Have you ever sat and talked with someone to whom you’re very attracted—perhaps early in a relationship—and you wanted desperately to reach out and touch them? All you can do is listen and watch but you really want to immerse yourself in them—to smell their skin and kiss their smile. It’s a powerful sensation.

Do not make your readers feel this way!

In writing, it’s far too easy to focus on sounds (dialogue) and images (description). We often forget about those other three senses—taste, smell, and touch. Perhaps the most potent of these senses is smell. Consider this:

Randy walks into the deserted office. An air conditioning vent rattles. Outside, car horns blare and traffic hums. Haphazard stacks of paper cover the desk. Bits of white stuffing peek out of the brutalized chair. On the dented filing cabinet, something furry grows inside a Darth Vader coffee mug.

So that gives us a sense of the room, but check out how much deeper into the moment (and the character’s head) you get when the other sense are involved:

Randy walks into the deserted office. The chilled air cools the sweat on his shirt. He shivers, echoing the rattling air conditioning vent. Outside, car horns blare and traffic hums. Bits of white stuffing peek out of the brutalized chair. On the dented filing cabinet, something furry grows inside a Darth Vader coffee mug. The room smells like sweaty socks and too much hair product—like high school.

When describing a scene, the sense of smell can clue you in to the subtle histories of a place. It can tell you something beneath the surface. A hint of cigarette smoke, rotten trash, melted candlewax, disinfectant . . . these can all give clues about a setting’s recent history.

Smells can also trigger memories in the POV character, as well as the reader. The olfactory bulb is part of the brain’s limbic system, a region closely tied to memory. So, scents can be an easy, relatable way to segue into a flashback.

As you craft your scenes and chapters, make a point of including all the senses, especially smell. Your written world will be all the richer – and smellier – for it.

Last night, I took my daughter, my mom, and her husband to see a limited engagement of Gone With the Wind on the big screen. It’d been years since I’d seen the film, and I was most struck this time by the touching relationship between Melanie Hamilton and Rhett Butler.

The two characters couldn’t have been more opposite. Rhett is a classic devilish rogue interested only in himself, while Melanie is as selfless and wholesome as can be. If the story had lesser writing, these two wouldn’t have had anything to do with each other. Instead, their characters are so much richer because of how much they respect and appreciate each other. And that’s the point of this week’s post: keep your characters from being stereotypes by giving them moments where they can break type.

Melanie the Goodie-Goodie and Rhett the Rogue.

For example, if you have a character named Randy who’s a grim-n-gritty anti-hero loner, flesh him out by giving him an undying devotion to the original Beverly Hills 90210 series. Or a love of Lifetime movies. Or a habit of reading romance novels. Or a girlish laugh when his feet are tickled.

Back to Gone With the Wind, the kindly Melanie has a great moment right after Scarlett shoots a Yankee deserter. Rather than react in horror, Melanie says, “I’m glad you killed him.” She also comes up with a quick lie to account for the gunshot and then suggests pilfering the dead man’s pockets. It’s a brilliant moment in which the character really shines—and becomes more than a simple goody-goody.

Likewise, Rhett has some great off-type moments, too. Now, you could argue that his love for his daughter Bonnie is a break from his rogue character, but there’s a hint of selfishness in his parenting. At one point, he even refers to Bonnie as the one person who’s ever completely belonged to him. No, I’d argue that it’s his admiration for Melanie where the self-centered Rhett takes on real dimension. For example, when Melanie donates her wedding ring to the war effort, Rhett returns it and makes a donation on her behalf. Or course, true to form, he also takes a playful jab at Scarlett in the process.

Perhaps most touching, when Rhett has a complete breakdown after Bonnie’s death, Melanie is the only one who can reason with him. A few scenes later, her last words to Scarlett on her deathbed urge her to be good to Rhett.

Bottom line: the key to making archetypal characters work is to give them a few moments where they break out of their mold and become more human. Likewise, real magic can occur when you have characters, like Melanie and Rhett, who can find new depths to themselves in the context of each other.