WHAT IS THE TONE OF MY NOVEL AND HOW DO I CREATE IT?
Tone. Even for writers, can be difficult to define. But tone is the emotional guidance, the framework for the emotions and feelings your reader should experience while they’re reading your novel. It’s how the author (you) or your narrator feels about the characters in the narrative, the subject matter of your novel, what the story of your novel is centered around, and so on. But it’s easy to confuse the tone versus the “voice” of your novel. So let’s get the facts down about tone by first defining voice in fiction.
Voice in fiction is one of the most critical elements of fiction. In fiction, voice is what you “hear” when you’re reading. It’s how the sentences are structured—short, short and long combination, long sentences, and so on. Have a lot of short, punchy sentences? You may be of the Hemingway school of writing. Voice makes your narrator, your characters, identifiable. If you were to have an experiment of different texts, or excerpts of texts, where readers familiar with your work try to pick your writing over others’, they’ll pick correctly. Voice is also what a great many literary agents say is the number one thing they’re looking for when they pick up a manuscript: a voice that’s original and captivating. If you read Faulkner or McCarthy, Vonnegut or Neil Gaiman or David Foster Wallace, it’s easy to pick out who wrote what, because of the rhythm and words and style of the voice of their narrators and characters. Literary agents seek original voices that capture them from word one.
Tone is not that. Or, not that it’s not as easy to pick up tone in a narrative than voice is, but rather that you, as a writer, as a reader, aren’t always as likely or as quickly able to lock down the narrative tone until you get significantly into the novel. And that’s because things change as you make progress within longer works of fiction. The tone in a novel can be humorous (Think Less by Andrew Sean Greer, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22). Tone is also not the “mood” of the narrative; that’s what’s created from the tone. Tone is, remember, the author or narrator’s attitude toward the novel’s characters, what the novel’s about, the story itself, and so on.
. . . tone is the emotional guidance, the framework for the emotions and feelings your reader should experience while they’re reading your novel. It’s how the author (you) or your narrator feels about the characters in the narrative, the subject matter of your novel, what the story of your novel is centered around, and so on
Tone also helps push the reader into the world in which the narrative takes place and where our heroine’s story plays out. One of my favorite novels, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, dives deep into Raskolnikov’s mental state after he murders Alyona Ivanovna, a money lender, and her sister Lizaveta, who walks in on Alyona’s murder. The tone of the novel derives its impact from the psychological aspect of Raskolnikov’s crime(s), namely guilt, panic, a disturbed mind and eventually to a tone that emerges from Raskolnikov’s confession to the murders that can be called redemptive. Which, in this case, shows how tone can vary based on what’s happening in the narrative.
Raskolnikov’s internal monologues hype the reader up through his desperation at having killed the two women, thus making the reader feel anxious about what’s going to happen, but also shows how isolated and disgusted he feels at his alienation from the world around him. We, as human beings, can relate to how our hero/antihero is feeling, and while we likely won’t go as far as he goes as a result of his mental state, we get it. And the tone of that stress on Raskolnikov translates, through Dostoevsky’s words, into stress on the reader. We remember fiction for how it makes us feel, not just because of the plot or the well-developed round characters, or the subject matter, but greatly due to the tone of the work and how that tone affects our experience.
Here’s a list of tones in literature (though likely not a complete one), and some people believe there are only 7 or some other number (I’ve bolded those seven), but I’m going with what I’ve put down here:
Sarcastic
Humorous
Pessimistic
Optimistic
Formal
Informal
Serious
Melancholic or sad
Nostalgic
Defiant
Contemptuous
Empathetic
Impassioned
Philosophical
Satirical
Uneasy
Urgent
And on and on . . .
So, What is the Tone of my Novel and How do I Create it?
That’s the question, isn’t it? And it’s a question you’ll answer before you start your novel (or short story or whatever), or you’ll discover it while actually writing. When I begin a new novel, I have a pretty good idea of what the voice of my novel is going to be, as well as the tone. Now, I write literary fiction/realistic fiction for the most part, and sometimes I drop a few jokes in there. But that doesn’t make the novel a humorous one, or sarcastic, or take your pick. What I’m saying is, the tone of a novel can change throughout the novel, but overall, unless the novel plays with the conventional elements of fiction, it’s likely to fall into one category tone-wise.
For example, George Orwell’s Animal Farm is political satire. Orwell uses anthropomorphic animals to criticize corruption, Stalin, and issues related to the Russian Revolution. The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, is a hopeful novel because while the story centers around two brothers freed from slavery, the narrative leads (or promises to lead) towards a more inclusive society and future. Animal Farm is satirical, yes, but it’s also hopeful, and cynical, bleak and lighthearted. Orwell shifts the tone throughout the novel, but the message and tone of the novel remain focused on very serious subject matter. The way I look at it, the bolded tones above are the more stringently adhered to narratives that maintain a single, or very few, tonal shifts throughout the work.
To focus on the tone of your novel, you need to focus on the elements of fiction mentioned above. Sentence structure. Voice. Characters and their actions and dialogue and word choices. How the author or narrator focuses on a certain topic or person or [enter subject matter here], and how they describe the subject matter (through words, thoughts, dialogue, description, etc). One way to teach yourself tone is to take the seven bolded words above and write a paragraph or a page or however much you want or need to feel like you’ve created a narrative with a clearly, identifiable tone.
For example, what would you say the tone of these few lines is:
Smith couldn’t see the light. He’d been passed over countless times for supervisor, the last time by a twenty-two-year-old kid with a year of experience and a mouth full of metal. Braces! The kid had braces, had just learned how to navigate the process of how they did things at PlatCo, and he gets supervisor? God, he thought, what have I done to deserve any of this?
Smith sounds pretty pessimistic, doesn’t he? So, I think we can safely say the tone of the previous passage is one of pessimism. But what happens if further down the road the new kid messes something up and gets fired or demoted? And Smith’s boss promotes him? Now the tone shifts towards optimism, doesn’t it?
There are some writers and critics and teachers out there who believe tone should remain steady throughout a work. I disagree. Keeping to one tone throughout a novel, in my opinion, would not only limit the impact of the work, it would be incredibly hard to do. And boring, me thinks. But what is the tone of my novel and how do I create it? is a question you'll have to figure out on your own.
Cully Perlman is author of a novel, The Losses. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
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