How would you say good authors use onomatopoeias to make their writing more interesting and engaging for their readers?

Comic book writers can plan for onomatopoeias to be illustrated: WHACK! POW!. Besides that, they’re just little nonsense words, hardly interesting at all. MEOW is totally meaningless without context. Todd Rundgren wrote a song about onomatopoeias back in the ‘70s on “The Hermit of Mink Hollow” album — that was a novel use.

Poe’s the tintinabulation of the bells, bells, bells

It’s been ages since I’ve read that poem, but that phrase was the first thing that popped into my head.

Read the entire poem. It’s really beautiful. The best example of it in the English language IMO.

The Bells

Edgar Allen Poe

Read the chapters in Joyce’s Ulysses on the newspaper business and on Irish singers (Chapters 7 and 11: Eolus and The Sirens.)

I would say they use the onomatopoeia to describe a sound while putting the sound into a word. some more onomatopoetics that come to mine are:

rattle, hum whir, whoosh, shush, whisper, splash, clunk, clunker,

I disagree with @frdelrosario‘s statement that they are useless. I think they are the most creative class of words in the language.

I always liked the old Alka-Seltzer ad campaign that went “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is”...Ahhhh!

I like how Shakespeare uses ding-dong in The Tempest, which other than scanning perfectly within Ariel’s “Full fathom five” song reinforces the whole knell image he, Ariel, is crafting.

In a more marketable sense I’d second @frdelrosario‘s suggestion of looking at comic books (although I totally disagree; onomatopoeiac words are interesting). And on the off-chance you can read Japanese syllabaries, manga artists usually incorporate some really subtle and hilarious onomatopoeia in their work. Without it the comic is decidedly deader.

Here’s my homage to Poe and his onomatopoeia: Tintinnabulation

I love the way Tom Wolfe uses the technique in his novels like “The Right Stuff.”

A good onomatopoeia makes things more fun to read. Or say. Words like “crackle” and “sizzle” aren’t just words that sound like what they are, they’re fun words. For me a good author is one that really loves a good word.

Judiciously. Slurp, slurp.