Ian McMIllan wrestles with how to write everyday noises

By Ian McMillan

Published 25th Jun 2022, 06:00 BST

Here’s Ian McMillan approaching the settee, like a ship approaching the safety of a harbour after negotiating the choppy waters of a stroll to the shop for some brown sauce. Ian McMillan lowers himself towards the cushions and as he makes settee-contact he goes “Hmmmph” or “Gnnnaaaaaahw” or “Ohhnn”. Ian McMillan’s wife gives him a stare that is so hard you couldn’t break it with a sledgehammer. “I wish you wouldn’t make that noise when you sit down,” she says. In an attempt to distract her, Ian McMillan says: “Yes, but at least I got the brown sauce,” waving the bottle. The distraction tactic doesn’t work.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this column is going to be about me sitting down on the settee, but it isn’t. It’s about how to represent in writing the noises that you make every day, like my sitting aria. The three ways I wrote it down just now sound a little bit like the noise I made, but not completely. Just a moment after I’d tried to make the brown sauce distraction, my wife said “Mmm” in a way that suggested she wasn’t convinced but, again, how do you write that sound down? It wasn’t the kind of “Mmm” you do when you’re eating a sausage roll, and it wasn’t the kind of “Mmm” you do when you want somebody to repeat what they’ve just said. It was a very different “Mmm”, but written down it looks just like all the others.

I suppose what I’m examining here are the differences between talking and dialogue. So in a play I would have said something sharp about making a sitting-down-on-the-settee noise just before I sat down on the settee and my wife would have said something witty and cutting about me groaning and then I would have retorted with a brown sauce barb that was as poetic as it was profound. Instead of those Shakespearean exchanges you got some grunting and some Mmm-ing and some half-finished sentences because we’re in real life not being stared at by an audience.

Then, once I’d sat on the settee and groaned, I sneezed. Again, the real-life sneeze didn’t resemble a sneeze in fiction. A character in a novel would go “Achoo!” or “Aaaaaachoooo!” if it was a graphic novel, but when I sneeze I say “RESH!” very loudly, and then I say “And that’s dust!” Then, to express disquiet with myself at my loud sneeze, I’ll mumble something that if written down would look like “Huh” but which is really more like “Hh” or “Hrh”.

It pains me as a writer to admit this but language can sometimes be inadequate to the tasks we ask it to perform, and the articulation of grunts and gasps and groans falls into this category. You might say that as far as words are concerned, you can’t tell talk from mutter, as the old joke goes. Hnh!