–Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company

This passage paints a beautiful picture of utter stillness, of expectancy and a coming change (indeed, it immediately precedes the scene that sets all the other events in the story into motion). But it’s not just the meaning of the words that makes the paragraph work on us like this; the words themselves affect our sense that something important is about to happen. Let’s look at what Sutcliff did to achieve that sense of coherence and expectancy.

First, she uses lots of high-energy vowels: long a, long e, and short i sounds. These “high” vowel sounds, spoken in the front of the mouth, with the lips tight, create a sense of energy or tension.

Second, she predominantly uses liquid consonant sounds (m, n, r, l, and w). Liquids connect words, because their sounds continue, lingering in the mouth. They lend a feel of (what else?) fluidity, softness, and hushed quiet.

I’ve copied Sutcliff’s paragraph below, highlighting the words with these sounds. Words in bold have a high-energy vowel sound in them. Words in italic have liquid consonants in them. Words in bold italic have both a high-energy vowel and a soft consonant sound in them. (I did not highlight articles or conjunctions.)

The trees began to thin, and we came out onto the edge of a clearing; and in the same moment the harvest moon, which had been veiled by thunder-rack, sailed out into a lake of clear sky. Ragged silver wings of cloud formed the shores of the lake, and beyond the fringe of hazel and hawthorn that still lay between us and open ground, a milky mane of moonlight flowed over the clearing. Everything was very still; even the nighttime sounds of the forest had fallen away, so that it was as though everything waited with held breath. For maybe three heartbeats of time the stillness endured.

Wow. Do you see that? Almost every word in these four sentences contains either a high-energy vowel or a liquid consonant—or both! By using the same kinds of sounds throughout this paragraph, Sutcliff weaves her description together, gives it a feeling of continuity, of belonging together. Repeating these sounds also reinforces the sense of impending crisis and irrevocable change.

Words are made up of sound and meaning. If as a writer, I know the properties of different sounds and how they contribute to (and even create) meaning, I can choose not just a good word but the best word–a word whose sound reinforces the meaning and mood I want to convey.

Nasals—n, m, ng—are sounded in the nose. Say inning, and you’ll see what I mean. You can feel the n and ng sounds at the top of the back of your throat, almost in your nose.

Sibilants—s, z, j (soft), th, sh, zh, ch, f, v, x—make a sort of hissing sound, and you can aspirate (i.e., protract) them as long as you have breath. Say hiss and hold that final s sound. And again, notice how our words for this kind of sound—hiss, sibilant—have the very sounds they’re describing embedded in the word.

Finally, liquids—l, r, w, m, n—create a fluidity or fluency of sound, like water running over rocks. (You already noticed, right? All those l’s and r’s that I used to describe this sound…)

All right, you say, that’s totally cool (because you’re a word nerd, so you would think so), but who cares? Why does it matter?

Let’s say you’re writing a bedtime story. Do you want to use a lot of stops? No, of course not. That would be jarring. You want to lull that child to sleep. So you use liquids and sibilants, sounds that can be drawn out. You use low energy vowels.

But if you’re writing a suspenseful scene in a story, do you want to use lots of sleepy liquids? Maybe, depending on the mood you want to evoke. If you want to create a sense of calm before the storm, liquids might be totally appropriate. But if you’re in the midst of the storm and there’s a lot going on, you can reinforce that with high-energy vowels and stop-and-start mutes.

You could use lots of sibilants to create a scene with hissing machinery, or to create the voice of a dragon.

Nasals would work well to reinforce the whiny little sister voice.

And so on.

Of course, there aren’t hard and fast rules about how to do this. But knowing about sounds can help you choose a better word in a given sentence or scene, a word that by its very sound reinforces the mood you’re trying to create.

Next time we’ll look at a passage from Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Shining Company that uses sound to great effect.

Most consonants cannot actually be said without an accompanying vowel sound. (Try saying the sound for “d” and see what I mean: you can’t really say it unless you add a schwa or some other vowel sound after it.) So the energy of a sentence is going to come from its vowels.

That said, consonants do play a role in how a word or sentence feels in the mouth. They can be divided into rough categories, based on how you hold your mouth and how the air moves through your mouth when you say the sounds.

Today, I want to focus on stops or mutes. These are the consonant sounds that, when at the end of a word, force you to stop: b; c (hard), k, and q; d; g (hard); p; and t.

The word stop, for instance, ends in a stop—that final p. And the word mute ends in a mute—that final t. How interesting that our words for these kinds of sounds actually exemplify the sound they’re describing. Coincindence? Probably not. We feel sound in our mouths and ears, and it only makes sense that the sounds of the words we create correlate to their meaning.

To understand the role of a stop, consider this sentence: The cats jumped onto the table. The s on the end of cats allows you to connect this word with the word that follows. But if you take the s off—The cat jumped onto the table—you now have a felt pause between cat and jumped. The t in cat cannot elide (i.e., blend) with the j in jump.

This felt pause can be used to great effect, as in Tennyson’s “The Eagle”:

He watches from his mountain walls/ And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The t on the end of thunderbolt creates a pause—and thus a bit of suspense—before the final two words of the line. Tennyson did this without line breaks or punctuation, simply by using a stop. How cool is that?

Next up: nasals, sibilants, and liquids (oh my!).

We all know that words are made up of letters. But I think we sometimes forget that they’re also made up of sounds. Let’s look at those sounds and why they matter. (Special thanks to Darcy Pattison, who first introduced me to the way sounds help create meaning.)

Today, we start with vowels. In English there are five vowels, right? A, e, i, o, and u.

Well, yes and no. There are five vowel letters. But in most English dialects there are 15 distinct vowel sounds. (The following list is entirely Kimberlee-centric; I included only those vowel sounds that I could distinguish as separate sounds, which is why only 13 are listed—I hear no difference in the sounds of “the” and “but” or of “cause” and “cop.” If you do, by all means, stick them back in!)

High Energy Vowels

• long e (as in tree)
• short i (as in sit)
• long a (as in say)

These are high sounds, spoken in the top of the mouth, with the face pulled taut. Try it. Say those sounds. Feel where they are in your mouth, what your face does as you say them. Feel their energy.

Midrange Vowels

• long i (as in glide)
• short e (pen)
• short a (cat)
• oi (toy)
• ow (cow)

These sounds are spoken in the middle of the mouth, with the face more relaxed. Go ahead. Say them. Feel where they are in your mouth, how your face relaxes as you go down that list.

Low Energy Vowels

• short o (cop)
• short u (but)
• long o (bone)
• short oo (book)
• long oo (tooth)

These are low sounds, spoken in the bottom of the mouth with the face relaxed. One more time. Say them. Feel them in your mouth, your face.

Okay, so this is all very interesting (okay, so it’s only interesting if you’re a total word nerd like me, but I’ll assume if you’re reading this that you, in fact, are), but who cares? How does it affect one’s writing?

Let’s look at how knowing about vowel sounds and their effects on our physiology (and thus our psychology) can make our writing stronger. Here’s the original version of the first sentence of chapter four of my novel:

The autumn I was seventeen, the nightmares were particularly frequent.

This sentence starts off an intense chapter, in which the narrator is nearly scared out of her mind—but though the sentence tells us a few things (the narrator’s age, the time of year, and that she’s suffering from bad dreams), it’s not, ahem, particularly compelling.

So, I decided to use these vowel sounds to revise it. I wanted to use as many high energy vowels as I could. Right away that got rid of every word but seventeen and frequent.

Now, the most important word in the sentence is nightmare, but it doesn’t have any high-energy vowel sounds. The only synonym I could think of was dream—and while the long e sound contributes high energy, dream doesn’t have the same connotations as nightmare. To use dream, I needed a strong verb that would make clear what kind of dreams these are. I came up with plagued (long a!).

Then I toyed with the rest of the sentence, trying to give it a few more high-energy sounds (there are a total of seven; eight if you pronounce the autumn as thee autumn). The revised version reads:

In the autumn of my eighteenth year, the dreams plagued me.

How’s that for a whole lot stronger? And all I did was tinker with the vowel sounds! Woot!