Pitching a Tone
I'm continuing in my right-side of the brain segment today, discussing tone. Tone is not quite voice, but a part of voice -- definitely (and please note that you'll never look up voice or tone in a dictionary and find something that all authors or editors will agree on, so I'm just using my own terminology. Sue me.).
Chick-lit has a tone. Sarcastic and satirical. Harlequin Presents have a tone. It's not satirical at all, and florid in it's verbiage. Temptations had (sniffle) a tone. I just adjusted the tone on a proposal for Harlequin because my tone didn't have enough of the chick-lit voice that they expected from me. This doesn't mean shoes and designer names. It means sass.
What is your favorite tone to write? I would suggest sitting down and writing a first person account of something silly. Perhaps toilet-training your dog or cat, or how garbage is collected in your area and if recycling truly matters. Use your own experiences and feelings and see what comes out of you. That's probably your native tone, and is probably a good place to start if you're creating a writing career from scratch.
When I write, I hear voices in my head that read the words. Each book has a different reader. In Touched By Fire, I heard Emma Thompson. In Diva's Guide, that was Marisa Tomei from My Cousin Vinny. In my Bach Pact books for Temptation, that was just me. It's always interesting where the voice comes from, because I don't consciously choose one ahead of time, it's just there. These voices represent the chorus of tones inside me, and in my humble opinion, I believe that lots of writers can work different tones, too. Nora Roberts uses one tone for her JD Robb books and another for her romances. You can see the same voice, but they're uniquely different from the other.
Different sub-genres really need different tones, although I've read sassy historical romances and florid contemporaries, so that's not a hard and fast rule. I think it's harder to write outside the standards of the sub-genre, but not impossible.
I've heard 'tone' described as 'style' as well, but I like tone because I literally hear the words, so tone is what makes sense to me.
posted by Kathleen at 12:16 PM
4 Comments:
I do think some authors only have one tone, and I'm wondering if this is because some writers writer auditorally and some write visually. Do you think you write visually? I suspect that visual writers (i.e. "I see a movie in my head") don't vary their tone as much. And this is completely not scientific, just me musing me about writing stuff :)
I think my manuscripts have a sarcastic tone to them. I guess I write visually since I ALWAYS see the movie playing in my head.
And thanks, Kathleen! Now that I've discovered your blog, I have somewhere else to hang out when I desperately need to procrastinate!
Christine,
Always happy to help a fellow writer in need of procrastination :)
Anna, I think one of the reasons I recognize the sound of the voices is because I'm one of those people who tries to figure out who narrates car commercials. I listened to The Plane That Fought Back (excellent job by Discovery Channel) and was going nuts trying to figure out who the narrator was. Finally they flashed him on the credits: Keifer Sutherland. I don't channel the character as much as I channel the voice (which might have been what you were saying).
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