appropriate discovery going into my next post about sound.
My husband is a singer-songwriter and is musical in just about as many ways as I am not. I can sing a little, keep a beat, but there it ends. For most of my life, music was a background, something to drive to, dance to, write to. I loved music, but when I listened to it, I was always multi-tasking. I thought I “knew a song,” if I could sing along with the lyrics.
When Jason listens to music, he gives it his undivided attention. When I first met him, it baffled me the way he could admire something as specific as the bass line in a song where, honestly, I might not even have recognized bass at all. These days, I try to listen with more focus: to hear the drums first in their own right, then to try to understand what the lead guitar is doing, to think about key changes, and so on.
When I think about the role of sound in Fallen, one moment stands out in my mind. During the battle scene in the cemetery, when Luce looks back one last time before getting Penn to shelter, her ears are filled with a single chord of music: “Low notes thundered in the night. High notes chimed in to fill the space around them. It was the grandest, most perfectly balanced celestial harmony ever heard on earth.”
I didn’t realize this at the time I wrote it, but looking back now—especially after thinking over my above mention of listening-but-not-really-listening to music—I think I wanted to hit Luce with something so big and loud and grand that it would have to drown out everything else. I wanted to command her whole attention with a single sound to express the gravity of the moment, to make it impossible to tune out the sense of sound.
The sense of taste is a big one for me. If I weren’t writing novels, I think I’d probably be working in a kitchen somewhere. I love to cook, I love to eat, I love to talk about food, read about food, and shop for food. When I travel, every meal ends with a discussion of what the next one should be. My favorite foods are spaghetti, pickles, and homemade cookies, and the best thing I have eaten recently was the strawberry shortcake at the Commander’s Palace restaurant in New Orleans on New Years Day. It tasted like Summer on a plate.
But when it comes to how I write food and the sense of taste into my books, I realize there is a sharp disparity between what my characters eat and how big a role good food plays in my life off the page. Maybe I figure, once I got started down the road of writing detailed food descriptions, I’d never be able to stop. And do you really want to read me going on for three pages about how life-affirming a spoonful of strawberry shortcake was? Doesn’t exactly seem like something Luce would do.
On the contrary, food is often a desperate, isolating element in Fallen. Luce’s first visit to the cafeteria gets her pelted with a vile tray of meatloaf. There are flies in the punch at Todd’s funeral and stale bologna sandwiches served for snacks. Off the top of my head, the few references I can think of to real, nourishing food are tricky: Cam’s attempt to seduce her with a picnic basket of forbidden fruits in the cemetery, and her parent’s too-brief lunch visit during Family Day. I guess to me, good food is comfort, and because Luce’s experience at Sword and Cross is far from comfortable, it gets reflected by what she gets to taste. Soon though, there’s going a pretty dramatic shift in the menu—but you’ll have to wait for Torment to see why.
Of all the senses, to me the sense of smell feels most closely related to memory. Growing up, my ballet teacher wore cologne that smelled like watermelon. Now, more than a decade later, any time I get a whiff of watermelon, it takes me back to years spent under his supervision at the barre.
The part of Texas where I grew up is in the middle of what we call Tornado Alley. Frequently, in the summer, the skies clot with fast-moving, green-tinted clouds, the wind picks up, and everyone hunkers down to wait out the storm. In those moments, the air takes on a very specific scent, which can only be described as the smell-of-a-big-storm-brewing. Living in Los Angeles now, I hardly ever see rain—but when I went home to Texas recently for the holidays, there was a spectacular green-skied thunderstorm. I hadn’t breathed in the smell of one in years, but was just the same as it has been all through my childhood, and I was struck by the clearest memory of running for shelter to my cabin at summer camp on muggy July night. That happened probably twenty years ago, and without my sense of smell to loosen that memory, I probably would never have thought of it again.
In Fallen, Luce is defined by the past lives she’s experienced but can’t remember. She’s attracted to Daniel for reasons she doesn’t understand, and even when she learns of her reincarnation history, any memory of her past with Daniel remains impenetrable. In the books to follow in the series, Luce gets a chance to unlock more and more of her past lives. And as the memories of who and where and what she’s been open up to her, her sense of smell is going to play a very important role in reclaiming some of those long buried memories.
When I was asked to contribute five posts to the Random Blog, I started thinking about things that come in sets of five as a method to make the most my stay here. Since vivid descriptions play a large part in my stories, I kept coming back to the five senses. This week, I’m taking you on a sensory tour of how I see, smell, taste, hear, and feel the world—and then, how I write it.
Virginia Woolf said that for a woman to be able to write, she must have a room of her own. I don’t. My new house has a single tiny office, which I share with my husband, and which doubles as a guestroom whenever anyone comes to visit. But what this room lacks in space and privacy, it more than makes up for with the view. Nestled into Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills among the California sagebrush, bay laurel, and twisting live oak trees, I stare out a wall of windows, and find it hard to believe the Sunset Strip is a few minutes drive away.
We’ve been living in this house for less than three months, but I’m surprised by how much I already depend on this view. Probably because I spend so much “writing time” staring blankly out the window, wondering if I’ll ever be able to think of what happens next in a scene. But hey, I remind myself after zoning out for fifteen minutes out the window, I’m not wasting time—I’m working! I watch the way the wind ripples through a pine branch more thoroughly than it moves through an oak. I trace the steady climb of the sun shifting light though the canopy of trees, or the path of a rare L.A. cloud glide over the mountain’s peak. Often, this makes view me feel closer to the physical world than I do when I (along with all my other senses) rush around through it.
I place Luce out there in the brush and ivy and take my time really seeing what she’d see. The natural world is very significant in Fallen—I’m thinking specifically about the time Luce and Daniel spend at their place at the hidden lake. It was important to me to take my time describing those scenes from Luce’s eyes, how the thrill of being around Daniel heightens her awareness of every view around her.
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