It came up in the morning workshop the question of what tone is and how it develops. Let's discuss!
Tone comes from the time gap between the plot (the linear, chronologic sequence of events that happens in real time) and the story (how the narrative gives us those events). The example Timothy Morton gives in his book Ecology Without Nature is of the Illiad when Homer stops during the battle to describe Achilles's shield, for multiple pages.
In fiction or nonfiction, we can create this tonal gap and develop tone by, for example, giving directly a dialogue in real time, and interupting with a persons thoughts as they develop, or providing backstory.
Hope this makes sense!
I think tone has a lot to do
I think tone has a lot to do with "how" description and dialog are handled and not just the proportion between the two in a story. For example, if the same scene is described from a perspective of immediacy in which insightful details that might only be arrived at later in the life of the narrator are not includes, that is very different from the same scene described with judgment and hindsight.
I think of voice as something somehow more innate to the author and not as variable from story to story. Tone can vary from story to story or even from chapter depending upon the seriousness and/or pace the author chooses to take with the development of his/her story.
This is great and really
This is great and really important to keep in mind. I know I need a lot of help with this in my own writing, which is all dialogue, despite the fact that I can write descriptively. I'm not sure about how this will change the tone of my writing though. The line between voice and tone has always been a bit blurred to me. Maybe this is because I don't understand the terms well enough. What do you guys think? Do you have any definitions for me? This really is a good way to add tone though and to vary the pace of a piece of writing and slow things down. Varying pace is really important, I think, and really makes major scenes stand out. I'm definitely going to give this a shot, adding more descriptions to my scenes as well as thoughts, and see what happens to the "tone" of my writing.