Writing a Novel, Part Seven: The Zone of the Tone

Tone, more popularly known as style, is one of the harder things to teach, according to conventional wisdom.  It’s one thing to tell students to have plots with a beginnings, middles, and ends, to have snappy dialogue with clear attribution, to have a core idea for a story, but an author can have all three checkmarks without really being interesting.  What’s the deal?

A middle school teacher of mine put the dynamic quite well.  In books, the tired old metaphor is true—it’s the journey, not the destination.  But don’t mistake good style with flowing literary writing.  Flowing literary is only one kind of tone, and not all flowing literary is good.  A rule of thumb is this:

Be interesting.  Be always interesting, every sentence, every word, every scene.

Some people think that the key to novel writing is length.  While verbosity might intimidate some people (there’s a whole literature on the fine art of using big words to bluff knowledgeability in scholarly writing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair]) it’s the wrong way to go if you want to be a good novelist.  Why?  Consider the following:

George dismounted from his simpering, whinnying equestrian animal and took careful padded steps towards the great beast, a fine example of the genus Draco, speaking in a nuanced cant as he sauntered ever closer: “You must not, I say, bother this fine village again, because if you do, my dear creature, you will find that the pointy end of my spear will pierce your left dragon eye, cutting off your depth perception and rendering you unable to hunt even the smallest, most youngling waterfowl in all of the Five Duchies.”

Or,

George dismounted towards the dragon, speaking in a cant: “You must not bother this fine village again, because if you do, my spear will pierce your left eye, cutting your depth perception and rendering you unable to hunt even the smallest waterfowl in all the Five Duchies.”

To step into the dangerous world of assessing one’s own writing, the problem with the first sentence is not in the individual phrases (even ‘equestrian animal’ could have uses towards comedy or characterization) but rather in all the redundancy.

Don’t be redundant.  If you have a good turn of phrase, use it to advance plot, setting, or characterization.  Otherwise it’s just getting in the way.

Next time—Setting the table, kingdom, empire, or whatever the place may be.