After you’ve spent Valentine’s Day with your loved ones, come spend the next day with me (and Sam and Daisy!đ)
I will be at Hopeless Romantic Bookshop (In the Stackt Market, Toronto) from 2-4pm on February 15th 2025, to sign TIME AND TIDE.
Originally Published on Storybilder August 24, 2021
This is the second part of our discussion on narrative vocabulary and tone. Part One focuses on vocabulary choice and ways to shed light on your characters’ inner thoughts and world view through the language they use.
What is âToneâ?Â
Compared to vocabulary choice, tone is harder to pin down. Itâs more or less the way that you, the writer, feel about the story youâre telling, and how, on the page, you convey that feeling to the reader. For example, Terry Pratchett feels irreverent and deeply hopeful in his novel Good Omens. If Jane Austen had written a similar story about an angel and a demon accidentally losing the antichrist on the eve of Armageddon, her tone would likely have been dry and witty. Ernest Hemingway’s version might have been angry and defeatist.
You can set the tone of a story by deciding what mood or flavor youâre looking convey. Is the book meant to be light and frivolous, like a delicious marshmallow? Is it meant to be smooth and dark, like rich hot chocolate? Is it supposed to be astringent and biting, like a tart lemon martini?
Once youâve figured out the feeling and mood, try to reflect that in your pacing, sentence length, and yes, vocabulary choice. How long you linger on scenery or descriptions, how quickly you move from plot point to plot point, how much of the small domestic moments you share, how choppy your prose is, and which words you choose, all these elements come together to create the bookâs tone.Â
Alignment and JuxtapositionÂ
Depending on what sort of tone youâre looking to convey, you can have the character voice and narrative voice work in harmony to paint the picture for the reader, or you can provide deliberate juxtaposition, to make it clear that the narrator’s opinion on the action diverges from the protagonistsâ.
For example:Â
Poetic tone:Â The heather waved grey and sweet in the florid gloaming. âOh, my dearest heart, how I love you,â the poet sighed to me, their eyes on the beautiful landscape that marked our last day together.Â
Cynical tone: A rock stuck into my thigh. âYou know,â he sniffed, eyes glued to the sunrise so he didnât have to look at me. âSeeing as, eh, you know, it being the last time Iâm ever gonna see you, I think I, you knowâŠL-word you.âÂ
What happens if we mix and match them?
Blended: The heather waved grey and sweet, while a rock stuck awkwardly into my thigh. âYou know,â the poet sighed to me, their eyes on the beautiful sunrise that marked our last day together. âSeeing as, eh, you know,, it being the last time Iâm ever gonna see you, I think I, you knowâŠL-word you.âÂ
Play around with voice, tone, and vocabulary choice, to find the narrative voice works best for your book.
Activity:
Pick a favorite children’s story such as The Three Little Pigs, Cinderella or any other folk tale you know well. How would you tell the story so it sounds sweet and light? Can you tell it again so it sounds terrifying? How do your language, your pacing, and your tone change? What happens if you tell the story as if it were the truth? What does changes if you try to tell the same story as if you thought it were funny or sad?
Originally Posted on Storybilder August 10, 2021
If your characters are the lens through which the reader experiences your story, and you the writer are the glassmaker, then vocabulary makes up the grains of sand which create the glass. Likewise, tone is the mold into which you pour your hot glass to set the lens.
Some grains will be hard, rough, imperfect; and, poured into a straight-edged mold, would make a wonderful lens for, say, a gritty detective story. Some will be dark, and smooth, and sharp, combined in a rough mold that produces a lens that is uneven and hard to see through, making it suitable for gothic romance. Some will be filled with glitter, poured into a star-shaped mold, ideal for magic and fantasy.
Your combination of Voice, Vocabulary and Tone create the Narrative Voice that is unique to your work and your book.
What is âVoiceâ?Â
Character Voice â the words, idioms, metaphors, and sentence structures that the characters choose to think and speak. These structures are rooted in your characters’ dialogue and reflect their background, education, and culture.
Narrative Voice – the words, idioms, metaphors, and sentence structures that the narrator chooses. If the narration is relayed in second or third person, the narrative voice might not match the main characterâs dialogue and thought patterns because the narrator’s voice comes from a different person or entity.
What is âVocabulary Choiceâ?Â
The words you select to describe things are often freighted with associations and meanings that can elicit emotions and understanding. Vocabulary also influences tone (which we’ll talk about in the next post) and can be crafted to suit the age range and the genre-savviness of your intended readership.
For example: think about the word âhotâ. This is a general catch-all word that even young readers understand. Depending on your audience’s age range and your chosen genre, you might describe a landscape as âhot, and parched, and cracked, like the palms of the old men who shielded their eyes from the unforgiving sunlight.â Or you might say it was âhot and lush as a greenhouse.â
In the first case, the word “hot” describes something that is hot and dry and worn out. In the second, it refers to a type of hot that helps things to grow. How the word is interpreted depends on context and the other words that surround it.
If I say the weather was arid, Iâm saying it was hot, but also dry and parched, which is pretty specific. If I say itâs humid, then the air is damp and heavy. Deciding to use “hot”, “hot and humid”, or “humid” are all choices you make as a writer; and, depending on how they’re used, your choice tells the reader something about your narrator’s perspective.
Word choice affects more than just the picture you want to paint for the reader; it also tells them what kind of world theyâre in, and whether the narrator is the kind of person who would prefer to use âhotâ when âswelteringâ, âfeveredâ, or âblazingâ may invoke not only a specific meaning, but also a specific feeling. âHotâ is warm, but âsizzlingâ sounds dangerous.
Activity
Think about the last story you read. What sort of words do the characters use? What do those words tell you about their social status, their feelings? Now, think about the narrator. Is one of the characters telling the story? If so, what do their word choices tell you about their perspective? Does their language suggest they enjoy telling the story? Are they sad or afraid? Are they reliable? If the story is told in third person, how does language help you to imagine the landscape, the way the characters feel, or the mood?
Tune in next time for the second part of this topic, where we discuss Tone.
Originally Published on Storybilder July 28, 2021
Now that youâve decided who is going to be telling your reader your story, letâs take a closer look at the technical aspects of how that story is going to be conveyed, and what the impacts of these technical choices may be on a readerâs experience.
Point of View (who is telling your story)Â
Point of View (POV) is the perspective lens through which your reader witnesses and experiences the tale. But the way that lens is constructed is important, too, and worth some conscious and deliberate decision-making. Each POV has different strengths, so consider them carefully.
Scope of View (how much do they know)Â
Tense (how immediate is the experience)Â
Mix in a shakerÂ
You can mix and match POV, tense and scope, and I recommend you play around with different combinations until you find something that clicks, and feels right for your character and story.
Direct the readerâs experience
As much as Iâve been saying that the narrator is the lens through which the reader views a story in this series, donât forget that you, the author, are the glassmaker. The deliberate choices you make in terms of tense and POV will influence the readerâs understanding of your narrative, your characters, and your world.
For example: in my novel The Untold Tale, the narrator character Forsyth is a fictional creation who only later learns that he is not real. I made a deliberate choice to have him narrate the tale in First Person Present Tense Limited. Why? Because I wanted to convey a sense of immediacy to the reader. This narrator is a construct that only exists in the moment on the page, and this choice of âIâ and ânowâ helps to solidify that.
Whether theyâre conscious of it or not, making concerted and deliberate choices about tense and POV will influence your readerâs experience of your tale.
Activity:
Think about the latest book you read or the one you’re reading now. Who is the narrator? Is the story told through a character’s voice or through an omniscient one? Is the story written in present tense or past tense? Does the narrator know what the other characters are thinking, or is it a mystery to them? Now, why do you think the author chose to write the book this way? What would change in the story if any one of these details were different?
Originally Published on Storybilder February 4, 2021
Which of your characters is going to lie to your audience, and why?
Firstly, it’s always important to remember that no baddie ever actually thinks theyâre the baddie. They are always hero of their own tales, so create them to believe that. Take Loki, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. His character arc is a great example of someone going to increasingly more desperate ends to prove himself and be accepted, and at no point does Loki consider himself the Villainâhe is the ignored and bullied little brother, the victim of gaslighting and lies, the wronged rightful heir, the trapped and enslaved minion of Thanos, the desperately hurt and angry child trying to come back to a home that no longer values what he thought it did. We only see Loki as the villain the MCU because the point-of-view (POV) of the films tell us he is.
Why use an Unreliable Narrator?
For one thing, itâs juicy. While itâs hard to pull off right, when it works, it really, really works.
Whether this unreliability is pays off through your readers’ slow, dawning realization that something is off (Fight Club), or a grand reveal at the end of the story (The Sixth Sense), or even a revelation that changes the context of a truth told at the start of the story when nobody took it seriously (American Psycho), there is something satisfying about a really good Unreliable Narrator.
So how do you do it?
Deliberately feeding your readers misinformation, filtered through the POV of your narrator, is the best way to create a believable Unreliable Narrator.
However…
The one thing you cannot do to you reader is lie to them.
You can trick them, sure, by having the narrator lie (or at least, omit the truth). But you, the writer, you cannot lie to the reader. You cannot betray their trust in you as a storyteller with a cheap, thin, weak twist ending that you didnât work to earn all the way through the book. Whatever groundwork you lay for your Unreliable Narrator, it has to be solid. (Imagine if you went back through The Sixth Sense and saw the ghost move a chair!)
In summary
Writing an Unreliable Narrator is really not much different than writing a reliable one. But it can make for a much more powerful reading experience. The only difference is that you had to add a second filter onto the mechanism/character youâre transporting the story through. The first filter is the characterâs hegemonic (their primary or mainly visible) context, as discussed in the first post in this series, Who Is Telling Your Story, and the second is a layer of lies the character understands and relates to the reader, whether consciously, unconsciously, by circumstance, or by omission.
