What the past sounded like, and why I kept getting it wrong

I can tell you what my characters are wearing down to the hooks and eyes. I can tell you what it cost to light the room for an evening. For years I could not have told you what any of it sounded like, and a scene you cannot hear is only half built.

The silence we forget to fill

A historical novel is usually written from pictures. We have paintings, inventories, the odd surviving dress behind glass, and so the past arrives in the mind as a series of still, silent rooms, beautifully furnished and quiet as a museum after closing. Real rooms were never quiet. They were full of sound we have simply stopped living with, and the moment you notice the silence you cannot unnotice it.

Think of a large house before electricity. No hum. We do not realise how much of our own quiet is actually a low electrical drone until somebody takes it away. In its place, bells. A whole house run on bell wires, each room pulling a different note downstairs, so that a servant could tell from the kitchen who was wanting what and where. The house spoke in bells, all day, and everyone in my story would have read that language without thinking about it, and I had written forty pages before I let a single one ring.

The things that were loud and are now gone

Streets were louder than ours, and loud in a different key. Iron tyres and iron shoes on stone, which is a sound almost nobody alive has heard a whole street make at once. Church bells not as a Sunday nicety but as the public clock, telling the hour to people who owned no watch. Sellers who sold by voice because most of their customers could not read a sign. A city was an argument conducted at volume, from before dawn, and my clerk walking to work would have moved through it the way you move through traffic noise, which is to say without hearing it at all until it stopped.

That last part is the craft problem. People do not notice their own soundscape. So you cannot have your character admire the bells, any more than you notice the fridge. You have to let the reader hear what the character has stopped hearing, which means putting the sound in and giving the character something else to attend to while it happens.

How I fix it now

I do one pass through every scene with my eyes shut, so to speak, asking only what can be heard. Who is in the next room and what are they doing to make a noise doing it. What is the weather doing to the windows. What is the fire doing. Is there an animal. Is there, underneath all of it, that house full of bells.

A room nobody can hear is a stage set. A room you can hear is a place somebody lived.

Half of what I add in that pass comes straight back out again, because sound described for its own sake is only me showing my research, and nothing empties a scene faster than a writer proving they did the reading. What stays is the one or two sounds the moment actually needs. The bell that rings at the wrong time. The street going quiet when it should not. The fire that is the only thing speaking in a room where two people have run out of things to say.

I used to think I was writing the past I could see. I was writing a painting. A painting is a fine thing, but nobody ever lived inside one. They lived inside the noise, the same as us, and the novelist's job is to put the noise back in and then, for the most part, teach the reader to stop hearing it, exactly as the living did.

Sound is the stenographer's whole job in She Wrote Their Names, set on Ellis Island in 1907, in the room where every word decides someone's future.