Style, Tone and Mood.
I sat listening to two people exploring the differences between ‘Style’, ‘Tone’ and ‘Mood’. They asked me my opinion, feeling they were losing me.
I emptied the last of the wine into my glass, ‘Like they say in Thailand, “Same, same but different.” . . .’ Then I took out my smart phone to check for messages.
I could have searched the internet for what each word meant, but didn’t bother. To my mind, ‘Style’ is the way you write. ‘Tone’ and ‘Mood’ are elements of ‘Style’. That’s it. ‘Tone’ focuses more on the form, ‘Mood’ on the emotion. Rather like choosing between, ‘I think . . .’ and ‘I feel . . .’ to voice your opinion about something. Maybe I have over simplified and missed out on crucial elements. In which case, let me know.
For me, the most important thing is just to write. Get it down. Don’t stop the flow by analysing. Once the words tumble onto the page, you can then scrutinise for meta-language, but until that point there’s nothing there and the subject truly is academic.
Still, for what it’s worth . . . these days we are expected to analyse our own writing style and genre for pitch letter, synopsis and marketing clout, so let’s delve deeper.
I like Your Style . . .
Perhaps it is never easy to see ourselves the way others do, but step back, what clothes do you wear? What tattoos do you have? Do you wear your collar up? What about your hair? The way you dress, talk, eat, and even sit, sends a signal, a beat. Clues are picked up about a writer in a similar way, look at their choice of words, arrangement of paragraphs and sentences and so on. But when we are writing, such knowledge doesn’t have to restrict us. Different characters can co-exist within a given style. In fact, when we create characters we experiment within the parameters of the style or choose to have a character live outside of those boundaries for dramatic emphasis.
Sometimes, the narrator has a certain voice, the main character another and the writer, though you may not know it, does not identify with either.
Can You Learn Anything?
It can be useful to look at a writer you admire and dissect the written page to see the various elements that contribute to the overall style of the piece.
Style is also an embodiment of the times in which we live and the genre in which we write. Compare us to the Victorians of the nineteenth century. In the 21st Century we have text messages and fragments of sentences written in shorthand, the quicker the better: ‘c u l8r’, ‘a mai bad’ . . . etc. For the Victorians, giving and sending messages had a lot more ritual attached, communication was neither immediate nor rushed especially when the aim was to entertain and they didn’t even have television, let alone the internet.
Work out your own style.
Take two chunks of your writing, for example two dialogues of different characters. Set up four columns headed: Diction, Sentence Structure, Tone and Organisation. Each choice reveals something important about the story. It should shed light on some patterns of your writing style and also highlight the credibility of different characters that you’ve created as well as the register used.
Clearly, an overriding feature of style is the way it conforms to genre and epoch.
Times Change.
Look at these examples from Victorian novels:
‘Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina. I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly.’
—George Eliot in Middlemarch (1873)
‘And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce, but occasionally step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand; if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader’s sleeve; if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of.’
—William Makepeace Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1847–1848)
In contrast, a century later Anton Chekhov said that a writer should not judge the characters but should be their “impartial witness.” This belief is still popular today, along with getting close and personal – witnessing a character’s unspoken thoughts through the character herself rather than through the narrator.
STYLE
In general, ‘Style’ refers to the individual traits or characteristics of a piece of writing. It is the label we use to identify and classify. It gives the piece its voice and once identified it can be copied. (Like we sometimes do, wittingly or otherwise, when we imitate, say, a Scottish or cockney accent.) In a piece of writing we mimic, unconsciously or consciously, literary tics, embellishments and syntax. For that reason some people in the throes of a work in progress prefer not to read other writers lest they lose their own voice.
A distinctive style marks the work of a skilled writer: we can tell his or her work from that of anyone else’s. From one story to another, however, the writer may vary his or her style; and in some stories, style may be altered consciously to dramatic effect as the story goes along.
TONE
When the narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness comes upon an African outpost littered with abandoned machines he notices “a boiler wallowing in the grass,” his use of ‘wallowing’ evokes images of hippos or rhinos juxtaposed with things no longer wanted. It connects the inanimate to the animate and infers abandonment of Nature.
Whatever leads us to deduce the author’s attitude is commonly called tone. Like a tone of voice, the tone of a story may communicate a wide array of emotions: amusement, anger, affection, sorrow, contempt. To understand the tone of a story, then, is to understand some attitude more fundamental to the story than whatever attitude the characters explicitly declare. It is to understand the subtext.
Maybe there is use in analysing these words after all.
Tracy Thomson
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