“The air was redolent with the smell of garlic,” is what I typed into the notes program on my phone an early Sunday already hot morning in Taipei, Taiwan, July, 2025, when I was out early, long before the city was fully awake. I was in Taipei with my daughter. She was still in bed. I knew the neighborhood as my daughter and I had stayed in this same hotel on a previous trip. So, I walked two blocks to a small café that I had a feeling would be open, and it was.

I ordered a cappuccino made with a dark roast coffee to drink at the café’s only table. The morning was already hot. The café table was placed in the opening of a wide doorway. Half in, and half out, the table straddled the line between indoors and outdoors.

Drinking my coffee, looking out at the small street that started just past the table, I became aware the air was filled with the aroma of garlic. A nearby restaurant had started prepping garlic. It was a perfect moment. A humid summer morning in a city that was still mostly asleep, a well made coffee, the air itself smelling delicious. Then and there the phrase came to me, “The air is redolent with the smell of garlic.”

I wrote that fragment down.

From that fragment I can recall that morning in its entirety. The look of the cafe. The look of the small street where my table was placed. The contentment of being far from home in a comforting place while my daughter continued to sleep in our hotel room.

As a writer, it is helpful to keep a writing journal. You can keep it on paper, or on your phone. The where and how you record notes is not important. What is important is that you do write down impressions as you go about your life as soon after you see or hear something that strikes your interest as you can. Even a scrap of a sentence, like my “The air is redolent with the smell of garlic” can be enough to memorialize that moment for later use in a story you are writing.