Style: Sound effects

If readers want to hear a REAL sound effect they should click on 'narrations' and listen to the final part of the audio recording on my story, 'The Little Black Dress.' Please excuse the plug.

I have it on good authority that a well known librarian was involved in the production

I skip over the spank spank spanks and slap slap slaps! I think the 2nd version is much better.

"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is RIGHT" (Kipling).

That said, I think it may be contented that some techniques are, in general, more effective or successful than others. And moreover that it is worth discussing which techniques tend to work better in which circumstances. Of course, no such rule is absolute.

I am reminded of the story of the literature professor who pronounced that "all your characters must be fully alive to the reader, drawing the reader into the tale." when a deep voice from the back of the hall rejoined "To begin with, Marley was dead" (which is of course the opening line of Dickens's A Christmas Carol).

I could not agree more, however to say some style is "wrong" just because it does not fit one's personal idea of what is more successful or works better, is not right in my opinion. Discussions are one thing, and we can all learn from discussions,but both sides of any discussion need to be taken as equal value.

I voted for option 2, so I happen to agree with many here that a lot of "smacks" in any story do not appeal to me, however that does not make the writing "wrong" does it?

However we are getting off track here, lets continue to discuss the two options placed before us and forget about right and wrong.

I also tend to skip over the onomatopoeia . . . and the rest of the spanking descriptions for that matter. I read stories more for the characters, relationships, and context rather than how a spanking is described, though I recognize I'm probably in the minority here.

Of stories in the "excessive onomatopoeia" category, I tend to be more in favor of those inserting the smacks into a scolding rather than in blocks of text on their own. This can make it more difficult to read, but chances are I'm just skimming at this point anyway. The reason for this preference is purely visual; I get rather distracted by the regular spacing that occurs when a single word is repeated or the diagonal lines which can appear occasionally when inserted into a sentence.

I think that an occasional SMACK!!, WHAP!! or whatever can be a useful tool to establish a rhythm in the text and pull the reader into the scene. On the other hand, using twelve SWICK-THWACK!!!'s to indicate twelve strokes of the cane is a very poor way to convey the scene to your reader.

There are right ways and wrong ways to tell a story. A right way brings your reader into the action and elicits the desired intellectual and emotional responses. A wrong way, does just the opposite. This is not to say that there is only one right way.

Similarly, it is not true that both sides of any discussion should be taken with equal value. While both sides may deserve a fair hearing, when it comes to judging the value of their arguments, equality is not generally the case. If it were, valid choices could never be made.

I like onomatopoeia and butchering words to give them emphasized length or tone. Granted it doesn't always work out well, but it can be effective I think.

I think the hardest part of writing a spanking story is the actual spanking itself. The build up, the after effects, and everything else besides the part where the spankee is bare-butt and over a knee, is easy enough to do for me, but its the heat of the moment stuff that's the hardest to write I think. You either end up drawing it out and throwing in six thousand instances of SMACK, or end up just glossing over it all.

That being said, I try and use spanking onomatopoeia as a way to create a sort of "background noise" to the spankee's and spanker's thought processes during the actual spanking, since unless the punishment is only a few swats, there is going to be a LOT of repetition, and I think it's boring to read about literally every smack of the palm.

The pattern I've found that I've developed for myself is,

< noise noise noise >

< Description of the spanking, and/or thoughts from the person spanking or being spanked >

< more noise that helps draw the reader away from specific actions that are happening or thoughts of the characters, and back into more of a "background observer" view of the spanking as a whole. I.e. the continuous and unrelenting spanks being delivered over and over again. >

< More thoughts or descriptions >

< More noise >

< rinse and repeat until cheeks are red and toasty >

That's what I love about writing, there's no right or wrong approach if you think of things from more of an artistic perspective than purely grammatical, and I think it's super fun to try and come up with new ways of painting a very intense picture with words.

To that I said, does not it depend upon each and every individual to make that judgement. If I am correct, and I am by the way, then there is no right or wrong way to write a story because any story is not judged by one person or one group, it is judged by hundreds of individuals whose judgement will vary, so there equality has to be the case.


And I ask a question in response to this...who decides if the reader is involved? Is it not the reader? Then if the reader likes what we may assume the general majority does not like, is the reader wrong? No of course not, the reader is never wrong. So if Option #1 here is what the reader likes then it is right, and if Option #2 is what the reader likes, then it is right.

Do not forget in story writing, nothing is a group decision as far as whether it is good or bad, every reader makes their own decision. The book "Fifty Shades of Gray" is considered mere trash as far as quality of writing goes by some, but others like it. Whose right in this case? Each individual reader is right, there is no other way to view it.

Once again I state, there is no wrong way to write a story.

This! So totally right. People read things different ways and have different interests and writers are the same. There's no magic formula it's just what works for writer and reader.

It is surely true that no story and no technique works for everyone, and almost any story and almost any technique will work for someone. To that extent there is no absolutely RIGHT or WRONG way to write a story.

However, i think that there are techniques which work more of the time for more readers, and ones that usually don't work as well. For example, Changing PoV in mod-paragraph rarely works well, although there are exceptions. For another example, stories written in second person (you did thus and so, and then you did the other) often seem like mere tricks. I think that it is a very rare second person story where the unusual format can so support the content that the story works well. (Ted Sturgeon's "The Man who Lost the Sea" is one of the few second persons stories that *does* work, in my view.)

I do not think it pointless to discuss which writing and story-telling techniques generally work better than others, and why, with examples, provided we remember than no such tendency applies in every case. I think such discussions can help writers improve, and can also be interesting for at least some readers who have no intention of becoming writers.

And so while i do think it is wise to attend to all sides of such debates, I do not think that they are by definition of equal value. An argument that correctly predicts what works for the vast majority of readers is, in my view, at an advantage over one that does not.