Hi, everyone, I was wondering if anyone had any tips for writing a description of an "inhuman voice". One criticism I received on a story was that I used that phrase and it doesn't really describe the voice. (A fair criticism). I was wondering if anyone had any tips to describe an alien, inhuman, scary, or demonic voice. It doesn't have to be specific to my story, just some general descriptions or good ones you've seen in other stories. Thanks.
How could the phrase fail to describe something that doesn't exist outside of its inherent description? I mean, it's not like the reader could "hear" it in its true form or anything and determine that the description failed to represent what it purported. As for the voice itself, those are always difficult to describe. I'd surmise that sound is the toughest of the senses to describe in print. I think I might have described a computerized voice once as "clipped and off-kilter," but that might not be what you're looking for. "Demonic" is kind of cliche if you're describing a deep, scary voice, but at least it's a familiar symbol everyone can relate to. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Doesn't sound like something that is likely to blow the reader away, one way or the other.
My favorite trick is The Indescribable. Works best for horror type stuff -- the voice is incomprehensible to the human ear, impossible to put human words to. You could also expand on how it's 'inhuman'. What qualities does it have that are human, if any? How exactly does it deviate? I write scifi and a lot of robots, and I like describing my robots' voices as being essentially human-sounding, but devoid of inflection or sometimes with little mechanical artifacts in them.
