20.49: Using Tone and Mood

Defining Tone and Mood

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2:24This is Writing Excuses. Using Tone and Mood. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wan. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard. And I have brought this topic to the table because it's a class that I taught for my Patreon because I started thinking about what Tone and Mood did and that they are one of the most powerful storytelling tools, but we always talk about structure, our character arc, and things like that. Here is why I think it's important, and then we're going to tell it.

2:55We're going to... I will let other people talk at some point. Yay! So basically, I think plot tells us what happens, structure tells us how it happens, and Tone and Mood shape the emotional experience of the reader. And my example of this, I've got two of them for you, is that Wizard of Oz is structurally a heist. So you have the catalyst, which is the tornado. You have scouting the territory, welcome to Oz. You have gathering the team, meet the scarecrow, ten-man, cowardly lion, and the wizard. You have practice and prep for the heist, which is the merry old Land of Oz song.

3:27You have committed to the heist. The wizard sends them to get the broom. They're forced to alter the plan. There's flying monkeys. Then the plan comes together. The team rescues Dorothy. Bigger thing goes wrong. They get chased by guards and the witch through the castle. They've got apparent total loss where they're caught, and the scarecrow catches on fire. And then the actual win, which is the witch is melted, and we have the true plan revealed, which is that that was the wizard's goal all along. More heist movies need flying monkeys. Right? Wow. But it doesn't feel like a heist because tonally it is a wonder tale

4:01and it's a coming-of-age story. And then Pride and Prejudice, actually secretly a mystery. You've got the crime. Mr. Darcy is an asshole. The investigation. Lizzie investigates and continues to find proof that he's an asshole. Then you have the twist. Wickham runs away with Lydia. And then the breakthrough. Like, what? Mr. Darcy saved Lydia from ruin? And then the conclusion that he's not an asshole and that they're in love. And then you have marriage. So, but again, it's tonally, it's not that.

Narrator View Versus Character View

4:33So my- This connects to elemental genres. Exactly. This gets into elemental genres. But I think that tone and mood are things that we can play with. And so what I want to do is talk about tone in the first half of the episode and mood in the second. And my thinking is that tone is about the narrator's view of the world and that mood is about the character's view of the world. So I am curious what, having just spewed at you,

5:06here's my thinking. I'm very excited about this idea. What do you think about that? And, uh, like, you know, I, I think, I think there's a number of different ways that we, that, the, that we control tone. Um, and so I'm curious what you think now that I've been like, hello, here's a thing. I am one, I'm reluctant to disagree because this is very well thought out and I love it. But two, I think that tone might be, uh, yeah, might, might be the, you know, the, the structure

5:42and, and, and so on and so forth. And mood might be a more readerly thing that comes into the narrative because in the context of, uh, you know, what I bring to sitting down to watch Wizard of Oz, Wizard of Oz doesn't feel like a heist, it feels like a wonder tale, but if I'd never seen, if I didn't have that context, Wizard of Oz might feel like, might feel more like a heist. And so mood might be more related to the conversation.

6:15As you, we talked about this earlier this year, the conversation that your piece is having with other pieces that are similar in the mood that you're shooting for. I see what you're saying. I think the, the question is, if we're thinking about this as being an intentional thing that we can control. Yes. And that's, that's why, that's the other reason I'm reluctant to do this. How would I control that? I don't know. Well, and I think the reason you can, the way you control that is through how the character feels. Like Dorothy, when she walks into Oz, when she steps out into Oz, her reaction to being in

6:48Oz tells us how we should feel about it. Mm-hmm. So that's the mood. That's the mood. And the tone is the high structure of it. No, the tone, the structure is this thing that's happening. The tone is, is, so the tone is the narrator's view of the world. It's the imagery that we use. So it's the, in fiction, it's the word choices. It's the sentence structure. In, in Wizard of Oz, it's, you know, it's the color palette and things like that. I was going to actually say what you would say for mood. And then I have a theoretical analogy. Oh, okay.

7:19So for, for mood, the, the tools that I think that we're using to, to control things are the character's physical responses, their internal reaction, the actions that they take and the things they pay attention to. I see. Okay. So the way that I'm thinking about this, of course, is with karaoke. Um, and so I'm thinking like, so the tone, cause to me, what you're saying is the tone is the way the, it's how the teller tells the tale. And so when you sing a song, like you can decide, like if you, it could be the weirdest song ever.

7:49That's like, who knows, could be the most emo screamo song. And if instead of screaming it, you decide to sing it in a sultry jazz voice, like you, you have changed the tone of the song. The song's trying to do what it's doing, but you have put your foot down and said, this is the way that I'm going to do it. I sing everything as a sultry jazz number and I don't care what it is. And that's the part of the experience that you're going to have. And then the mood to me is more like the crowd. Like the mood is like, I'm telling the tale in this way. And the mood is like looking around and seeing like, is everyone polking? That's going to give a different mood than, you know, no matter what.

8:24So it's like, and then those two things intersect. And one of the things I think is interesting, uh, number one is to say, does that even work for you as an analogy? And number two, then like what happens if the tone and the mood, like, do they always have to line up or do you, or can they be in conflict with each other? Yeah. I have a great example. I think of where they'd average. What's fun about this episode is you brought us this idea and we didn't talk about it much off mic. So this is sort of a little bit of a class situation for us and a little bit of like, let's interrogate the instructor and find out what this means. Well, this is this for me, this is a, let's kick the tires on this.

8:56No, I love it. Um, okay. So Mike Flanagan, who's a horror director made a, uh, adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories called the fall of the house of Usher. Um, the tone of this is this big, dark family drama, horror story of a man being haunted by the deaths of his children that are happening over the course of a week where all of his children die in increasingly horrible or not increasing, they're all equally horrible ways. The tone of this story is told in this like bombastic way, this like big grand family drama.

9:35And then the experience of watching the show is almost horror comedy. It's campy. It's over the top. And I think a lot of people reacted badly to the show because of this, but it's, it's a deeply unserious show with a serious core message. Um, but it's a deeply unserious show as you watch these characters die in increasingly ludicrous ways, you know, in ways that feel very Edgar Allen Poe in terms of being wildly over the top of watching a guy go insane. Cause he thinks there's a cat in the walls, right? Like in it, to me, it was an utterly delightful experience.

10:08We were like howling and cackling through the whole thing, but it, it strikes me that there is a real difference between the tone and the mood where the tone is like reading Edgar Allen Poe poems, like verbatim as narration and with like this somber music behind it. And then you're watching someone run around with a sledgehammer trying to find a cat and it's like fantastic, but there's such a difference between those two experiences in the, I think the dissonance between them led to so much of the, um, space for Flanagan to say the serious

10:42things he wanted to say while also entertaining the hell out of us of watching a bunch of awful, incredibly wealthy people get got in ways that they deserved. Yeah. So to Aaron's point about, can these two, can these things work, uh, work in, in opposition to each other? Can you, can you create a juxtaposition and contrast? Um, yes, I, uh, absolutely. Uh, one of the things that I was thinking about is, uh, that in, uh, this is how you lose a time war, or this is how you lose the time war, the tea shop scene, the, the tone of that

11:15is like, look at how lovely Britain is and how beautiful this is. And the mood of the character is quite different from that. While the character is there to enjoy that, the character is, the, the character is inhabiting it as a, this is quaint. This is, and I'm, I'm also having all of these big feels about this person that, that I'm having these, these battles with it. This is a battleground. That's the mood that's going on. One of my other favorite examples is, uh, Jane Austen. You do not have to read the entire novel, but if you take a look at Northanger Abbey, chapter 21 and

11:4922, and 20, basically, uh, the character arrives and she's in this room and she's like, oh no, this room is so gothic and terrible. And it's really, it's frightening. And there's mysteries in it. And, um, and the author, the, the tone of it is that Jane Austen, the author's voice is gently mocking the character while the character is having genuine feels. And in chapter 22, she wakes up in the morning and discovers that the terrible scratchy thing at the window was actually a beautiful rose

12:22bush. And that the wardrobe that she thought was locked was actually unlocked and that she had locked it. And that that was why it was hard to get open. And so the tone remains quite consistent that, you know, I'm gently mocking you while the character's mood switches. And so it causes you to experience the same room in two very, very different ways. The thought I'm having is that it seems like mood in some ways, in terms of tools and how you work with it, that mood is a more primal. It seems like it's like more of like a lizard brain thing. And by

12:54that, I mean, things are scary. There are certain things like when things feel, when it's just a scary mood plays on things that we are afraid of. It is dark. There is a strange sound. There are a lot of ways to bring different tones because we can do a lot more small control over the way our narrator thinks about it and talks about it. But things like, you know, hitting a wall with sledgehammers looking for a cat. Like if you frame that, well, like there's something that we will just think that's funny because there's something funny in the visual that hits us on that primal level.

13:28And so I'm kind of curious, like how you, thinking for myself, how to set up that kind of like, this is the landscape in some ways. Like mood is the landscape and tone is the person walking through the landscape. And so we can control how they see it and what they say about it, if they make fun of it or whatever. But in some ways, the landscape is still there. And if you want to change the mood, you're making broader changes to the landscape in front of you. That sounds like a great thing for us to talk about when we come back from the break.

Using Tone as a Tool

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17:12masterclass.com slash excuses to see the latest offer. Mileage may vary, but in my home, Masterclass has paid for itself in homemade fried chicken alone. So I love this idea of thinking about it as a landscape. And I think the reason that I have been thinking about mood is that as a thing that is very character-centered is because different people react differently to the same landscapes.

17:44And so the narrator has set for me, it's like, okay, folks, here's your landscape. I'm gonna, maybe I'll set up some fog and some scary lighting, and this is amazing. And the character's like, I love fog and scary lighting. And then another character's like, no, this is much worse. And that, for me, a lot of the, what a character does when we are, we are in tight third person or a first person is that, um, they are my viewpoint into the story. They're my way of imagining how I would feel in that.

18:18And it does activate my lizard brain. So I think that, I think that that's, um, it's an interesting way to think about it. You bring that up. I went through a haunted house once a couple of decades ago, and the mood that I brought with me was, I have heard that they have spent a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of effort, and they've got really good, they got a really good team working on this. And it's being hosted at what used to be, you know, the actual mental hospital, you know, up on

18:51the hillside in Utah. And I was giggling, genuinely joyful, happy the whole time. And, you know, somebody does a thing where they pull down a lever and crush a dummy and something squirted on my face. And I squealed with laughter. And one of the cast members stepped up to me just right in my ears, like, dude, what's wrong with you? Can we hire you? Would you like to work here? Because you're frightening all of us. And so, yeah, for me, the tone and the mood are dependent a lot on what I

19:29bring into that landscape. I'd love to turn at this point to talking a little bit how we can use this as a tool, right? I think understanding, we've gotten to a little point where we kind of understand the terms here. How do you deploy this in your fiction? Or how should we think about this as an act of use? Let me actually use an example from an early, early piece of my own writing. This was one of the pieces that made me understand that tone was something that I should be consciously manipulating. So there's a short story called Cerbo In Vitro Ujo, which was the first horror story that

20:06I sold. And I'm like, this is, I'm not very deep into my career. I have, you know, I don't have novels out at this point. And so I'm going to read you the first paragraph or so, first three sentences-ish. And then I'm going to read you the revision of it after I talked to Ellen Datlow, who gave me some lessons about horror. So behind the steady drone of the garden's humidifiers, Greta caught the whoosh

20:36snick as the airlock door opened. She kept pruning her sunset glory rosebush to give Kai a chance to sneak up on her. He barreled around the Milholland's prize emperor artichoke without a hint of stealth. Something was wrong. Greta's breath quickened to match his. Kai's dark skin seemed covered by a layer of ash. So the thing that Ellen said when she read that was that there was nothing visceral about it. There was nothing about the language, the tone of my language. Right now I'm setting up something that could just be, you know, a meet cute kind of thing. He could be about like, oh my goodness,

21:13I'm about to propose marriage. Like anything could be happening right now. So when I revised it, all of the actions are exactly the same, but I've switched my language. Greta snipped a diseased branch off her sunset glory rosebush like she was a body harvester looking for the perfect part. So you can see it like, I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of it, but you can see immediately that the tone switch that that makes. So for me, when I'm thinking about tone, I'm, I'm thinking about the imagery that I use. And that was one of the things that Ellen said was that I needed

21:47that there needed to be something diseased or something like why, why was there a perfect rosebush? So imagery, the word choices, like body harvester, choosing that sentence structures, whether you're doing something that's flowing and languid or, or like choppy and breathy. And I think that's where,

Matching and Juxtaposition

22:06to my original attempt to argue with you, I think that's where we have control over what the reader brings, what the reader brings to the experience. Because when you say body harvester, uh, that's, that's the sort of phrase that is going to resonate with people, whether or not they have experience in sci-fi or horror, uh, diseased branch, diseased, you know, these are things that carry

22:41imagery and which, yeah, they, you, you are controlling the mood really well. What I'm going to point out is that my character does not know that she's in a horror story. And that's why I think mood is a separate thing. Yes. So if mood is the landscape, as Aaron sort of described, I'm seeing tone as the score, like the movie score that's running underneath it, right? Like you have a scene of a character, of a group of characters laughing with, you know, upbeat music behind it. You were in a comedy, you put a discordant, you know, ambient sound underneath it. It's a horror movie now, right? Um, Howard showed

23:15me a YouTube video the other day of, uh, the trailer for Mad Max remix to the Yakety Sax song. And, uh, it changed the tone, let's say, you know, while the mood of the characters remains the same because the landscape is the same. This is not important to writing, but this is why I have always wanted, if I were going to have a superpower for it to be, to be able to hear the orchestration of my own life so that I would know when to be afraid, when to be happy, when I'm like meeting a romance, because it would come through and let me know that like, while I might be in this place,

23:46something completely different is happening altogether. You know what, Aaron, I think you're empowered to choose the music that is behind your own life. Deep. I love it. Yeah. But I would say the other thing that's not to do with my own life is I think we, a lot of times play around with this, with contrast. I asked the question about the contrast and the example that I thought of was like your old school law and order episodes where like someone has been killed in some horrible way. And then Lenny Briscoe's like, guess he's not making it home for dinner.

24:15Like brings like it's cuts. Cause you're like, Oh no. Like, and it is a, you know, but it, it brings you to like, this is a show that's about procedure and we're kind of having a fun time. It's not a, it's not a horror. Law and order is not a horror show though. That would be interesting. And it, and it teaches you a little bit, but also it makes you laugh because the mood sets up one expectation and the tone comes and contrasts it. And contrast I've learned from Howard is one of the tools I think that you can use to make humor happen. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And that's,

24:46it's also one of the things that you can use to make tension happen too, which we've been talking about in a lot of other places that the placing two things in, in contrast to each other. It's why you, you so often see the, hello, it's a giant battle scene with scores like this, you know, like the classic one is it's what a wonderful world in good morning, Vietnam. And, and that's, that's a, a thing that I think is fun to play with on a conscious level. I think a lot of us do it

25:19unconsciously, but I think it is as important to think about as plot. Yeah. The tools that I find myself using, um, are white space and sentence length, where, when I want to make a shift and I think about that in terms of it, Aaron, as you, as you suggested, you know, the score, because the song of the, the music of the poetry of the prose on the page is so dependent on where the breaths land that by adding white space, by shortening sentences,

25:54I can change the breath of what's happening and govern the mood in the same way that an orchestral score might. Yeah. And so I think when you're looking at it, that you kind of have two choices that you can, I, when you're combining tone and mood, that you can either have the match or you can have them in juxtaposition. And when they match the, you, you get what Edgar Allen Poe calls unity of effect, where you are reinforcing and underlining, this is, I think things are real bad or things are really

26:25good. And in juxtaposition, when they don't match that, you can create tension by the contrast between the narration and the character. Like if the narration is like, oh, this bad stuff is going down and the character's like, I love this place. You're like, no, things are good. You know, it creates that anticipation. It's funny that you mentioned that because the fall of the House of Usher show I was talking about, there's one moment towards the end when the tone and the mood match. And it is a devastating, brutal beat in a show that has been mostly about yucks up until that point where

26:55he just kicks you in the heart. And it's when those align, it's like, that's the trick he pulls is suddenly aligns. And then we kind of slip out of that again for the finale, but it's, it's interesting to point that out. I'm like, oh, that is a good trick to pull.

Writing Homework

27:09Yeah. Yeah. So I have some homework for you. Your homework is that I just want you to take a mystery structure. And a mystery structure is five parts. You have a crime, an investigation, a twist, a breakthrough, and then the conclusion. I want you to take that structure and I want you to write something that is not obviously a mystery. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

27:42Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dongwon Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.

28:07Thank you.