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The Smell of Paper: Memories and Experiencing

May 24, 2021

Do you like to smell paper? If yes, I’m sure you find nothing weird about it. If not, you likely think that people who smell paper are weird, or worse. Perhaps you find it weirder, still, to hear that smelling paper is a strong facilitator of memory and, hence, experiencing.

In other words, smelling paper can help you recall old memories and relive past experiences. As we’ve seen before, this is crucial for a writer.

But even if you’re not a writer, recalling and re-experiencing your memories offers a sense of identity, helping you to reflect on yourself. Ultimately, it helps you better understand who you are.

All this from smelling paper!

smell of paper — Paper doesn’t smell like roses. It smells like paper! And it’s precisely this uniqueness that makes smelling paper special in helping us remember

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Why Imagination and Creativity Are not the Same (and why It Matters)

June 30, 2020

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

creativity, fiction, imagination, memory, writing

In writing, is imagination the same as creativity? If the answer were “yes”, this post wouldn’t exist. But imagination and creativity are two very different concepts, as we’ll see in more detail, and confusing them can have far-reaching repercussions in your writing.

Indeed, it’s particularly in the field of creative writing that confusing imagination and creativity can be damaging.

Imagination versus creativity. Creativity versus imagination.

Even the order is important, and so in this post I’ll refer to the pair as “imagination and creativity”. The reason? One of the major differences between these two concepts is their temporal order. Imagination comes first and creativity follows, in a different form.

But, as usual, the story doesn’t end with that; it only begins there!

imagination vs creativity in writing — **Imagination** is wanting to take a photo of a woman in a forest; **creativity** is deciding what the photo should look like

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Visuality and Memories: A Way of Seeing

January 27, 2019

Experiencing

affect, experience, memory, nostalgia, seeing, vision, visuality

The term “visuality” might at first appear obscure. We define visuality as “the quality or state of being visible or visual”. This definition might actually make you wonder, why didn’t I simply use the term “visibility”?

However, I like what “visuality” conveys. It’s not merely the quality or state of being visible/visual, as the dictionaries inform us. Rather, I see visuality as a philosophy of seeing.

That’s an impossible weight for a humble word to carry, and doubly so because this is simply the way I choose to see the word. Guess what, however? That’s precisely what I’ll be talking about in this article: the subjective rendering of reality through visual representation.

visuality and memory — The visuality of this scene is not merely what is visible in it, but what I render (=see and remember)

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