Writing Sounds

July 23, 2015 / Lisa / Leave a comment

Remember that hilarious video of two men talking, but the only word they say is ‘Dude’? The different inflections tell the listener what they are talking about.

But how does that translate to writing?

If that conversation were to be written, punctuation would help.

“Dude!”

“Dude?”

Then there are dialog tags. “Dude,” he said, on a long exhalation of beer-infused breath.

The idea intrigues me. I’m positive I miss opportunities by not thinking about the sound of a story. I don’t mean reading your work out loud, which is of course important. I mean, how do you convey sound without being bland (‘the car door slammed’) or corny (POW!!! Batman’s fist hit Robin’s jaw)?

If you do an internet search on writing sounds, you get some interesting hits. I found a few sites that actually had sounds attached to writing, where someone had done studies and assigned sounds to things like a pencil on paper.

I got distracted by that one.

Then there’s Onomatopoeia. At its most basic that means using sound to show the noise, as in hiss, meow, or POW!!! There’s a more subtle version of this where the word alludes to sound. Like Eeyore’s name in Winnie the Pooh. His name is a quiet nod to the sound a donkey makes. Think about that honking, braying sound. Can’t you hear ‘Eeeeeyooorrreee’ in there?

I got distracted reading up on Onomatopoeia, too.

With all the internet searching though, I didn’t really find what I was looking for. How do you imply sound through words, without telling the reader what something sounds like?

Well, body language works. Someone speaks and the other person cringes and covers their ears.

Description, of course, implies sound. If I said ‘fingernails on a blackboard’ you’d hear that sound. I think, though, that using that tool can cause writing to slide into clichés. And one can’t forget that too much description gets boring. Plus, description means you’re writing what you see, rather than what you hear, if that makes sense.

I’ve tried closing my eyes to eliminate the sense of sight and forcing myself to focus on just sounds. As I listened, I tried to figure out how I would translate sound into words.

I got queasy.

So I don’t know. Guess I’ll just keep using a mix of all of the above, hoping that somehow the reader, using imagination, can hear the wind in the trees or the scary sounds outside the door late at night.

Birds and Other Apocalypse Tales

July 17, 2015 / Lisa / 3 Comments

Remember Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds? I believe I was about nine when I saw it. Afterwards I decided I could keep my siblings alive in our half-bathroom. There were no windows, I could stuff towels under the door, we’d have water to drink, and most important of all, a toilet. Of course the five of us would have had to stand in the cramped space the whole time. I believe I pictured myself, as the one who saved their lives, getting to sit on the throne.

Birds from Wikicommons

Then there was the nuclear bomb. Or the atomic bomb. I don’t remember which. Either way, I was going to make the siblings crawl under the house because for some reason I thought we’d be safe there. An alternate plan was to get to my friend’s house. They had a real bomb shelter, stocked with canned goods. No can opener though, as they discovered years later when dismantling the shelter.

Next came volcanoes. Anyone remember being shown, in school, a film about a Mexican farmer who had a volcano appear in his back yard? I believe I was around twelve for that one. I don’t remember my plan to save the siblings from volcanoes other than an attempt to get my dad to teach me to drive.

From Wikicommons images

Then came the Chernobyl disaster and I was right back to planning for radiation. But by then I was living off grid with my parents – generating our own power, in the woods (hunting possibilities), near a river (water supply) and with an outhouse (remember the importance of the toilet and the birds?). We were set.

wikicommons images

Each generation has an apocalypse fear. I read a study that said the shape an apocalypse takes for each age is a reflection on the stresses and fears for that generation. Zombies? That we were becoming drones.

So what is it these days that I’m preparing for? Natural disasters. I just read a very sobering article on the upcoming big earthquake for the Pacific Northwest.

But hey, I have a plan. Bug-out bags, stocked pantry, kerosene lanterns and candles, water filters, hunting rifle, and lots of vodka.

I’m still slightly worried about that volcano though. And the giant mutant spider from a Midnight Theater episode. And tornadoes. Man, don’t get me started on tornadoes.

Are you prepared? There’s a fine line between paranoia and preparedness, between nightmares and reality. It never hurts to at least have a blanket, candles, and some water in your car though.

Oops. I took the candles out. They melted.

(Ha, looking at the tags for this post you’d think I was a bit paranoid…)

Boring Words

July 9, 2015 / Lisa / 4 Comments

I’ve started a stand-alone book not connected to the mystery series, with multiple point of view characters.

Last night I worked on the beginning scene with one of those characters. Several months ago I wrote opening scenes with this character that I liked a lot. Jumping right into the action. But then I realized I needed to back up and introduce the opening scenes.

Words flowed just great last night. Fingers flying on the keyboard. Until I realized the fingers weren’t flying, they were skimming. And I was yawning.

You know what? If you’re bored with the story when you’re writing it, the readers sure aren’t going to be thrilled while reading.

I went to bed.

The problem is obvious. In this scene I have a teacher with a mysterious background, and eight students heading out on a field trip in the mountains. The original beginning started in the middle of dramatic action. This version I wanted to set the stage for that action. What made it so boring was not realizing that setting the stage means just moving a few pieces in. You don’t necessarily have to bring in every tiny piece of stage decoration.

In other words, I was introducing each person and trying to feed in a little of who each person was. Description, a bit of their personality quirks, a little dialog, some of the teacher’s opinions on each of them. I know better than to throw in all the backstory at once, but even this amount of information was too much.

Part of this obvious problem is the number of characters in the opening scene. I wanted to set the names of each before the reader, to plant those names preparing for the coming action. But nine characters in the opening scene, with an introduction on each of them, turned into a boring information dump, even though I salted it with dialog and movement. Especially when only a few are going to be pivotal to the story. (Teaser: the rest are needed to provide bodies…)

So tonight I’m going back and deleting most of what I wrote last night. The opening will be replaced with introduction, description, etc., on, at the most, the teacher and two or three students. And even that may be too much. The remaining students can have attention drawn to them through something as simple as the teacher thinking about taking eight kids into the woods. That’s sufficient to tell the reader there are more kids on scene. And then as the story unfolds, as the action begins, each of those eight will play their parts.

Years ago I would have struggled much longer to make the story work. I would have ignored the inner critic yawning loudly. I would have ignored the inner critic finally yelling ‘BORING!!!!’ and kept writing. I would have told myself that if I plowed ahead, things would improve.

Now, a little wiser, I’m more ruthless. If it’s not working it’s time to cut and toss. If I’m bored I need to go back to the point where I started losing interest, cut everything from that point forward, and start over.

It never pays in the long run to force a story where it doesn’t want to go. The detour takes way too much effort and sometimes you never find your way back to where the story needs to be. I’ve learned to listen to my instinct and to not be afraid to trust that feeling. And this time it only took me a day to figure out the problem instead of weeks of writing and fighting it, and then more weeks of figuring out how to fix the problem.

But man, last night? That was some of the most awful, boring writing I’ve done in a very long time. Let’s blame the heat, shall we?

In the meantime I need to go to the beginning I liked. I think there will be a way to add in what I tried to do last night, in a much tighter way. I probably don’t need as much stage setting as I thought I did.

Maybe I’ll be holding my breath as I madly type, instead of yawning.