For me "sound" has always been the most difficult of the five senses to describe. It's easy to write: a truck rumbled past, or the neighbor's dog barked; she heard a scream; his voice was higher than usual; the sound of silence filled the air. A little of that is fine I suppose, but when we allow ourselves to become lazy and rely solely on the fill-in-the-blank technique, it seems to me we miss an opportunity to engage the reader by drawing him into our fictional dream.
This week, while approaching my story from a new and hopefully more illustrative angle, I've begun to pay closer attention to some of the more creative ways writers describe sound. Here are a few of my favorites:
A scream:
There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound. It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them. [Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep]
Silence:
Hotels, late at night, are never still. The corridors are never entirely silent. There are countless barely audible sighs, the rustling of sheets, and muffled voices speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor corridor, Coretti seemed to move through a perfect vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on the colorless carpet and even the beating of his outsider's heart sucked away into the vague pattern that decorated the wallpaper. [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"]
Background noise:
Lifting the old-fashioned black instrument to his ear, he heard only music at first, and then a wall of sound resolving into a fragmented amalgam of conversations. Laughter. No one spoke to him over the sound of the bar, but the song in the background was "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly." [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"]
Footsteps:
"You and Francis are on the hiding side," a tall girl said, and then the light was gone, and the carpet wavered under his feet with the sibilance of footfalls, like small cold draughts, creeping away into corners. [Graham Greene: "The End of the Party"]
A scream:
There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound. It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them. [Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep]
Silence:
Hotels, late at night, are never still. The corridors are never entirely silent. There are countless barely audible sighs, the rustling of sheets, and muffled voices speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor corridor, Coretti seemed to move through a perfect vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on the colorless carpet and even the beating of his outsider's heart sucked away into the vague pattern that decorated the wallpaper. [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"]
Background noise:
Lifting the old-fashioned black instrument to his ear, he heard only music at first, and then a wall of sound resolving into a fragmented amalgam of conversations. Laughter. No one spoke to him over the sound of the bar, but the song in the background was "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly." [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"]
Footsteps:
"You and Francis are on the hiding side," a tall girl said, and then the light was gone, and the carpet wavered under his feet with the sibilance of footfalls, like small cold draughts, creeping away into corners. [Graham Greene: "The End of the Party"]
Rain:
It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. [James Joyce: "Araby"]
A woman and her granddaughter hide under a dock and listen to the sounds of the men who are searching for them:
They crouched there then, the two of them, submerged to the shoulders, feet unsteady on the slimed lake bed. They listened. The sky went from rose to ocher to violet in the cracks over their heads. The motorcycles had stopped now. In the silence there was the glissando of locusts, the dry crunch of boots on the flinty beach, their low man-talk drifting as they prowled back and forth. One of them struck a match… The wind carried their voices into the pines…. The carp, roused by the troubling of the waters, came nosing around the dock, guzzling and snorting…. The bike cranked. The other ratcheted, ratcheted, then coughed, caught, roared. They circled, cut deep ruts, slung gravel, and went. Their roaring died away and away. Crickets resumed and a near frog bic-bic-bicked. [Mary Hood: "How Far She Went"]
Sounds of a neighboring homestead:
From the Workman's valley came the sounds of industry at all hours of the day: the buzz of chain saws, the crashing of timber, the splitting of wood, the jingle-trace rattling of mules in chains pulling stumps and stoneboats…. the next day the sounds resumed: the clangings and bangings, the shouts and orders and complaints, the buzzings and grindings, the hammerings and sawings, backfires and outbursts. [Rick Bass: "The Lives of Rocks"]
John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"
Mary Hood: "How Far She Went"
James Joyce: "Araby"
Graham Greene: "The End of the Party"
Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep
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