Those words are triggering a “sense memory,” with smell being a particularly powerful way of evoking an experience from the past that’s been stored away in your brain, almost always without a conscious effort on your part. On occasion, you will hear people liken our brains to computers, and often the way we’re asked to learn reflects this view: we’re required to read, retain, and retrieve information.

But the metaphor of brain as computer does not reflect what we know about our neurobiology, nor does it connect to how we exist in the world. Humans are wired as “interaction” machines, arriving on the scene with a dozen or more reflexive responses to stimuli. Our brains are constantly doing all kinds of things we’re not aware of, squirreling experiences away where we may never access them again, unless triggered, often subconsciously.

Actors use sense memory as a way to evoke emotion in a scene. By recalling a time when they felt an emotion similar to what they’re attempting to portray, they can more believably embody that emotion in the moment.

Writers can use sense memory as a way to access material that may help us bring a particular experience alive. It is a way of getting in touch with some of these subconscious, hidden parts of ourselves, and reminding us we contain much more possibility than we can consciously access at any given moment.

This experience is different from most every other experience in the book in that it is asking you to write not for anyone but yourself. You are going to get in a time machine, triggered by a song, in an attempt to remember what you never realized you knew.

AUDIENCE

You are the audience. This is meant as a pure experience with no product to be consumed by others at the end of the process. I’m not even sure what to call what you’ll be writing. You’re trying to capture a memory.

PROCESS

Read the full process before starting the experience.

1. Locate a memory.

Get comfortable, have handy some way to write down whatever is going to come to you, and start listening to music you know and love on shuffle. As you listen to the first few seconds of a song, see if you are transported to the time and place when you first heard that song. If so, move on to step 2. Just keep flipping until something hits you. If nothing is happening, take a break, go do something else to clear your mind, and come back and try again later.

2. Re-experience the memory.

Once the memory hits, try to follow it back into the moment evoked by the song. There will be both physical and emotional dimensions to the memory. You will likely be able to remember what you saw, smell, touched, and tasted in the moment evoked by this music. Perhaps not all the senses will be present, but some will be, and as you follow the memory more sensations will arrive.

Only those of us past a certain vintage can appreciate this one, but those raised during the 8-track era may recall that there is a part in the live version of Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” where the music fades out, the track switches, and the song fades back in. When I listen to the song today, and the part where the fade would happen, I am transported to the “way back” seat in my parents’ station wagon, a 1976 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, where I am feeling vaguely nauseous from the exhaust fumes as I ride facing backward, looking out the rear window.

I could do this all day, but this isn’t about me.

As you experience the memory, record what you’re experiencing, focusing on the sense details and emotions of the moment. You’ll know it’s going well as you lose touch with present reality and venture deeper into the memory, as more and more associations arrive, perhaps even triggering a chain of memories, one after the other. Just follow that flow for as long as you can.

3. File away your re-experienced memory.

Whatever you capture, make sure to find a home for it where you can go back to it later. Right now, it’s raw material. Think of it as lumber that could be used to build anything you like when the time is right.

REFLECT

If you were able to really get into experiencing a memory, and lost track of the present, my question is, “What’s up with that?” What did that feel like? Was it different from other times when you’re writing or concentrating?

You may have been in a moment of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has conceptualized as “flow,” which he describes this way: “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Writers are often in the pursuit of flow, a depth of engagement in which ideas and language arrive without knowing where they’re coming from. At its best, a state of flow can almost trigger a physical buzzing sensation in my head, like a high.

It is difficult to access and even harder to maintain. I have many days of work when I never achieve flow, even as I seek it out. But the more familiar you become with the sensation, and how you can trigger your own engagement, the better for your writing practice.

Writing is thinking, and flow is a period of extremely elevated thinking that hardly feels like you’re thinking at all.

REMIX

Make a playlist to represent and honor a period in your life. It can be a good period or a bad period, but either way choose some songs, list them, and include a brief descriptions for each, explaining why it’s included and what it represents from the period. If you like, you can publish your list on a streaming service or any other appropriate outlet.

BRINGING THE WORLD TO THE PAGE

Pop quiz. Please give each of the following words a numerical value that expresses how many times out of one hundred something must happen if we are to use the word to describe the frequency of its happening.

In other words, we’re looking for a percentage. For example, if something happens “all the time,” how often does it happen, expressed as a percentage?

Answers are on the next page. Don’t peek.

1. Most

2. Many

3. Few

4. A majority

5. Never

6. Always

ANSWERS

Despite almost everyone knowing what these words mean, there are no specific, concrete answers to the question I posed. When I do this live and ask people to tell me how often something happens if it happens “most of the time,” I’ve received answers ranging from ten to ninety. “Few” has been as few as three and as many as forty.

Even “never” and “always,” seemingly straightforward in their meaning, never (hah!) draw universal responses. Sure, in theory “never” means “never,” as in zero percent of the time, but we often use “never” to mean something else.

YOU NEVER TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE!

In the sentence above, “never” means something like “I take out the garbage more often than you, and I’m upset about that fact.”

By themselves, all the words in the quiz are abstractions, dependent on context for meaning, and even with context they’re sometimes open to interpretation. This doesn’t make the words useless, but we should understand the limits of abstractions.

“Beautiful” is another abstract word, as reflected in the cliché, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Anyone would be pleased to be called beautiful, but if we wrote something like “A beautiful horse appeared on the horizon,” we haven’t done much to paint a concrete picture of that horse.

The degree of specificity depends on what effects we would like to achieve. If I say, “Picture a dog,” my audience is likely picturing many different dogs. Most people think of their own dog.

If I say “big dog,” the list of possible dogs narrows. “Big black dog” and about half are thinking of a black Lab. “Little black dog with a graying muzzle and dabs of white on his toes and a slightly wonky right eye.” I’ve just described one of my dogs, Truman.

The sense-memory, time-travel experience is an example of how describing an experience through sense details can help bring something alive with specifics. Next, the adventure report, “You Did What?” is a chance to engage this part of the writer’s practice more purposefully.