[SPEAKER_02]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends. [SPEAKER_02]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patrion.com slash writing excuses. [SPEAKER_01]: Season twenty, episode thirty. [SPEAKER_01]: This is Writing Excuses. [SPEAKER_02]: Using Y to shape tone. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Howard. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Mary Rubinette. [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm Dan. [SPEAKER_02]: Today, we're going to be talking about tone.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I know that we did a whole episode in season eighteen on tone and mood. [SPEAKER_02]: We're coming back to tone because I love talking about it. [SPEAKER_02]: Tone is one of those words that people use when talking about fiction in a lot of different ways. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the tone of horror or the tone of the scene. [SPEAKER_02]: What we're going to do is we're going to break down what it means. [SPEAKER_02]: how we use it and how it can be a tool in your toolbox.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when we're talking about tone, what are some of the things that you all are thinking about in terms of what it means? [SPEAKER_02]: Let's start with the meaning. [SPEAKER_01]: I treat tone in fiction as an emotional word, like a happy tone, a sad tone. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I come from music background and so the domain of the word tone is very heavily overburdened.
[SPEAKER_01]: But within the domain of writing, I think of tone as a set of emotional beats that the prose will deliver. [SPEAKER_01]: independent of what kind of story it may be. [SPEAKER_01]: You can have a horror story that has a cheerful tone. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure that I have a good answer for this. [SPEAKER_00]: I think about tone in similar ways. [SPEAKER_02]: Same. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that tone tends to be primarily emotional for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love [SPEAKER_00]: picking tones that are not happy. [SPEAKER_02]: Really? [SPEAKER_00]: You're talking. [SPEAKER_00]: My most of my books. [SPEAKER_00]: I am really taken by the idea of sadness. [SPEAKER_00]: I love sadness as like a tonal texture in which to tell a story. [SPEAKER_00]: dealing with loss, dealing with sadness, dealing with whether or not it is worth hoping for something. [SPEAKER_00]: And this was all long before I developed depression.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I find that to be such a fun thing to play with. [SPEAKER_00]: I guess I need to ask though, what do you mean by the meaning of the tone? [SPEAKER_02]: So for me, when I'm thinking about tone, very similar that it's the emotion, that it tends to have, you know, words associated with it, like, oh, this has a bouncy tone or a, [SPEAKER_02]: a loving tone or a scary tone. [SPEAKER_02]: But I also think that you can talk about tone in a large scale thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, this is the tone of the book. [SPEAKER_02]: When you open the book, you're like, I am in for a horror thing that it can hint at genre. [SPEAKER_02]: It can hint at, this is the emotion that I'm going to have when I walk away from the book. [SPEAKER_02]: But I also think that it can be within a scene. [SPEAKER_02]: We sometimes talk about the dark night of the soul, which is a specific tone that there's a specific mood, there's a vibe that's going on.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not sure that tone and vibe are that different, honestly. [SPEAKER_02]: But it exists in the same way that in a horror book where you, instead of having the all is lost moment, you have the, aha, you're gonna get away. [SPEAKER_02]: Nope. [SPEAKER_02]: Nope, you get sucked back in. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: And so those are, those are places where you're gonna lay two tones against each other.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the overall tone of the whole piece, the overall vibe, the sensation, the experience that the reader is gonna have. [SPEAKER_02]: that there's, it's still coloring that, that contrasting moment. [SPEAKER_00]: Yes. [SPEAKER_00]: I see, I see what you mean now. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking about my book Partials where, you know, I established the tone right off the bat. [SPEAKER_00]: The very first scene, very first chapter is about a dead baby.
[SPEAKER_00]: the plague that has killed everyone is still around and a baby is born and passes away and it's horrible and that's part of the point is because I want to establish right up front that is the tone that we are dealing with in this book which is not to say that the entire book will be dismal in fact most of the book is much more upbeat than that
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... because uh... another thing i was specifically trying to play within that series was the idea that the adults who remember the world that we lost are always sad and angry about it whereas the kids who have grown up post apocalypse um... this is the only world they've ever known they are finding joy in ways that the adults never do and so there is
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the easiest, best way to get that juxtaposition across was to present the horrible thing and then show the different reactions that everyone in the book has to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that kind of overriding sense of this is a world where babies die is important to establish the stakes, to establish what the emotions are going to be like, [SPEAKER_00]: but then it also makes the joy and the happiness that the main characters experience that much more meaningful because you know what they are feeling joy in spite of.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I keep tripping over just the word tone in context with my music background and I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of pieces of music [SPEAKER_01]: where what in fiction, you know, in prose, we would call tone in the music, we would call timbre, you know, we would call maybe maybe texture. [SPEAKER_01]: When you have, when you have the brass all standing on a note versus when you have the strings all standing on a note, it's very, very different.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is, [SPEAKER_01]: But analogous to in our prose, the word choice, the line-level word choice. [SPEAKER_01]: But Dan, when you talk about the content of, I am telling the story of a baby dying, that is the minor key versus the major key, the tritone versus the dominant seventh. [SPEAKER_01]: That is the tone of the content as opposed to the tone of the turn of phrase.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as a humorist, I'm always balancing the two of those because if I take [SPEAKER_01]: If I take the tritone, if I take the very dissonant tall jazz, you know, nineteenth chord and play it with nothing but woodwinds and harps, it's almost silly. [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it's light and it's airy and I love taking the tone of my words, the tone of my, you know, prosaic turns of phrase and contrasting them against the tone of the content of what I'm writing.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is, that is a chewy delight for me that I just never tire of doing. [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, man, that's one of my favorite things to do. [SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely. [SPEAKER_00]: If I can get a reader to feel too contrasting emotions at the same time, I know I have succeeded at something. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: So as we're talking, you've made me think about a thing that was happening when I was working on Martian contingency.
[SPEAKER_02]: that goes back to the last episode where we were talking about all the real intent. [SPEAKER_02]: I honestly, when I sat down to write that, what I wanted to do was I just wanted to write a cozy. [SPEAKER_02]: I just wanted to, like, my characters have been having a really tough time. [SPEAKER_02]: I just wanted them to have a nice time on Mars. [SPEAKER_02]: I just wanted to write about, let's have a party, let's have meals. [SPEAKER_02]: This is, let's grow some plants.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is what I wanted to write. [SPEAKER_02]: And also, the book before that in the series is Rivalentless Moon, which is a really intense thriller. [SPEAKER_02]: And I knew that that motion for the reader, that coming into this tone of, we're growing some plants, that the complete lack of tension was not going to work.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I had to come up with a tone [SPEAKER_02]: And a reason, like, I had to come up with an unthorial intention for it, but I came up with a tone of tension and keeping tension on my characters all the way through. [SPEAKER_02]: But most of the plot points, most of the things that are actually happening in the book, I am, like, there are multiple parties in this book. [SPEAKER_02]: There's multiple discussions of clothing and sexy fun times and food and gardening.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm masking it under this tone of tension. [SPEAKER_02]: I have created the tension using authorial intent and all of the other tools we've been talking about. [SPEAKER_02]: But I had to put that tone in of, oh, no, things are going to go terribly, terribly wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I did that on the first page when I have my character looking at the beautiful sky and thinking how lovely it is and then thinking, but of course this was space and in space something always goes wrong. [SPEAKER_02]: And using that contrasting tone between those two things to create tension for the reader that I then play with or the whole book.
[SPEAKER_02]: Speaking of creating contrasts, we are gonna take a pause now and when we come back, we're gonna talk more about how to actually use this concept. [SPEAKER_02]: So I find that when I am learning a new tool and that one of the things that works for me is to deal with it on a fairly small level and then I can scale it up to see how it works on something bigger.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you are talking about the tone of a sentence, what are the pieces that we're using to manipulate the tone of a sentence? [SPEAKER_01]: Assunance and dissonance or assunance and consonant repeated vowel sounds repeated consonant sounds or the absence the absence thereof putting [SPEAKER_01]: putting emphasis almost like rhymes, words with similar emphatic patterns, similar accent patterns, putting rhymes in emphasized and non-emphasized places.
[SPEAKER_01]: If this sounds like poetry, I'm so sorry, that's kind of the way my brain works. [SPEAKER_01]: But when I'm crafting, when I'm really trying to craft one sentence that matters, [SPEAKER_01]: the whole shape, the lilt, the beat, the song of the sentence is governed by every one of those pieces. [SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, I can't think about that for every sentence. [SPEAKER_01]: I write for an entire book, but it's when I know, gosh, like first line, I have to establish tone.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will shape that sentence very, very carefully. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, a lot of it is also sentence length. [SPEAKER_00]: Word, length. [SPEAKER_00]: Am I using big long words? [SPEAKER_00]: Am I using short ones? [SPEAKER_00]: How much punctuation is in there? [SPEAKER_00]: There's all of these little tools you can use to [SPEAKER_00]: You know, change whether a sentence feels very fast and punchy, whether it feels fast and simple, whether it feels long and malifluous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lots of word length and sentence length and punctuation are tools that I use all the time. [SPEAKER_01]: The tintinabulation of the bells, bells, bells. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So tasty. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and it is that like word choice, sentence structure, the imagery that I choose. [SPEAKER_02]: Those are the things that I, I will look at, you know, the difference between describing a fallen leaf. [SPEAKER_02]: as moldy or gold in red.
[SPEAKER_02]: Those are both leaves that are dead, but they convey a different tone. [SPEAKER_02]: Some of what I'm also looking at is shared context. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. [SPEAKER_01]: When you say shared context, I lean into sensory details. [SPEAKER_01]: We often forget when we're writing to describe what a room smells like, what a small room sounds like when empty as you walk through it versus a large room versus the great outdoors when you walk.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are those are different acoustic spaces. [SPEAKER_01]: at least, okay, I have an audio engineering background. [SPEAKER_01]: I can't not hear these things. [SPEAKER_01]: But I think even to the untrained ear, you can tell if you're in a small room versus a large room, even if the lights are out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if the lights are out and the experience the character is having is hearing that they have stepped from a small alcove into a larger room, we've established a tone and it's probably pretty cool. [SPEAKER_02]: You're making me think about and wonder if our readers can tell the difference between the episodes that we record when we are all sitting in the same room, which we are doing right now, and the ones where we are on Zoom, and we are separated, we're distant.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the answer to that question is Alex wants the answer to be no, or the guy who masters our episodes, and so masterfully masks the sounds of the ship, or the sounds of the [SPEAKER_00]: Long more outside. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's so much more to it than that. [SPEAKER_00]: There is how much we step on each other. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like just now you were still talking and I talked over you. [SPEAKER_00]: And when we record on Zoom, we tend to not do that as much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or two people will start talking at the same time and then stop. [SPEAKER_00]: Like there's a lot of very weird, eternal etiquette kind of things that we do that are very different. [SPEAKER_02]: And these are the kinds of very small nuanced things that often a reader won't notice. [SPEAKER_02]: There won't be a conscious piece of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So sometimes you're going into a scene and you may not have a conscious thought as you were writing it about what this tone is going to be. [SPEAKER_02]: And this is something that I think that you can go back and layer in later. [SPEAKER_02]: You can add in, if you want a little bit of tension, you can look at the way the characters are interacting with each other. [SPEAKER_02]: You can look at what are the where am I adding in words like Tintabulation to direct there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's in the first line. [SPEAKER_01]: You've got my attention. [SPEAKER_01]: You've got my attention. [SPEAKER_01]: If you describe something, if you describe a car as Cherry Red. [SPEAKER_01]: or if you describe the car as lipstick red or blood red. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, those might all be the same color of car to your mind's eye, but to the reader, the blood red car is in a very different book than the cherry red car.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that that Howard actually is a great segue for us talking about homework. [SPEAKER_02]: What I want you to think about is to take this idea of tone, just thinking about it in terms of these very broad things we're talking about, word choice, sentence structure, the feeling that you want the reader to have. [SPEAKER_02]: And I want you to have your character do an action, which is going to have a very simple thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to write a little vignette in which a character is pouring tea for a beloved partner. [SPEAKER_02]: I want you to try for a joyful tone. [SPEAKER_02]: Everything in this is just joy. [SPEAKER_02]: The tea is joyful. [SPEAKER_02]: Everything is joyful. [SPEAKER_02]: Think about the word choices, the sentence structure, the way the character's notice, the imagery that you're showing us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I want you to do it again, but I want you to try for a tone of terror. [SPEAKER_02]: It is still tea, it is still a beloved partner. [SPEAKER_02]: One character is pouring tea for the other, and there is a sense of terror for the entire scene. [SPEAKER_02]: You're out of excuses. [SPEAKER_02]: Now go right. [SPEAKER_02]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends.
[SPEAKER_02]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dan Wells, and Howard Taylor. [SPEAKER_02]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. [SPEAKER_02]: For more information, visit writingexuses.com.