Zip! Crash! Bang! Using Onomatopoeia

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

This week’s refresher Friday takes a heavily updated look at the pros and cons of onomatopoeia. Enjoy!

I'm going to talk about something controversial, and I'll likely have readers split down the middle over this issue.

Onomatopoeia.

Those words that read like what they sound like. Creak. Bang. Swish. They’re those big comic book BAM! and POW! that show sound without having to describe the sound. For example:

Creak

Bob spun around. Was that a zombie or just the wind?

Did You Hear That? Showing Sound

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

I love crafting scenes where my narrator can't see. I'm not sure when this developed, but quite often in The Healing Wars, Nya is either in the dark, locked away inside something, or otherwise deprived of her sight. I find it creepier to put her in situations like that, and it lets both her and the reader imagine the worst and helps raise the tension of a scene.

Sometimes it's perfectly fine to use "heard" or "sound," just like it's fine to use saw or look if that's what makes the scene work best (I've even had my copy editor put it back into the text when I've written it without it). But other times it reads as redundant, detached, or even told. There are only so many times you can write "the sound of..." before it sounds repetitive.