Starless and Bible-Black

Choose a time of day and jot down all the sounds that you associate with it.  Early morning might include the dawn chorus, alarm clocks, yawns, the first stirrings from rustling bedsheets.  Now imagine that you are going to write the opening of a radio play that begins at your chosen time of day. The audience cannot see the scene, so consider how you might communicate these sounds in a narrative form.  Look at the extract below where Dylan Thomas is trying to capture ‘night’ for the listener:

 

It is…moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, wood limping invisible down to the slowblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.  The houses are blind as moles or blind as Captian Cat there in the muffles middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds.  And al the people of the lulled and dumbfounded town are sleeping now…

You can hear the dew falling and the hushed town breathing.  Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llaregub Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

 

Happy writing!