Free A Writer's Guide to Active Setting by Mary Buckham Page A

a reader is willing to accept the story slowing down so that she can really see and experience that Setting. After a few paragraphs or a few pages, the reader will have already crafted her own images, so if the Setting matters, use sensory details in your descriptions sooner rather than later.
    Here’s a very different location, this time in New Orleans. This one is in a steampunk novel and the author not only enforces where the POV character is, but the sense of a different type of world.
    A faintly burning chemical stink joined the city’s odors, trapped in the humid fog of Gulf water and river water that crept through the Quarter like a warm, wet bath.
    —Cherie Priest,
Ganymede
    Again, in this second example the reader is deep into the story, where an inexperienced writer might think the Setting has already been described, so that there is no need to use more words on it. But neither author missed the opportunity to thread in one or two quick and specific sentences to pull the reader into the story.
Utilizing Scents
    Smell can convey a wealth of communication. Were you aware that after three months we retain only 30 percent of our visual memory, but even after a year we retain 100 percent of olfactory memory? Smell activates our primordial, or the oldest part of our brain, so if you are missing scents on the page, you’re missing a very subtle but powerful element of sensory detail.
    The following descriptions come from an interview with a Norwegian scent researcher. She is describing some of the locations she has visited to collect samples of scent.
    Havana. It smells sensual, of Cuba Libre [a rum, cola, and lime cocktail], coffee, dogs, and freshly washed laundry fluttering on endless balconies. The streets smell like they are crumbling, decaying, rotting. But unlike cities in the United States, Havana has been doing this for centuries. It rots in style. Berlin’s Neukӧlln neighborhood is the closest you can get to Istanbul: sunflower oil, bread, dry cleaning, laundry detergent, tobacco, cheap aftershave, and kebabs. The outlying Colonia Hacienda de Echegaray district in Mexico City smells of fake leather boots, corn, dust, concrete, cocoa, burnt and moldy earth, plastic, sweat, chili peppers, and hot straw.
    One or two sentences max and the reader is in Cuba, Istanbul, or Mexico City. When we smell
fake leather boots
,
burnt
or
moldy earth
,
plastic
,
sweat
, and
hot straw
, we add to those smells an image of run-down neighborhoods, stray dogs, a city that’s a workingman’s world. We fill in the blanks based on what we smell.
    Scents can evoke memories so strongly. I love the smell of lilies, whereas my mother detests the same smell because they remind her of her mother’s funeral. Have you ever been overwhelmed in a new location because everything is so new and different and the scents cause you to be overstimulated to the point you walk away with a pounding headache? Some scents mean pleasure to most people—baking cookies, the smell of a new book, the warm scent of babies’ skin when you nuzzle their heads. Others evoke just the opposite response—the musty smell of damp basements, strong perfume in a small elevator, moldy bread.
Building a Believable Setting with Sensory Details
    Sometimes you simply want to build a larger story Setting for the reader. This can happen when writing stories that readers tend to read for the Setting as much as the plot and characters. Examples include historical, steampunk, fantasy, science fiction, and some mystery series. Before we revisit Cherie Priest's steampunk novel set in New Orleans, let’s imagine a rough-draft version:
    FIRST DRAFT: She walked through the French market and inhaled the smells she knew so well.
    Not much here to let the reader experience a city during a time period where steam engines rule, viewed through the POV of a woman who’s spent her whole life in this town and would never voluntarily leave it. So let’s see how Priest uses specific