How To Decide The Voice And Tone Of Your Novel

by Kristina Adams, @KristinaAuthor 

The voice and tone of your novel will affect who connects with your characters and what genre it fits into. It can even be the difference between someone finishing your book an avid fan or putting it down after the first page.

Yes, it really is that important.

Tone is the overall mood of your novel. The voice, meanwhile, is how you and your characters communicate with your reader. It’s how you get across the personality of your characters, as well as draw in your target audience from the first words on the page.

If your book is written in third person, you can channel a little bit of yourself into your narration. If it’s written in first, your character(s) should speak through you.

When it comes to dialogue, the voice will vary from character to character. It’s the main way we show their different personalities. Your reader should be able to tell who’s saying what even without dialogue tags.

Here are some of the factors you need to consider when deciding on the voice and tone of your novel:

Setting

Listen to how your parents and grandparents speak. There will be small differences in the words and the phrases that they use. That’s because each generation has its own subtly different ways of speaking. It’s most obvious when you watch old films.

The country your book is set in will also affect how your characters speak. Even countries that have English as their main language differ in their uses of it. It isn’t just the spelling, either. There are some phrases that differ, too. For example, a Brit would say that a sick person looks like ‘death warmed up’, while an American would say that they look like ‘death warmed over’. As a Brit, this phrase doesn’t make sense to me, but it isn’t up to me to inflict my way of speaking on my American characters.

Narrator

This is the most important factor you need to consider. Your characters’ age, gender, upbringing, mental or physical health issues, and even if they’re reliable or unreliable will affect how they communicate with your reader and the other characters.

Other factors such as who is most influential to them can affect this. For instance, a young person raised by their grandparents might imitate their grandparents’ speaking patterns, demonstrating how close they are. Someone trying to differentiate themselves from the older crowd will be more likely to use modern slang.

Genre

Each genre comes with its own set of reader expectations. ‘But I’m an artist. I want to do my own thing,’ you say. I hear you. And that’s great. But if you want to be able to sell and market your work, you need to give them at least a little of what they expect.

For example, a book that’s all about tracking down a serial killer will have a very different voice and tone to a romance novel.

The crime novel will be much darker, even if it has a romance subplot. The focus will be on moving the action forward. Characters’ thoughts and feelings will be addressed, but they’ll be secondary to the story.

The romance, on the other hand, will be much lighter in tone with a focus on the characters’ thoughts and emotions.

Ways to Express Voice and Tone

Once you’ve decided on the voice and tone for your novel, there are lots of things you can do to express it.

Words

The first – and most obvious – way to express voice and tone is with the words that you and your characters use.

For example, someone who says ‘seldom’ instead of ‘occasionally’, is likely to be either of an older generation, a word nerd, or someone younger but a little old-fashioned, since it’s a word that is seldom (ahem) used in the twenty-first century.

Idioms and Cliches

While traditional writing advice tells you to avoid these, we use them in everyday speech, so why shouldn’t we use them when imitating everyday speech?

Don’t get too carried away, of course – you want to exercise your writing muscles and show your readers that you’re an amazing writer, after all. Use them when you really can’t think of anything else, or when it’s a character trait, such as the kindly grandma that always speaks in clichés.

Readers do have a tendency to not fully process the image created by a cliche, so I’ll say it one last time: use them sparingly.

Sentence Length

Different sentence lengths not only make your piece easier and more interesting to read, but can also say a lot about your character.

Someone who speaks in monosyllables is uncommunicative and keeps people at arm’s length. Someone who speaks in long, rambling sentences is likely nervous about something. Likewise short, snappy sentences can show anxiety and breathlessness.

These can be used to build tension in your story, too. They also work well in dialogue – they can tell the narrator a lot about the character they’re interacting with.

Punctuation (or lack of it)

When one of my characters was causing a scene on live TV, I removed the majority of the commas to make her sentences long and rambling.

This reflected the incoherence in the way that she was speaking; the reader could see that her speech was unnatural without having to watch it on TV as the characters did.

Conclusion

Each of the things we’ve explored are fairly small when you look at them individually. But they all add up to influence the voice and tone of your novel, and how your character(s) come across to your readers.

If you already have a good grasp of the kind of person your character is, it will make it easier for you to decide how they speak. You may even find that because you know them so well, their voice comes to you easily. Don’t worry if this isn’t the case, though. Dig deeper into your main character’s goal and central flaw. These will dictate almost everything else your character says and does within your story, so are the perfect places to go back to if the voice and tone aren’t working.

Character interviews work great if you get stuck, too. You might be surprised at what you discover!

Kristina Adams is an author, blogger, and reformed caffeine addict. She’s written five novels poking fun at celebrity culture, one nonfiction book on productivity for writers, and too many blog posts to count. She shares advice for writers over on her blog, The Writer’s Cookbook. Preorder her upcoming release Behind the Spotlight here.

Quick note from Elizabeth: I’ll see you back on Sunday for Twitterific…I’m taking a short blog break on Friday. Enjoy your week! 

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