What a Dog Actually Smells When He Wakes Up

Riverspook opens with a young Labrador coming awake in the pre-dawn dark because something outside is wrong. He can’t see it. There is nothing to see. Writing that page taught me more about sensory craft than anything else I’ve done, mostly by showing me how lazy I’d been about it.

Sight is a snapshot. Smell is a timeline.

This is the sentence I kept coming back to. You walk into a kitchen and see it as it is right now: dishes in the sink, light on the floor. A dog walks into the same kitchen and receives the last several hours of it, roughly in order, with a decent sense of how long ago each thing happened and whether any of it should worry him.

That difference isn’t decorative. It changes what a scene can do. Visual description is static, a photograph in prose. Scent description is inherently narrative, because every smell is evidence of something that already happened. A scenting narrator can’t help telling you a story about the recent past every time he breathes.

How you layer it, from the bottom up

The mistake I made in early drafts was writing scent as a list. Six smells, comma, comma, comma. It reads like inventory and it lands on the reader as nothing at all. What fixed it was building in strata, deepest and most familiar first, so the thing that doesn’t belong arrives last and lands hardest.

So the opening page goes down through layers. First his siblings, warm and milk-sweet, closest and most reassuring. Then the individual markers that make each of them a specific animal rather than a general littermate: Blue still carries the morning dew she rolled in yesterday, Brown smells faintly of the mud puddle he found behind the water station, Green’s fur holds the pine needles he likes to roll in, and White gives off the clean, cautious smell of someone who avoids getting dirty—which is its own kind of signature.

Then the room. Bedding, and Karen’s lavender soap from yesterday’s cleaning, and beneath that the loamy ground that cradles the kennel, and the cold metal of the chain-link. Then the world past the fence: a creek carrying fish and wet stones and the wild grasses on its banks.

That’s five layers of ordinary. All of it safe. All of it home. Only then does the wrongness arrive, cutting through everything underneath—old blood rather than the fresh scent of yesterday’s meat, torn flesh, and a patience built from decades of successful hunting.

The horror isn’t in the description of the predator. There isn’t one. The horror is that it’s the sixth layer of a page that spent five layers teaching you what safe smells like.

Three rules I ended up following

Never name what he doesn’t name. Red never puts a species to the thing outside the fence—“monster” is as close as he gets. He has a smell, a set of inferences, and a body that will not stop reacting. He can tell you what it is not—not the humans who feed him, not the songbirds, not the raccoons that raid the garbage cans and are clever but harmless. Every time the prose reached for the actual noun, the scene got smaller. Withholding the name isn’t coyness. It’s accuracy, and accuracy happens to be scarier.

Give the smell a physical cost. Scent alone is abstract. Scent plus a body is a scene. His fur stands on end. His ears prick forward with an intensity that makes his skull ache. Something involuntary and specific is happening to him, and the reader feels it even if they have never smelled anything like it.

Let other characters smell differently. Eight animals catch the same thing on the same morning and none of them respond identically. Blue goes from sleepy to alert prey animal in about a second, pupils blowing wide. White trembles with something past rational thought. And the Inseparable Trio—Orange, Purple, and Violet—stay huddled in their corner and dismiss the whole thing, with the arrogance that comes from being the largest and most confident of the litter. Same input, eight nervous systems. That page does more characterization than any amount of dialogue would have.

What it cost me

Two things worth knowing if you try this. It’s slow—a scent-forward page runs longer than its visual equivalent, and the pacing has to be bought back somewhere else. And it makes suspense harder, because your narrator finds things out early. A human protagonist can walk past danger for forty pages. Red knows on page one, so the tension has to come from what he can do about it rather than from whether he knows.

Which, as it happens, is the better book anyway.

If you’re wondering why a literary novelist wrote a dog-narrated novella in the first place, that story is on the blog—and so is the case for why the dog isn’t the point.

READ RIVERSPOOK FREE—THE NOVELLA THAT LEADS INTO JETSON’S JOURNEY