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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…
