‘You’re Talking … all Wrong. It’s the Wrong Tone.’

Thank you, Christopher Walken, for helping me establish expectations. While we may not need the threat of soldering iron repercussions, something we should take seriously is our writing tone. I’m still learning its various forms, some of which require a higher skill level than I was previously equipped to handle. And this past weekend, I encountered an aspect that I hadn’t directly considered before.

To Be Clear

Writing tone is a combination of elements that imparts a certain mood, feel, or style. As for the tone of my articles, you won’t really find many strong ‘Do’s and Don’ts,’ because telling you to ‘Do this’ or ‘Don’t do that’ is instructional. And while I am sharing my experiences as a lesson, you have a different focus with your own writing. So, instead of instruction, my articles come across more like a conversation. This is tone. And it’s deliberate.

Writing tone is something that I’m still improving though, which is earning an increasing amount of my attention. An easy way to adjust your tone early is to just alter your adjectives and word choice. If you’re trying to write horror, your story can grow darker just by selecting more menacing terms to word-paint your settings.

Consider the words ‘broken’ and ‘fractured.’ They’re synonyms but their usage can change what we expect from the writing. Take these examples:

‘Broken ground’ vs ‘Fractured ground.’

Breaking ground could be something positive like building a home or plowing a field...or digging a grave. So, it could create both positive and negative vibes. But a fractured ground? That sounds more catastrophic. Maybe an earthquake recently opened a crevasse or some great war scarred the landscape.

Let’s expand on that and adjust the writing tone with word substitutions:

The old two-story Victorian had been abandoned for years. It was gray but once might have been blue. A porch led to its double doored entrance, passed across a front bay window, then wrapped around one end of the house. The other end was occupied by a protruding tower that rose to a turret with a balcony. And everything was enclosed by messy landscaping and a dilapidated picket fence.

To me, this house sounds a bit lonely and neglected. The gray color makes it feel lifeless but there’s a bit of optimism in supposing that it might have once been blue. The tower also has a hopeful feel because it’s description sounds like a lighthouse, which is literally a tower built to promote safe passage. Even the yard seems to yearn for attention.

So, this whole description seems Y.A. The POV is likely someone with a hopeful outlook, so when the story describes things in her words, there’s a hint of what things could be if circumstances where different. But what if our view was from someone with a darker perspective? Maybe someone sees things for what they are, has a darker imagination, or has an altogether different understanding of this same house?

The old two-story Victorian had been abandoned for years. Its skin was cloaked in a decrepit gray. A rounded tower protruded from one side that rose to a turret with barred windows. A porch wrapped from around the opposite end, passing a front window and door before its steps spilled down to a concrete pathway. And everything was enclosed by a landscape in shambles and a wrought iron fence.

Now, the order of descriptions might be slightly altered but there’s no denying that all of the same property components are present. The first example seems like the house would appreciate visitors, but the second is definitely telling you to go away. The second also gives me the impression that the viewer thinks he’s looking into a graveyard. Even the simple replacing of ‘messy’ for ‘shambles’ seems like we’re suddenly describing a place where we could find the roaming undead. Both of these examples are sixty-nine words in length, yet feel like entirely different stories. The difference? Writing Tone.

These prior examples are somewhat easy adjustments. You can draft whatever it is that you’re writing, then take another look at the work and try substituting words that lean into whatever mood you’re going for. If you want dark, use a grimmer vocabulary; if you want hopeful, use brighter colors and terminology. You’ll find there’s a pretty significant difference in something being the color of a rose and the same thing being the color of blood.

Some Caution

While I have completed a novel, I’m no writing expert and I’m certain I’ll never claim to be. These things I share are my own writing lessons learned, which I discovered by analyzing my writing and that of others’. Some of my learned things are answers I sought out, while others are happy discoveries that were something like Aha! moments.

There were several key things I picked up between writing my draft and rewrite, but those lessons continued all the way up to hitting ‘Publish’ on Twilight Wolfand beyond. So, my first caution is to not expect this next suggestion in all of my writing. This is something I’m still learning. I realize it’s at the top end of my present skill level, so my using it is going to be intermittent and to varied levels of success.

My second caution is from something I managed to avoid with my completed novel. I know writers sometimes get stuck in a loop where their work is never good enough as they always find something else to improve. But turning your story over to the audience is an important part of your development. Completing a work and moving on to the next is far more productive for increasing skill than trying to continuously improve a single piece. So, consider finalizing that story you’ve been sitting on and know that you can always go back and release updated revisions.

Writing Tone in Point of View

I’ll cover POV more in-depth in a separate article, but we need to touch on it a bit for this next part. This bit of writing tone is something I’m actively trying to apply to my own work and this new aspect is something I identified in my writing over the weekend.

I’m presently working on a Grimm’s Fairy Tale anthology and I encountered this descriptive detail while trying to get into the mind of my Cinderella character. And this note on writing tone came from trying to describe a butler’s eyebrows. Previously, I had described them in another character’s POV as cartoonishly bushy. But as I re-approached the butler with my Cinderella, who’s in an anxious state of mind, I wondered on how she’d describe them.

This is where POV comes into play. As I’ve worked more with 3rd person limited, I’ve grown to appreciate it more. The POV requires that you describe the world the way the character would and you have to use narrative devices in line with the way the character thinks.

For example, I have a huntsman character named Jack, who’s literally the huntsman plucked from the Little Red Riding Hood story. He has a hunter and very outdoorsy mindset, so when his POV describes things, you should expect things to likely be depicted in a way that relates to nature in some way. And this is something from Jack:

“Like Mioko, you both think you can control everything. That’s just not the case. Go stand in a river with a strong current. You’ll quickly figure out just how much control is at your disposal.”

Here, Jack is talking to Wolf about how much control one has in life. It’s dialogue, but even if this was part of the narration, ‘one’s control’ would still be associated to rivers or nature in some way because that’s how Jack’s mind works. Plus, Jack is presumed to be from a time period within the 17th or 18th century, so no part of his POV can describe things by relating them to more modern technologies, such as trying to maneuver a helicopter without a tail rotor.

So returning to my Cinderella, let’s consider the writing tone of her POV. The character is very optimistic and tries to see the good in all people. She’s always smiling or giggling, but in this particular moment, she’s not. She’s uncomfortable and anxious. Remember, we said that tone was essentially mood, so if you’re writing in 3rd person limited or 1st person, the character’s mood is absolutely going to apply a different tone to the environmental descriptions.

In considering how to describe the butler’s eyebrows, I was initially thinking to associate them with a Woolly Bear caterpillar. It’s not a far leap for your mind to move from caterpillar to butterfly or moth, which sounds too optimistic for her present state of mind. What I shifted to was porcupines, which sounds altogether less approachable. If I imagine someone with porcupines squatting over their eyes, that person sounds a bit prickly. Maybe not hostile, but they’re definitely not going to seem huggable.

And that was it—my Aha! moment for the day.

Hopefully, you can see why I think this is a more advanced skill level. When you’re using a POV that incorporates a character’s mood, that mood should absolutely spill into the writing surrounding that character. You can cast all your previous scenes in optimistic, colorful vocabulary, but if the character has a dour mood, the reader should feel that in the way the scenes are depicted. I’m confident a lot of us use this to some degree even without knowing it, but maybe we can use it a bit more deliberately from here on out.

Conclusion

For an easy way to alter your writing tone, substitute your adjectives and make different word choices that align with the theme you’re going for. If you want something to feel more optimistic use brighter colors and words, but do the opposite when your goal is the inverse.

If you’re writing in 1st person or 3rd person limited, keep in mind that your POV character’s mood should impact the way the environment is described. If she takes the same route to work everyday, on a good day, everything will seem more lively and inviting, but if she’s in a sour mood, you’ll want to make it seem like Charlie Brown’s rain cloud has decided to follow her everywhere she goes.

And that’s it! I hope my experience with this helps you in your own writing!