Anyway, my novel is to have an international setting, and uses the backdrop of many different countries. The only problem is that I haven't traveled extensively, and lack some basic information involving things like smell. While pictures on the Internet and in travel magazines can give a good description of how things look and people act, it rarely says anything about how things smell.

The funny thing about this is how important smell seems to be with people's memories of a foreign country, or visiting someplace new. This even includes visiting say the East Coast of the USA after living in California your whole life.

Along those lines, I thought it'd be good reference material for everyone to list some of the smells, both good and bad, we know of where we live, as well as where we've visited. I personally would like to know of people's impressions and smells of foreign countries, but anywhere would be useful to someone.

To start things off, I live in Iowa in the United States. It's farm country here, so a lot of the memorable smells are related to that industry. To start off with, there's the smell of dirt, clogging and heavy, in the air around this time of year (springtime) because of all of the plowing. To get an idea of this smell, just pick up a handful of black dirt or potting soil and smell it. You get the idea.

In the fall, there's the same smell, but mixed in with it is the noticable smell of dried soybeans and corn stalks. The soybean and corn smell kind of smells like dried grass.

Another smell comes from the numerous factory hog farms dotting the countryside. These are large, single story garage-like buildings each about a football field long. Each one houses about a thousand hogs packed in tightly together. Well, the manure has to go somewhere, and is usually pumped into uncovered manure pits that smell really bad. With the wind just right, it can be smelled in towns and from roads and interstates.

Also, a lot of natural fertilizer, (manure, to use a more acceptable term, but I'm sure you can think of others) is spread on the fields and can be quite strong for a couple of weeks. This smell is stronger than that from even the most vile of human outhouses (porta potties) since it is concentrated and aged.

In both of these cases, the smell is a stinging, sharp, rotten egg, ammonia, and methane combination that can be strong enough at times to make eyes water and cause coughing and breathing difficulties. The smell can also linger long after since the smell is actually from minute particles in the air that lodge in the nose. The same goes for heavy air pollutants in large cities like New York and Los Angeles, which there aren't as much of here.

Still another heavy smell comes from factory turkey and chicken farms. These are pretty much the same as the factory hog farms, but they house thousands of turkeys and chickens. The smell from these though is much higher in ammonia content, so that is what you smell the most. Ammonia, by the way, smells a lot like urine.

The final smell that has come to Iowa recently is that from Ethanol plants. These plants process corn and even though the smell is better with the newer plants, they still produce a smell like a cross between stale, moldy bread and old beer after it's sat on a messy bar floor for a night.

While these smells don't exist everywhere, or all the time, they are a part of what makes people remember and think of Iowa. For the most part, the air here is clean, crisp, and fresh, which is a good smell. If it wasn't, nobody could live here. I do think though that the smells that people remember best of a place will usually be the bad ones. That doesn't mean we should mention only the bad ones, though. Use them all.

So what smells do you know of or remember? Adding them to other descriptions using other senses can really enhance a description.

I've lived in the suburbs all my life -- St. Louis and now Kansas City. For the most part, Springtime smells like heaven. I've been going on walks lately just to breathe in the fresh air which includes leaves on the greening trees and flowers poking their heads into the air. It's just started to include the smells of freshly mowed grass.

But in any area, there are sub-areas. A few miles from our home is a sewage treatment plant and right next to it -- a housing development that I can't believe anyone lives in. We roll up the windows and turn off the outside flow of air into the car when driving by, especially on a windy day (and Kansas is prone to windy days).

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Having said all that, except at the start of Spring when I get to go outside for the first time in months and become reacquainted with the lovely smells, it all falls into the backdrop. I would agree that smells often get overlooked in description -- but all description needs to be relevant and salient to the POV character.

I have lived in West Africa, and have travelled quite a bit in Western Europe.

For example, when I was in Paris, the subway is the only one I know that runs on rails, but has tire-roller bumpers mounted on the sides of the cars so that it keeps it from scraping against the walls in tight turns. Often, the scrapes become skids, so in some stations, there is always the subtle but acrid smell of fresh-skidded tire/burnt rubber just after a train pulls in. Also, the Paris subway almost always has an underlying parfum of sewage. Not sure why, but I think it has to do with the way it was constructed. Yuck!!

If your character ranges as far afield as West Africa, remember that there is little if any sewage treatment, trash disposal, or refrigeration. If you want to see what the sun-dried fish that you're buying for dinner looks like, you have to smack the edge of the table so the flies lift off of the meat. It's 98 degrees, the humidity is 98 percent, and the smell is a combination of sweat, dead and beginning to decay fish, and the cloying, almost sickly-sweet scent of wild jasmine flowing through the air. All of these aromas will be veneered over the top of a subtle scent of urine, rotting vegetation, powdery red laterite dust (in the dry season), and chicken dung.

If you ride a taxi (city, or cross country) there will probably be 6-8 adults in a compact car (4-door Mazda GLC). If you are going cross-country, there will also be 2-3 kids (not a car seat in sight), some chickens in plastic bags with only their head poking out for air (gifts for whoever the traveler is visiting), and NO deoderant use. Based on the time of year, the rains, the local militia security checkpoints, and the quality of the vehicle, your average speed will be about 20 miles per hour. It used to take me between 8 and 10 hours to go 109 miles from my house to the capital in Freetown.

It'd be trickier in SF or fantasy, where a new place or a new event (or even a new character) might produce new smells.

I recall several books that invoke the sense of smell... primarily "Dune", which made repeated reference to the cinnamon-like smell of the "spice".