How you frame your story powerfully influences the reader’s experience of it. As a writer, you need to know exactly how that framing works and what tools you can use to create a narrative voice that serves your story well. In this series, I go over four key tools for creating a compelling narrative voice: perspective, tone, person, and tense. This second post in the series is all about one of the most subtle aspects of your writing voice: tone and the related aspects of mood and voice.

Let’s start with establishing what those three seemingly vague terms actually mean.

Some Definitions

Tone: Tone is the style and attitude that the narrator or point of view character brings to the story. For example, is the narrator witty and playful, dry and sarcastic, or neutral and objective? Tone, for the most part, should stay largely consistent in a story with a single narrator.

Mood: Mood is the emotional resonance that permeates the story. Your mood could be cold, warm, melancholic, ominous, cutting, playful, or sultry. The mood might shift somewhat throughout the story to match the tenor of events, be they tragic, happy, or bittersweet.

Voice: Voice is all about how the narrator’s personality, worldview, and identity influence the way that they talk. Voice is the communication style and language that the narrator uses. Is their communication style curt, meandering, or technical? Do they tend to use big words or small words, jargon or slang? All these attributes reflect the personality, identity, and worldview of the speaker. A narrator’s voice will usually be internally consistent unless there are multiple perspective characters who narrate their scenes in their own voice.

As you can see from these definitions, these three aspects are heavily influenced by who is telling the story. That’s why you should settle on your perspective characters and narrator before you start ironing out the novel’s unique tone, mood, and voice.

It’s easiest to see how tone, mood, and voice affect stories with some practical examples.

Seeing Tone, Mood & Voice at Work

An Example from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Analyzing His Tone, Mood & Voice

Charles Dickens’ books are simply dripping with wit, sarcasm, and playful manipulation of the English language. And this tone also reflects the faceless narrator’s voice, which is quite distinct from the protagonist Scrooge’s own voice. Scrooge’s tone and voice would be cold and dry and economical. The narrator’s playful voice ends up starkly contrasting with Scrooge himself and gives the story a warm mood and tone even though the protagonist is anything but.

Having a warm and playful narrative tone allows the story’s mood to match that of warm Christmas cheer even before Scrooge embraces Christmas cheer himself. This jovial tone also contrasts with Scrooge’s cold nature, which highlights just how stark and bitter he is. In this case, having a narrative voice and tone that is distinct from the protagonist’s own voice helps to build a mood that serves the story incredibly well.

Compare Charles Dickens’s style in A Christmas Carol to Patrick Rothfuss’s style in The Name of the Wind.

An Example from Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music . . . but no, of course there was no music. In fact, there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

Analyzing His Tone, Mood & Voice

The Name of the Wind’s tone is quite different than A Christmas Carol’s. Whereas Charles Dickens’s tone is witty and sarcastic, Patrick Rothfuss’s tone is sombre, pensive, and meditative. This tone reflects the protagonist’s own personality, which is perceptive and insightful, as well as his current mental state, which is melancholic and resigned.

That being said, this passage is still being told from a faceless third-person narrator rather than from the protagonist’s own direct voice. Sometimes the narrator’s voice will borrow from the perspective protagonist’s tone, mood, and voice, making the lines between the third person narrator and the protagonist blur. Depending on the story, this harmony between the narrator’s voice and the protagonist’s can also serve the story quite well.

Now let’s add a third voice to the mix.

An Example from Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education

I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life. I hadn’t really cared much about him before then one way or another, but I had limits. It would’ve been all right if he’d saved my life some really extraordinary number of times, ten or thirteen or so—­thirteen is a number with distinction. Orion Lake, my personal bodyguard; I could have lived with that. But we’d been in the Scholomance almost three years by then, and he hadn’t shown any previous inclination to single me out for special treatment.

Selfish of me, you’ll say, to be contemplating with murderous intent the hero responsible for the continued survival of a quarter of our class. Well, too bad for the losers who couldn’t stay afloat without his help. We’re not meant to all survive, anyway. The school has to be fed somehow.

Ah, but what about me, you ask, since I’d needed him to save me? Twice, even? And that’s exactly why he had to go. He set off the explosion in the alchemy lab last year, fighting that chimaera. I had to dig myself out of the rubble while he ran around in circles whacking at its fire-­breathing tail. And that soul-­eater hadn’t been in my room for five seconds before he came through the door: he must have been right on its heels, probably chasing it down the hall. The thing had only swerved in here looking to escape.

But who’s going to let me explain any of that? The chimaera might not have stuck to me, there were more than thirty kids in the lab that day, but a dramatic rescue in my bedchamber is on another level. As far as the rest of the school is concerned, I’ve just fallen into the general mass of hapless warts that Orion Lake has saved in the course of his brilliant progress, and that was intolerable.

Analyzing Her Tone, Mood & Voice

And now we have another utterly different tone, voice, and mood. We finally have a protagonist directly narrating her own story, so there’s no need to discuss any differences between the narrator’s voice and the protagonist’s voice. They’re one and the same.

This protagonist’s voice is sharp and witty, sort of like Charles Dickens’s narrator. She’s also perceptive, sort of like Patrick Rothfuss’s. But the protagonist’s tone, mood, and voice still come across as completely different. She’s witty, sharp, and sarcastic like a modern teenager, not like a stuffy old man from the nineteenth century. She’s also perceptive in a bitter and aggressive way, not in a sombre and meditative way. All that nuance of personality is there, both in what she says and how she says it.

All three of these stories’ tones and narrative voices are both riveting and unique. The first conjures the tone of highbrow humour. The second, a tone of sombre contemplation. And the third, the tone of a sassy and bitter teenager. When it comes to narrative tone, the possibilities are endless.

You can use your perspective character as a starting point for creating your own unique voice. Ask yourself, how would your perspective character speak? How is their voice different from your own? How is it different than other characters in the story? But ultimately, what kind of voice, tone, and mood would best serve the story you want to tell?

Some Specific Tools

So far, I’ve been speaking in quite abstract terms. What about some specific tools? Here are a few of the top tools you can use to craft a unique and compelling tone, mood, and voice.

Vocabulary

What style of language does your narrator use? A modern teenager’s slang? The vernacular of a highly educated professor? The plain language of the average speaker?

Sentence Structure

Go back to the above examples and compare how each narrator constructed their sentences. Are they long or short? Front heavy or back heavy? Rhythmic or plain? Repetitive or varied? How do these different structures affect the tone and mood of the scene? What style of sentence structure would best serve your desired tone, mood, and voice?

Focus

What kind of details does the narrator focus on? What elements of the scene and story does the narrator or perspective character find the most important to share and emphasize?

A psychiatrist might be hyper-focused on facial expressions, particularly noticing when a person’s body language conflicts with the words that they are saying.

On the other hand, a child might view every object around them through vivid imagination, seeing animals in clouds and imagining how the fork at the dinner table might try to rescue the captured spoon from the vicious and domineering knife. But when child’s attention is brought to the adults in the room, the narrator might notice and be baffled by every absurdity of adult behavior. How does the narrator’s focus and the details that they pick up on and contemplate convey the narrator’s own personality, identity, and worldview?

Figurative Language

What kind of figurative language does the narrator use? Does the narrator use descriptive language that tends to be plain or flowery, literal or metaphoric?

Rhetorical Techniques

What kind of rhetorical techniques does the narrator use? Sarcasm, alliteration, polyptoton, polysyndeton, asyndeton, hyperbole, overstatement, understatement, personification . . . the list of potential rhetorical techniques that you can use is as long as it is obscure. This is the part where you may need to do some deep studying to fully know how to effectively wield the plethora of rhetorical tools at your disposal.

Some Additional Resources

It will take time and practice to learn how to use these specific language tools to create an effective and engaging narrative voice that compliments and elevates your desired tone and mood. If you’re wondering where to start in this learning and skill‑developing endeavor, I recommend that you first read The Elements of Eloquence: The Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase by Mark Forsyth and then work through the exercises in Steering the Craft: Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula Le Guin. The Elements of Eloquence will teach you all about the rhetorical devices you can use to make your prose sound good. Steering the Craft is all about how to practice and hone your fiction-prose craft specifically. It’s a short book with great examples and lots of exercises that you can use to sharpen your skills.