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Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Sounds and Onomatopoeia

BAM!
POW!

These are probably the kinds of things we think of when we think about onomatopoeia, but one of the things we wanted to do in this discussion is expand how we think about the use of sound in prose.

Paul pointed out that paying attention to what people hear in a fictional environment is very important. Sound words themselves can come across as cool, or as esoteric, depending on which ones you choose.

I recently used onomatopoeia in a chapter I was working on, in which my point-of-view character was haunted by the sound of a weapon discharge after nearly being killed by it. What it involved was inserting the word "zzap" at different points in the narrative.

As with most literary techniques, whether it is effective or not depends a lot on how you do it. Any technique can be overused, or become intrusive. Rowan pointed out that redundancy is annoying. My own take on this is that repetition is a very powerful technique, and should be used carefully (because redundancy is annoying!).

Morgan noted that particular sounds can be very meaningful, such as the sound a coffeemaker makes when it's finished. A sawblade sound could also be striking. So can music.

Kat pointed out that the presence or absence of sound can be significant. What is the narrative impact when engine noise stops? What about birdsong? She talked about being in Australia and listening to kookaburras outside the window. This sound has so often been used by sound engineers to evoke the jungle - inaccurately - that it can be disconcerting. We get trained to expect particular sounds in particular environments, but sword-drawing does not make the sound sshhhinggg!

Think about what sounds you are choosing to describe. Why have you chosen them? What is important about them?

Think also about when you might notice sound. A heavy drawer makes a very different sound from a light drawer when opening. In radio plays, these differences would have been important to convey properly, but they're harder to capture in text.

Very often we are taught to write to show off beautiful ways to write. We should also try to think not just about how to make our writing sound beautiful but the larger significance of the techniques we use.

Onomatopoeia is optional in English but less so in a language like Japanese, where it constitutes a high percentage of adverbs.

Brian pointed out that if you focus on sound it can give your story more texture and weight, and a greater feeling of immersion. It directs your attention and adds dimension. It can also be an element of character voice.

The same event can be described with varying amounts of sound in the text. Here's an example:
"Crash" + description of lightning
"The lightning crashed"
Lightning lit the sky.

You can create a lot of sound-like effect just by using particular words with repeating sounds, as in alliteration, sibilance, and assonance. One author who does this beautifully is James Thurber in his children's works The Thirteen Clocks and The Wonderful O.

You can indicate a lot about your world by picking out sounds to describe. Adding those words can take time.

What is the reader's expectation of the soundscape? What do they know, or not know? Is the soundscape important? What should you describe, and how much, in order to capture it?

Steven King provides sound details, because you have to know what the normal sounds of a house are in order to understand what it means when they change. Set up the normal so you can understand departure from the normal. Character judgment is one good tool for doing this.

In comic books, you do have to come up with ways that things sound. This can be tricky!

In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, there is a recurring pockety-pockety sound that never gets explained, but may suggest he works in a factory in his real life.

The sound of a keyboard typewriter used to be the sound of word production.

Kat has written about a character with PTSD who is triggered by the presence or absence of certain noises. She astutely remarked that we should pay attention to the different sounds made by a pine forest and a broad-leaf deciduous forest.

Cliff pointed out that in The War of the Worlds, the presence of silence is very important to convey a ghost city.

What do places full of humans sound like? What do they sound like when they are not full of huans?

How do we represent language sounds that we don't understand? The word barbarian comes from the idea that foreigners used to say "bar bar."

If you don't describe accent or language, people will assume a default majority language. They will tend not to think it's their own language, necessarily.

Tobias Buckell has often dealt with issues surrounding how to portray patois in text.

We shouldn't always demand that the reader supply sonds for us.

Standardizing the "sound" of descriptive narrative is not always a socially neutral choice.

Robert Parker Spencer novels use a Bostonian dialect, and Morgan noted she never noticed the accent in the books until it was pointed out to her.

You can make deliberate choices at the phoneme level, in your word choices, in your prosody and rhythm to change the feel of narrative.

How much is an accent noticed by the point of view character? How much distinction is drawn between dialects in the world?

What kind of ideas do the people of your world have about what an upper-class accent is like? What a lower-class accent is like? All these judgments are culturally grounded.

What happens when you are writing a multi-species story? How do you deal with all kinds of accents?

Keep in mind that a character's native language is generally a major source of their accent in a second language. We have a lot of stereotypes and strong judgments we associate with particular social dialects, regional dialects, and foreign languages.

Thank you to everyone who attended!



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