Welcome to My Worlds: A Bipolar Christian Tells All

Once upon a time, a friend sent me a few pages of a manuscript she was critiquing. Something was wrong with it, but she couldn’t figure out what. The writing was excellent. The author—whose name I still do not know—used action verbs, kept the pace going, and possessed an excellent command of grammar. Yet I, too, found something missing when I finished the scene. 

A second read-through told me the answer: She had no auditory words. Flames stabbed from gun barrels, snow floated from the sky, and wheels slipped on icy patches. We heard no booming of shots, no crunch of wheels, and no voices. In short, she’d produced an excellent silent movie. 

Yesterday, I suggested sprinkling visual details so as not to slow the action or bog the reader down with irrelevant pictures. Today, in discussing incorporating sound, the auditory sense, I don’t want to be repetitious in instructions; therefore, I won’t tell you to sprinkle auditory words throughout the scene. 

In fact, too many writers are so judicious in sprinkling sound in their work, they leave it out altogether. 

Dialogue can be construed as sound. Yet, without an occasional suggestion of a tone of voice, one may as well have a speech synthesizer reading. No, the words themselves are not always enough to judge tone of voice. Think of this: 

“I love you,” she said. 

Or 

“I love you.” She spoke through gritted teeth. 

The first one: Yeah, that’s nice. Second one: Whoa, what’s going on here? 

In other areas, unless someone is profoundly deaf, people live in a world of sound. Think about what you can hear right now? For me, it’s the murmur of the ceiling fan, the distant hiss of air brakes, the click of a computer keyboard, one cat giving herself a bath and the other’s bell jangling as he tries to persuade me to play with him. 

Since we are surrounded by sound, to have our characters not be surrounded by sound is cutting the reader out of experiencing the character’s world. For today’s before and after, I’m using something I have written. This is being told through the point of view of a third party not in this snatch of dialogue. I’ve changed the original as though I included no auditory sense. 

“Thank you, but I’m not leaving until I either have the keys to this practice or the money back,” Dr. Vanderleyden said.  

“You can’t have either.” Doc’s heavy footfalls stalked across the room, making the floor vibrate. 

“You’re drinking in the middle of the afternoon?” Dr. Vanderleyden asked. 

What’s lacking? Tone of voice and thus most of the emotion. Any signal that the guy pours himself a drink. Any movement. It’s talking heads. 

I have deliberately neglected the visual input here because this is through the point of view of a character who is blind, so the auditory clues are paramount. 

Here is the original:  

“Thank you, but I’m not leaving until I either have the keys to this practice or the money back.” As smooth as warm maple syrup or not, Audrey Vanderleyden’s voice held a thread of steel.

“You can’t have either.” Doc’s heavy footfalls stalked across the room, making the floor vibrate. A drawer scraped open. Glass clinked

.“You’re drinking in the middle of the afternoon?” Dr. Vanderleyden sounded appalled. 

Through sound alone, we have:  

attitude—sounding appalled

character—steel in the voice

movement—scrape of the drawer opening

action—glass clinking 

Unless your character lives in a silent world, sound is a crucial sense to add to your work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 15:23 and is filed under Laurie Eakes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.