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We’ve all been at a party in a great conversation circle, but then you say something you think is brilliant or cutting and the response is not what you’d hoped. The mood cools, people look around and mumble things like, “I really need to go say hello to my ex’s new girlfriend.”
Readers can also react this way to when you make a misstep. For either fiction or nonfiction creating tone is about being precise in your word choices and sentence structures, and finding a rhythm that suits the genre and material, but it’s more than that too. It’s about decision making and reading the mood of the room you’ve created. If you’ve been told you have “tone problems,” it’s usually a signal that you need to go back over your whole project and smooth it out—that you nailed the tone in one place but not in others.
In my forthcoming novel, the biggest change after getting my agent’s notes was the death of the most likable character in the novel. I did set it up so that the death had impact on the reader but let’s say I went too far. The novel itself is a dark satire. Not a meditation on the brutality of humanity. After all, I’m Emily Schultz, not Cormac McCarthy. It was too heavy.
Expectations will dictate the tone, but so will the genre, so let’s look at that first. You’ll notice each of these examples is just two or three sentences, but they convey the vibe of the larger piece. Let’s look at a standard mystery, a satirical thriller, and dystopian fiction.
“In the restaurant car all was in readiness. Poirot and M Bouc sat together on one side of a table. The doctor sat across the aisle.” Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
Tone: Orderly and assured. Just the facts.
“Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive. A lot of folks mix their nitro with cotton and add Epsom salts as a sulfate. This works too. Some folks, they use paraffin mixed with nitro. Paraffin has never, ever worked for me.” Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk.
Tone: Dark but casual, fast, conversational.
“He tried to orient himself: Was he looking north or south? It was like dragging a fork through gruel. The ash smeared the city’s palette into a gray hush on the best of days, but introduce clouds and a little bit of precip and the city became an altar to obscurity.” Zone One, Colson Whitehead
Tone: Desolate, ominous, but grounded in everyday details.
To understand and practice tone, try a couple of these exercises.
Identify your genre and try to write two sentences that embody the genre and go with your character’s conundrum (or your own, if writing nonfiction). Think about pace—how quick or slow you want the progression to feel. Languorous and dreamy, or edgy and quick?
Write about an event or something that has meaning for the protagonist, but which they are trying to downplay the impact of. Focus on sensory details and expressing how the person feels by using images or carefully selected verbs, rather than stating it.
Write two sentences about a character kicking or catching a ball (or choose your favorite sport). Try to inject as much speed and vigor into the words as you can to make your reader feel very immediately placed in the scene.
Tone is style, vibe, mood. Discomfort is part of the pallet and at least in writing you can always backspace over it and try again for the right mix... unlike when you say the wrong thing at a party.