Free Make A Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld

might wear Joy perfume because her mother and grandmother wore it; it's a part of her wardrobe, and therefore a part of her character. Or a male character might persist in wearing stinky cologne that keeps women from wanting to get too close to him. There are ingenious ways to use scent to reveal details about your characters.
    Have you ever been to the movies or out to dinner and smelled a person entering before you saw her because of her perfume? Scent is a fabulous way to demonstrate that a character has arrived on the scene: "The pungent sting of bourbon in the air told Jeannie that Sam had let himself into the house and the liquor cabinet."
    Finally, harking back to the link between smell and memory, you can invoke scent as a way to transition into a character flashback. If you need to go back in time to a scene from your character's past and you can use the smell of peaches at a grocery store to drop Becky into the peach orchard where she first met Eduardo, the love of her life, by all means use it. Scent is a subtle way to transition that won't jar the reader.
    SOUND
    Sounds can describe a physical setting almost as effectively as visual descriptions. With eyes closed, you can probably tell the difference between a train station and an airport. The places your characters show up have sound signatures, which you can use to enrich a scene's other details.
    In a restaurant, for instance, your character, with eyes closed, can hear dishes, glasses, and silverware clinking, the sounds of wait staff calling out orders to cooks, and taking orders from customers. There is a certain kind of buzz of conversation that goes on in restaurants that is different from the sound of a real estate office, for instance. The more you pay attention to these small details when building a scene, the more real the scene will become.
    Here are a few different examples of the way sound creates or enhances atmosphere and contributes to the tone and theme of a story.
    In Irene Nemirovsky's novel Suite Frangaise, set in German-occupied France, 1942, sound marks the contrast with the silence of people hidden away in fear of air raids:
    The streets were empty. People were closing their shops. The metallic shudder of falling iron shutters was the only sound to break the silence, a sound familiar to anyone who has woken in a city threatened by riot or war.
    In Anton Chekhov's story "At Sea," the following sound description sets a raucous tone that is appropriate to the story of sailors acting on baser impulses:
    Crowded together in the crew's quarters we, the sailors, were casting lots. Loud, drunken laughter filled the air. One of our comrades was playfully crowing like a cock.
    Finally, here is a description of the first time the character Francis Macomb-er hears the lion that will change his fate, from Ernest Hemingway's story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber":
    It had started the night before when he had wakened and heard the lion roaring somewhere up along the river. It was a deep sound and at the end there were sort of coughing grunts that made him seem just outside the tent, and when Francis Macomber woke in the night to hear it he was afraid.
    Sounds enhance mood, set tone, and create atmosphere, and should not be forgotten when setting the scene.
    TASTE
    One of my pet peeves about writing is that you don't very often see characters eating. Food is an important part of life, and, I believe, an important part of a good story too, when it can be factored in. While many of your scenes may have no need to invoke the sense of taste, you might ask yourself if there are places in your story where you could add in the act of tasting something. Taste provides great moments of potential conflict and intimacy, such as:
    • A mother asks her a son to taste her soup, which provides an opportunity for him to be honest with her about her terrible cooking, leading to either conflict or unexpected closeness.
    • A character who has just learned of a