I’m not a big zombie movie, book or video-game connoisseur, but, I am addicted to the zombie TV series “The Walking Dead”. So like a good fan, I watched the highly anticipated 2nd season finale (it had almost 9,000,000 viewers, which, for cable, is a staggering number, and that’s only the people who watched it live). The episode didn’t disappoint and I can’t wait for season 3 to start. For fun, I’m trying my hand at a writing a zombie story.
I realized something though, zombies are dead, and dead people smell… well, they smell dead. Smell is really hard to convey through a visual medium, but it’s almost indispensable for well-rounded writing. Now, imagine the smell of a corpse. If you’ve had live dissections in medical or nursing school, it’s not hard to remember the disgustingly sweet smell of decomposition. If, on the other hand, you’ve never smelt a dead person, it’s like a combination of the smell of rotting ham, then add to that, the smell of gas leaking out of a stove, with just a whiff of the scent of extra virgin olive oil.
In light of that tasteful description, try this writing prompt: describe the smell of a zombie, or zombies, chasing you down the streets where you live.
Happy writing, mwahahahahahahaha.