Creating an Ironic Tone in Your Fiction

Guest Post by Jack Smith

Let’s say you want to create an ironic tone in a story or novel—it’s just needed.

First off, what is tone?  On the one hand, we might say that it’s the apparent attitude of the narrator toward the characters and the world they people.  But it should also be said that everything in a fictional work relates in some way to the tone.  If every character in your story drives crazily and exceeds the speed limit, this will certainly affect the tone.  If all the clocks are off twenty minutes, this will too.

To create the right tone, you need to think about character actions, dialogue, and setting.  All of these will affect the tone of your story or novel.   But you also need to attend to matters of style. 

Being something of an iconoclast, I tend to go for irony.   An ironic tone is, of course, the right tone for satire—which is my usual medium.

And so when I’m thinking about creating an ironic tone in my work, I find myself—and this tends to happen as I write—depending on the following useful tools:

1. Diction—words that create a witty, humorous tone

2. Irony and Paradox—both deal with contradiction, the first with the gap between what you expect and what you get; the second with apparent contradiction.

3. Juxtaposition – placing two quite different things or details next to each other.  One thing is read against the other.

4. Character actions—the kind that are out of kilter with the normal, the expected

5. Plot—the outcome being at odds with the conventionally expected one

6. Dialogue—mine sometimes tends to the extreme—on the one hand, short, clipped speech; on the other, speech that’s excessive, long-winded, over the top.

Of course, it’s not like you can work from a list like this to get it all right.  It depends on the story needs. If you want to burlesque your protagonist, you will probably use dramatic irony.  If your character is an I-narrator, you will end up, most probably, with an unreliable narrator if you engage in very much dramatic irony—and with an unsympathetic character if your irony is too vicious.

Maybe you want to take a whack at a given social practice.  If you settle for a straight, serious tone, you may well come off as preachy. If you use irony, you will be much less likely to do so if you handle the irony well.

How do you handle the irony well?  Everything must work together as a piece: the style, the character, the plot, the ideas the work suggests.  Every technique in the story must achieve the level of irony that seems called for—without overdoing it.

Jack Smith is author of the novel Hog to Hog, which won the George Garrett Fiction Prize (Texas Review Press. 2008), and is also the author of Write and Revise for Publication: A 6-Month Plan for Crafting an Exceptional Novel and Other Works of Fiction, published earlier this year by Writer’s Digest

Over the years, Smith’s short stories have appeared in North American Review, Night Train, Texas Review, and Southern Review, to name a few. He has also written some 20 articles for Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, as well as a dozen or so pieces for The Writer.

He has published reviews in numerous literary journals, including Ploughshares, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, American Review, Mid-American Review, and the Iowa Review.

Smith taught full-time at North Central Missouri College for some 24 years, and  has also served as Fiction Editor for The Green Hills Literary Lantern, an online literary journal published by Truman State University, for over two decades. Learn more about Jack and his work in the November 1 edition of PIF magazine.