Episode 214: Word Choice and Story Tone

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This week on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re talking about word choice and creating a overarching tone in our a given project.

At the top of the episode, we describe tone as both “the general character or attitude of a place, piece of writing, situation, etc” and “the musical quality of something - the timbre, color, resonance, and ring.”

In this episode, we work to break tone apart from voice. Describing it as the clothes that your story wears that makes it distinctive from your other writing.

We dig into the some of the main factors that contribute to tone in writing. Things like:

  • Word Choice

  • Setting

  • Sentence Structure and Length

  • Description Level

  • Metaphors and Similes Used

  • Rhythym

  • Sounds of the Words - Sharpe or Soft

Towards the end of our conversation, we discuss some methods for helping to identify and work towards keeping your tone how you want it to be. Creating things like: a project specific word list, an aesthetic board, a list of words/metaphors/visuals that help you key in to the feel of your project, a pinterest board, and list of 3 - 5 tone-specific words that describe the intention of what feel you’re going for.

But we also remind ourselves that sometimes it’s hard to hold all of the things we’re trying to create in our hands at once when we’re drafting, and we can always edit for tone in future drafts.

We hope you enjoy this episode! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

We referenced several articles for this conversation. Here they are:

Music from:https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Bethany Stedman