Guest Post by Jillian Forsberg –
I am kneeling next to a lion’s cage. The lion is female, tawny, though darker than her companion, who is across the enclosure, making huffing noises. The closer lioness leans against the chain-link fence, pressing her fur through the gaps, shedding.
Safely on the sidewalk, I wait for the lion keeper, Ben, who carries a metal stick and tubs of raw meat. He shoves a glob of meat on the stick and hands it to me. The lioness rises, heavy paws settling into the dirt around her. Ben taps the stick up. The animal careens onto her hind legs, primordial pouch swinging, fur dancing in the autumn light.
“Here, take it,” he says. The lion eats from my stick.
This is as close as I can get. I’m here for research for two of my historical novels that feature lions: one an 18th century menagerie with a historically recorded lion who had just one eye, The Porcelain Menagerie. The other is a retelling of Daniel in the lions’ den, currently on submission.
I need to know subtle things. Sensory things. Smell, sound, textures.
“What do they smell like?” I ask, sniffing the air but coming up short.
“Smell?”
“Yes. Like…people recognize that a dog’s paws smell like Frito chips. What can I say about the way a lion smells?”
“Well…how old is the lion?”
“Any age. A baby.”
“They’re…sweet. Like…molasses? A musky smell?”
The problem becomes that molasses didn’t exist in the year 539 BCE, when my book is set. So I ask an even stranger question: “Do you have any lions I can smell?” Ben laughs.
I long to bury my face in the fur of this lioness, but I cannot. My main characters might have, though, hundreds of years ago. Risking life and limb. But I just need the smell. I need it.
He produces a strand of lion dreadlock from the education room. I inhale the scent. Yes. Sweet, cloying, a strange and interesting musk. It is a mixture of dog, blood, heat, honey. Something strangely dangerous.
I write that description in both books, along with the sounds of the lions, the way their paws push into the earth, sending their toe beans (no, I don’t use the words toe beans, but I want to!) splaying out like flattening clay.
The point of all this is immersion. And if you want to fully immerse your readers in any book, lion-inclusive or not, you must figure out how to see or smell or hear these things yourself.
The feeling of silk on your skin, the smell of newsprint, the vast open plains – these things are accessible to most. Readers want to feel like they are there. You must describe them in ways that are unforgettable, and real.
Use the five senses, but do it uniquely: How does your character’s carriage smell? How does it sound when it moves? How does it smell when her love interest clambers in? We usually describe visuals: color, shape, size. But it is the other senses that draw us in.
My infamous protagonist in The Porcelain Menagerie, King Augustus the Strong, was described in history and portrayed in portraits as a large man. He spent a lot of his time participating in brutal blood sports or on the tennis court. It was reported by the end of his life that he was diabetic, obese, and suffered from various dental issues.
Knowing those things can lead the author to assume that he also did not smell particularly good – especially because of his meat-rich diet, and the preference to bathe with powders instead of water. Therefore, I wrote him as having stinky armpits, oniony and radiating; bad breath, which is to be expected before modern dentistry; and the cloying scent of over-powdering.
These sensory things, drawn from history but assumed, help immensely with your worldbuilding.
Now, let’s go to your ears. Play the music from your time period, easily found on YouTube. Assume what the world sounded like beyond our own. Was it silent, due to lack of vehicles? Chirping wildly with migrating birds? Does the sound of the ocean crest and fall?
I loved learning that lions make specific noises, with modern definitions. So do rhinos, the subject of my first novel, The Rhino Keeper. I rubbed the armpits of rhinos for that one, and yes, I smelled my hand afterward. But I also listened closely: to the sound of a running rhino’s feet, to the peeping (yes! peeping!) noises they make, to the crunching of their chews, to the strange sound of a horn being rubbed on a wall or bar.
The touch of a rhino’s hide, the wobbling, woody, soft horn, the dense saliva that coats your hand after you feed them…. I wrote about all of those things. I could have looked them up. You can guess which was more fun.
Sometimes, as historical novelists, we get stuck thinking that history is words: spoken, read, written. But in reality, history exists around us in sensory ways that we have permission to re-create in our own texts. Getting creative with your research to engage the senses is the best possible way to create an immersive, unforgettable story.
Describe things in more ways than just the visuals, but remember, too, that your visual descriptions need to be unique. Yes, we know the sky is blue. Clouds are white. But what are they, to your character? Through their mind? The blue of his mother’s eyes? White like cresting waves? Be unique enough that we learn something about your characters while also providing us a sensory description we will not soon forget.
If you do this, you’ll create unforgettable scenes, which will allow your readers to fall deep into the world you wish to create. Without it, you might find the flavoring of your work can fall flat. For that reason, I highly encourage you to seek out the shipyard. Or the farm. Or the factory. Or, for me, the lion’s cage.
Jillian Forsberg is an award-winning historian and author who writes mostly about obscure people and animals. She lives in Wichita, Kansas, where she owns a bridal store. Her first novel, THE RHINO KEEPER, is a Kansas Notable Book. The Rhino Keeper and its companion, THE PORCELAIN MENAGERIE, are available wherever books are sold. She is represented by agent Jessica Berg of Rosecliff Literary, whom she met at the HNSNA conference in 2025.
You can visit her website here.
