Good fiction writing depends upon the author’s ability to create, in words, a literally unreal reality that mimics real reality so hard that the reader, a real person, exercises her real imagination, which, in turn, elicits real feelings, the very same ones that would be elicited if circumstances akin to what she read occurred right there on the sidewalk in front of her. Writing that is self aware, self referential, breaks the fourth wall, etc. —the post modern stuff—doesn’t depend on a real response to imaginative prompts in quite the same way, though it does depend on the author calling attention to the artifice of story consistently. As consistently as the more straight-ahead writer calls the reader’s attention away from the screws and planks from which the story is constructed. Employed in either case, the onomatopoeia is, at best too easy, a reminder for the author to himself that he must needs work harder and, at worst, a laziness to the reader. Whatever mode the author is working in, onomatopoeia erodes consistency.

Onomatopoeia—stupidly difficult to spell and maddeningly so in a post where the word is to be used a lot—is the author failing to prevent his metaphor from collapsing, then scrambling to puke out an audio-image he hopes will be (sound!) so clever that the reader forgives how he’s passed on the hard work of metaphor construction, or even reconstruction, in the first place.

Slap! Bang! Drip! Onomatopoeia, oft accompanied by the damnable exclamation point, offends in the same way that particular bit of punctuation offends. So, the exclamation point is meant to demonstrate, in the work, an excitement of some kind? My dear author, why then did you not write something convincingly exciting with nouns and verbs and a smattering of adjectives in the first place? Smackity! Shmashk! Spaloosh! Quit feeding your reader the raw ingredients. She’s come to your work for the pleasure of your cooking.

I’ll grant that some words we now consider regular words began their lives in the muck of onomatopoeia. Sizzle, for example, is wonderful. “The steak sizzled in the pan.” Better by far than ‘cooked.’ And yet sizzle will never not be without its literarily despotic origin story.

On the surface, onomatopoeia may seem to fire the imagination. To personify it, it’s what onomatopoeia would like you to think. On a second think-through, the imagination is fired not at all. The too-solidly-packed-but-still-mostly-true aphorism, “Show, don’t tell,” in fiction writing is bucked in onomatopoeia, whose baked-in aphorism is, “Only tell.” If the author were to write a scene in which a boulder fell off a cliff and landed on the forest floor, the author who isn’t willing to do any better may write, “Thud.” To which the reader may respond, “Thud. Huh. I would’ve assigned a different sound. And what about all the other sounds, not to mention appearances, from a giant, tumbling rock?” The author must provide the room in which the reader may assign to her sensibilities, within the sensible context of the greater story, exactly what it sounds like, what it looks like. In the onomatopoeia, there’s only room for the author; the author has not made room for the reader.

The best fiction writing is participatory by nature, a collaboration between the author and the reader. One must lead—the author—so in this way, it’s like a dance between two partners. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango, a pith premised upon the deeper truth that if there aren’t two, there isn’t any chance for transcendence, no culmination of purpose. And the best metaphors contained in the best fiction writing invite the reader to explore the height and breadth of her imagination, then figure out which ways she’ll assign what she imagines, prompted by the writing, to the way she feels about the world. The author must inspire the reader to imaginative work, in other words. Or else there’s no use writing. It’s the nail upon which everything else about writing is hung. Encroachments, therefore, are acutely egregious.