ALL WRITE NOW EPISODE #17

Find Your Voice/Master Your Tone

Welcome to this week’s episode of ALL WRITE NOW. Today, I am thrilled to share the stage with the masterful writer and teacher, Jeannine Ouellette, who rocks the page with metaphor and always seems to have the perfect word at her fingertips. Jeannine has worlds of wisdom about the use of voice and tone which both play an influential role in determining a reader’s response. How do we access our voice when writing? How do we infuse our writing with tone, whether angry, wry, witty, grim or hopeful? How do we manage/stay true to that tone as we tell a story? How do we know if we have strayed from the tone and how do we get back on track? Read Jeannine’s thoughts about the role that voice and tone play in our writing.

This week’s wisdom à la Jeannine Ouellette:

It's hard to talk about tone without talking about voice, because the way I see it, tone is an aspect of voice. You can think of voice as related to the writer/narrator's personality, and tone as the writer/narrator's attitude toward the subject or audience. Tone is a crucial tool, because even the most compelling narrative voices should never be monotone. Instead, a voice should vary in tone and register for all kinds of reasons, mostly related to emotions, even while the voice itself retains its character. To use an imperfect musical analogy: if voice is akin to a musician’s style, tone is the mood of the song they’re playing at that moment. So, if voice is the musician's style, and tone is the mood of a particular song, then we could also say that a writer has a "voice" across work (which is true, even though we do refine our voice from one project to the next), and that each essay/story/discrete work has its own “tone” (serious, humorous, playful, strident, etc.) depending on the topic. Generally, for short work, the tone is probably not going to shift a lot. But in a long work--especially a book--there will inevitably be tonal shifts, and those shifts should make sense to the reader, and not feel random or accidental. You can't really play with tone until you've found the voice, though you can work on both simultaneously because creative writing is messy that way.

I think one way to think about this is the difference between stability and malleability. A voice's identifying features--from specific vocabulary and word choices that ground us in a certain time or place to the tendency to use contractions like can't or don't instead of cannot or do not to sentence length to rhythm and cadence--are what make a voice distinct and recognizable, as unique as your father's, your sister's, your fourth-grade teacher's. Then you get to play with tone, as it shifts in response to emotion—it might be ironic, reverent, bitter, tender, sarcastic, hopeful, eerie, etc. So again, whether the narrative voice is overall dry and witty or intimate and dramatic, it should change in response to circumstances, perhaps sounding amused in one paragraph, quietly mournful in another, and later, sharply critical. But it's still the same speaker with the same recognizable voice. And importantly, if/when narrative tone does shift, it should be apparent or soon become apparent to the reader why it is shifting--as in, the reader should be able to understand the tonal shift in the context of the narrator reacting to something. Sudden shifts in tone without apparent cause can be jarring, and leave readers feeling disoriented and even frustrated. With regard to voice and tone, it's the writer's job to know what they are doing, and why, and to do it clearly enough for a reader to hopefully intuit our meaning, even when meaning is mostly or wholly implied.

Ultimately, these are fun and empowering concepts to play with on the page, because doing so raises a writer’s awareness of the small details that create voice and tone to make a speaker who they are, and that make them sound like themselves in different scenarios. It takes a lot of close attention to identify and execute these small details, which in turn brings us closer and closer to understanding a speaker, narrator, or character, even or especially if the speaker is us.

Because, yeah, once again, creative writing is messy that way.

This week’s prompt:

Write about a time in your life that you used your voice to express an opinion, take a position, assume a stance. What gave you the courage to take this stand? What was the outcome? Did you or others benefit from your action? What did you learn? Whatever tone you choose to tell this story, find verbs with muscle that pack a punch and details that support your tone. Use descriptions and dialogue to sustain tension and conflict. If you feel yourself backing away as you write, take a step forward into your narrative. Read your draft out loud to help you detect where you might have strayed from the tone of the piece.

Jeannine Ouellette’s lyric memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women’s Literature. Her literary essays and short fiction have appeared widely in journals such as Narrative, North American Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Masters Review, Calyx, and many anthologies. She holds an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a Millay Colony for the Arts fellow and past juror. Her cult-favorite bestselling Substack, Writing in the Dark, is a passionate creative community for people who “do language,” where writing is part of a deeper, vaster conversation about how attention, curiosity, playfulness, and surprise provide a portal to the profound on the path to becoming, because talking about “how to write better” without that larger context is kind of boring. Ouellette teaches writing at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the University of Minnesota, and of course, Writing in the Dark, online and in person.

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Now, go write!!

xx

Megan