Consistency of Tone

Office Hours

Q.

Dear George,

First of all, you have my heartfelt thanks for Story Club. It's a beautiful project and has brought together such a wonderful community. 

I'm writing to ask for advice on a particular issue in short story writing: inconsistency in tone.

I haven't seen this in the longer manuscripts I've written, but one of my short stories has this problem. It starts with a certain style in the opening, which then seems to fall by the wayside later on. Whereas the introduction is a bit experimental, metaphorical and surreal, the narration changes, i.e., gets more naturalistic, in service to what's going on in the story. 

What specifically made the tone change is that the characters have their own voices, so I instinctively neutralized my own voice, me, the narrator, so that theirs’ could lead the way, so to speak. 

I want to bridge the tones more effectively. The last thing one wants is a shift in tone so big that it breaks the story's 'identity' and creates a confusing experience for the reader. It's the first time I've written to this length for a short story, 10k, and this might also have something to do with it.

My question then is how to maintain a personal voice within a narrative style that is consistent, yet flexible and can modulate for changing moods or character arcs. I know that diction and syntax are subtle things and learning to control them is the work of a lifetime. 

Can you talk about tone sometime? I would love to hear how you've approached this yourself.

Thank you so much for your time. 

A.

So, I wrote to the questioner for more details on the story which, as it turns out, is a first-person story that begins with, in her description of it, a “three-page introduction (that) was a giant burst of energy and attitude, and somehow…set up a kind of language that was clashing with what the character was experiencing, so it's now only half a page long. The narrator speaks more naturalistically as the story progresses. This is what I was perceiving as a tonal disconnect and the reason I edited all that out. I think it worked, not completely sure. It's a real brain-wrecker, this story.” 

She also added that she liked the movie Poor Things in this context – the way that “the action and the dialogue are consistently weird in the same way.”

I’m going to confine the first part of this discussion, then, to first-person narration.  I’m also going to use “tone” and “voice” interchangeably in this context.

So, yes: I think we all understand that a certain consistency in voice is a good thing.  Otherwise, the effect can just be “clever person, typing.” We look to the voice of a story to tell us something about the story - its intention, its worldview and, in a first-person story, of course, something about who it is that’s talking to us. A too-wild or veering voice doesn’t give us a clear and evolving idea of the person on the other end.

And yet, I often find the tone/voice of one of my first-person stories shifting mid-project. 

If I like the resulting prose, I just try (gently) to ask the story why it wants to change in that way.  That is: I assume there’s a reason for the change, then start letting my mind search around for it.

In this model, a changing tone is really about the narrator changing, in response to the events of the story.  And, of course, the changing narrator (as reflected in the changed tone) will then behave differently and thereby affect the plot of the story.

It’s O.K. for voice to change in this way.  A person (or a character), in my view, is not well-represented by a single, static voice.  We think differently when in love, when under duress, when drunk, when lulled into complacency, etc. And part of our toolbox, as writers, is to be able to show these variations in a single person – and maybe that whole assemblage is “a character.”

In a sense, if we find ourselves striving too hard to write in a consistent voice, that might be another way of saying that we’re working hard to resist the changes the voice wants to make in itself, in order to teach us something new about our character. 

Trying too hard to keep the voice consistent, then, is equal to trying to control the voice, i.e., keep the voice static, which is equal (sometimes, possibly) to resisting escalatory urges from within the voice. 

We might even say that, once we’ve established a voice, we have a certain responsibility to let it change (let it evolve and develop).  We want it to change.  This can be part of that much-sought feeling of escalation we’re always talking about. 

The voice of a piece is one of the things we get to vary, and that variance is going to potentially feel like meaning.

Actually, if you write a few lines, and like them, and then start trying to duplicate that tone - you’ve already fallen out of relation with your story (you’ve gone on a form of AutoPilot).

I always feel like the job is to write in the spirit of those first lines while, at the same time, striving to “grow out” the voice - push out its borders, in a sense…

An example from my work would be the story, “Jon,” which is told in this sort of crazed corporate-surfer voice – but that voice does, subtly, change across the story, I’d say – it (he) becomes more passionate, as things in his life become more urgent, and his voice – while never “correct” – does become more articulate, in the sense that he is trying harder,  as the stakes go up to get at the truth of things.  His diction changes, his rhythms change – all of it, I hope, reflecting that he is growing as a person.

This was not, at the outset, intended but, as I worked on the story for that two years or so, the voice evolved.  In a sense, when I got to page eleven, I was responding to the voice I had made in the first ten pages.  I needed to always be “escalating” his voice (i.e., not repeating the same tricks or jokes) – which meant that, not only could the voice change, it had better change.

Other times – to complicate things – while writing in first-person I’ll noticed a voice that I can’t reconcile, or don’t feel like reconciling, with the rest of the story.  To make it part of the current story would feel like forcing it, like going “a bridge too far” and so I’ll pop that bit out and let it go colonize a blank page.  Some swaths of voice like that better and they’ll (while sitting over there, as if in a timeout) that swath will start plotting out a whole new story of its own.

Now, let me try to talk a little about voice/tone in a piece of indirect-third writing.

In this sort of story, it seems appropriate that the narrating voice would change, as different characters step forward to speak.  I like to work in a specific sub-mode of indirect third that I think of as “third-person ventriloquist,” in which I’m trying, as much as possible, to be very much in the voice of the character I’m following around – using their diction and syntax and even making the kinds of errors they might make.

And some of my short stories have two, even three, different narrators.    

When I’m writing a story like this, I just try to let the reader know that this is what I’m doing: I’m deliberately moving into another head (and then another, and maybe even another).  The way I do this is to give the reader a few lines of “objective” narration (“Ted moved into the living room.  The all-yellow living room”) and then segue into Ted’s head and, therefore, voice: “Yellow, indeed.  Holy crap.  Jasmine really loved yellow, he guessed.  He was more of a Red guy.  Yessir: red for him, straight down the damn line.” 

So, we understand that this is Ted’s diction and syntax and viewpoint (i.e., not the omniscient (mostly invisible) narrator’s). 

Then, when it’s time to move into (say) Jasmine’s head, same move: a line or two of objective, transitional, narrator-speak (“Jasmine, making for the kitchen, saw Ted, that odd guy from work, moving into the living room”) and then we let Jasmine’s voice take over (“That Ted.  Pretty nosy guy.  Twice she’d found him standing in her office.  That did not do it for her.  Now this? Time for action.”)

In other words, we are 1) very aware, ourselves, of where these switches are meant to take place and 2) are using little swaths of reader-reassuring objective narration to help in handing off the baton, so to speak.

In this model, there isn’t any real striving for “consistency,” as such, since different characters are stepping up to the microphone, and are allowed as many excesses and idiosyncrasies as the reader will tolerate.

In a story like this, though, there is a need for what we might call a consistent worldview – we’re trying to make it so it’s not too much of a stretch for the reader to imagine all of these people walking around in the same universe. 

That’s a whole other, and sort of difficult topic, that I’ll try to take up another time.

It’s hard to write about these things. Mainly, because so much of “maintaining a voice” is done by the seat of the pants, at-speed, because it lights us up, and so on.

But I feel that discussing these things, albeit incompletely and vaguely, can sometimes have the happy effect of spurring growth.

At least I hope so.

So, what do you think, Story Club?  How do you think about consistency of tone, if, in fact, you do?