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Writing Excuses 20.49: Using Tone and Mood 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-49-using-tone-and-mood

Key points: Plot tells us what happened, structure tells us how it happened, and tone and mood shape the emotional experience of the reader. Tone is the narrator's view of the world, mood is the character's view of the world. Tone is imagery, word choices, sentence structure. Mood is the characters' physical responses, internal reactions, actions they take, and what they pay attention to. Aligned or in conflict? Juxtaposition and contrast! Mood as landscape, and tone is the personal walking there? Control tone through imagery, word choices, and sentence structures. 

[Season 20, Episode 49]

[Erin] Hey, everybody. This is Erin, and I've got a question for you. What have you learned from Writing Excuses that you use for your own writing? Now, we talk a lot about tools, not rules. Which means there are things that we're going to say that you're going to be like, yes, that is for me. That's the tool I'm going to use in my next project. And there are others that you're going to be like, uh,  I'm going to leave that to the side. And what we want to know is which of the things that we're saying have really worked for you? What's the acronym you're always repeating? What's the plot structure you keep coming back to? What's a piece of advice that has carried you forward, when you've been stuck in your work? Or that you've been able to pass on to another writer who's needed advice or help? However you've used something that you've learned from us, we want to know about it, and we want to share it with the broader community. Every month, we're going to put one of your tips or tricks or tools in the newsletter, so that the rest of the community can hear how you have actually taken something that we've talked about and made it work for you. And I'm personally just really excited to learn about those, because a lot of times, y'all take the things that we say and use them in such ingenious and interesting ways to do such amazing writing that I'm just like chomping at the bit to get in these tools and tips and share them with everybody else. So if you're interested, please go to our show notes, and fill out the form there, and be part of this project and just share with us what you're doing, what you've learned, and how are you using it so that we can share with everybody else. Really excited, again, to get all this in because, honestly, what we say is made real and important and meaningful by what y'all do with it. With that, you're out of excuses. Now go tell us what works for you.

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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode  49]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon]  Using tone and mood.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] 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 or character arc or things like that. Here is why I think it's important, and then we're going to... We're going to tell it... We're going to... I will let other people talk at some point.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yay!

[Mary Robinette] Basically, I think plot tells us what happened, structure tells us how it happened, 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, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and The Wizard, you have practice and prep for the heist, which is the Merry Old Land of Oz song, you 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, everything goes wrong, they get chased by guards and the witch through the castle, they're at an 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. So...

[Howard] More heist movies need flying monkeys.

[Mary Robinette] Right?

[Howard] Wow!

[Mary Robinette] But it doesn't feel like a heist, because tonally, it is a wonder tale and 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, Lizzy investigates and continues to find proof that he's an asshole, and you have the twist, Wickham runs away with Lydia, and the breakthrough, like, what, 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... Tonally, it's a... It's not that. So...

[DongWon] This connects to fundamental genres in certain ways. Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly. This gets into Elemental genres. But I think that tone and mood are things that we can play with. So what I want to do is talk about tone in this 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, here's my thinking, I'm very excited about that idea...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What do you think about that? And, like, I think there's a number of different ways that we control tone, and so I'm curious what you think, now that I've been like, hello, here's a thing.

[Howard] 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... Yeah, might be the structure and so on and so forth, and mood might be a more readerly thing that comes  into the narrative because, in the context of 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... 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.

[Mary Robinette] I see what you're saying. I think the question is, if we're thinking about this as being an intentional thing that we can control...

[Howard] Yes. And that's why... That's the other reason I'm reluctant to do this. How would I control that? I don't know.

[Mary Robinette] 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 Oz tells us how we should feel about it.

[DongWon] So, that's the mood.

[Mary Robinette] That's the mood.

[DongWon] And the tone is the heist structure of it.  The...

[Mary Robinette] No, the tone... The structure is this thing that's happening. The tone is... So, the tone is the narrator's view of the world, it's the imagery that we use.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So it's... In fiction, it's the word choices, it's the sentence structure. And in Wizard of Oz, it's the color palette and things like that.

[Erin] I was going to... Actually say what you would say for mood, and then... I have a theoretical analogy.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, okay. so, for mood, the tools that I think we're using to control things are the characters' physical responses, their internal reactions, the actions that they take and the things they pay attention to.

[DongWon] I see. Okay.

[Erin] The way that I'm thinking about this, of course, is with karaoke.

[Mary Robinette] I love it.

[Erin] So, I'm thinking, like, so the tone... Because to me what you're saying is the tone is the way that... 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, that's like, who knows, could be the most emo [trumo] song, and if instead of screaming it, you decide to sing it in a sultry jazz voice, like, you have changed the tone of the song. That 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 say everything is 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 this way, and the mood is like looking around and seeing, like, is everyone polka-ing? That's going to give a different mood.

[DongWon] Yeah. Right.

[Erin] Then no matter what. So... And then those two things intersect. And one of the things I think is interesting, number one, is to see 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 can they be in conflict with each other?

[Mary Robinette] They don't [garbled]

[DongWon] I have a great example, I think, of where they diverge. What's fun about this episode is you brought up this idea and we didn't talk about it much offline. So this is sort of a little bit of a class situation...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] For us, and a little bit of, like, let's interrogate the instructor and find out what this means.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] For me, this is let's kick the tires on that. Yes. No, I love it. Okay. So. Mike Flanagan, who's a horror director, made a adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story called The Fall of the House of Usher. 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 weeks, where all of his children die in increasingly horror... Or not increasingly, but all equally horrible ways. The tone of this story is told in this, like, bombastic way, this. like. big grand family drama. And then the experience of watching this 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 a deeply unserious show with a serious core message. But it's a deeply unserious show... You watch these characters die in increasingly ludicrous ways. In ways that feel very Edgar Allan Poe, in terms of being wildly over the top, of watching a guy go insane because he thinks there's a cat in the wall. Right? Like...  and it's... To me, it was an utterly delightful experience. We were like howling and cackling through the whole thing. But it strikes me that there is a real difference between the tone and the mood, where the tone is like reading Edgar Allan Poe poems, like, verbatim as narration, 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. And the... I think the dissonance between them led to so much of the space for Flanagan to say the serious things he wanted to say, while also entertaining the hell out of us watching a bunch of awful, incredibly wealthy people get got in ways that they deserved.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, to Erin's point about can these two... Can these things work in opposition to each other, can you create a juxtaposition and contrast? Yes. Absolutely. One of the things that I was thinking about is that in This is How You Lose the Time War, the tea shop scene, the tone of that is like, look at how lovely Britain is, and how beautiful this is, and the mood of the characters is quite different from that. While the character is there to enjoy that, the character is inhabiting it as a this is quaint, this is... And I'm also having all these big feels about this person that I'm having these battles with. This is a battleground. That's the mood that's going on. One of my other favorite examples is Jane Austen. You do not have to read the entire novel. But if you take a look at Northanger Abbey, chapter 21 and 22, in 20... It's basically 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 frightening and there's mysteries in it. And the author, 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 scratching at the window was actually a beautiful rose bush 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. So the tone remains quite consistent, 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.

[Erin] 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 more of a lizard brain thing. And by that, I mean, things are scary. There are certain things, like when things..., 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 [garbled] control over the way our narrator thinks about it and talks about it. But things like 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 puts us on that kind of level. And so I'm kind of curious, like, how you... Speaking 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 [garbled].

[Mary Robinette] That sounds like a great thing for us to talk about when we come back from the break.

[DongWon] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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[unknown] If a Lenovo computer's on your holiday list, don't shop around. Just go directly to the source Lenovo.com. You'll find exclusive deals on the gaming PCs and tablets you want. Like the powerful Legion 7i gen 10 laptop and the versatile Legion tab. So avoid all that shopping chaos and price comparisons, and just go directly to the source Lenovo.com, where you can unlock exclusive savings. That's lenovo.com. [singing Lenovo, Lenovo]

[Mary Robinette] 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 landscape. And so the narrator has set for me, it's like, okay, here's your landscape. I'm going to... maybe I'll set up some fog, and some scary lighting, and this is amazing. And the character is like, I love fog and scary lighting. And then another character's like, no, this is much worse. And that's the... For me, a lot of the... What a character does when we are in tight third person or first person is that they are my viewpoint into the story. They're my way of imagining how I would feel in that, and it does activate my lizard brain. So I think that that's... It's an interesting way to think about it.

[Howard] 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 the actual mental hospital up on the hillside in Utah. And I was giggling, generally joyful, happy the whole time. And 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 ear, like, dude, what's wrong with you?

[laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled we need to?] hire you.

[Howard] 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 bring into that landscape.

[DongWon] I'd love to turn at this point to talking a little bit about how we can use this as a tool.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] 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 active use?

[Mary Robinette] Let me actually use an example from an early, early piece of my own writing. This is 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 Vitra ujo, which was the first horror story that I sold. And I'm like, this is... I'm not very deep into my career. I have... I don't have novels out at this point. And... So I'm going to read you the first paragraph or so. For 3 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 snick as the airlock door opened. She kept pruning her Sunset Glory rose bush to give Kai a chance to sneak up on her. He barreled around Noholen's 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, this is what 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 a meet cute kind of thing. He could be about, like, oh, my goodness, I'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 rose bush, like she was a body harvester looking for the perfect part.

So you can see... 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 thinking about the imagery that I use, and that was one of the things that Ellen said, was that I needed... That there needed to be something diseased or something like... Why was there a perfect rose bush? So imagery, the word choices, like body harvester, choosing that, sentence structures, whether you're doing something that's flowing and languid or, like, choppy and breathy.

[Howard] And I think that's where, to my original attempt to argue with you, I think that's where we have control over what the reader brings to the experience. Because when you say body harvester, that's the sort of phrase that is going to resonate with people, whether or not they had experience in sci-fi or horror...

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Howard] Really well.

[Mary Robinette] 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.

[DongWon] Yeah. So, if mood is the landscape, as Erin 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 group of characters laughing with upbeatness behind it, you are in a comedy, you put a discordant ambient sound underneath it, it is a horror movie now.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Howard showed me a YouTube video the other day of the trailer for Mad Max, remixed to the Yakety Yak song. And it changed the tone, let's say. While the mood of the characters remained the same because the landscape is the same.

[Erin] 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.

[laughter]

[Erin] 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 may be in this place, something completely different is happening all together.

[DongWon] You know what, Erin, I think you're empowered to choose the music that is behind your own life.

[Erin] I love it. 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 that 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 horrific way, and then Lenny Bristol is like, guess he's not making it home for dinner.

[laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? [garbled] like, it cuts because you're like, oh, no, like... And it is a... But 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 horror.

[yeah]

[Erin] Law and Order  is not a horror show.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But that would be interesting. And it teaches you a little bit, but also, it makes you laugh.  because the mood sets up one expectation, and the tone comes in contrast to that, and contrast, I've learned from Howard, is one of the tools, I think, that you can use to make humor happen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. And that's... It'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 placing two things in contrast to each other. That's why you so often see the, hello, it's a giant battle scene, the [garbled]... Like, the classic one is, it's... What a Wonderful World, and Good Morning, Vietnam. And that's the thing that I think is fun to play with on a conscious level. I think a lot of us do it unconsciously, but I think it is as important to think about  as plot.

[DongWon] Yeah, I totally agree.

[Howard] The tools that I find myself using are white space and sentence length. Where, when I want to make a shift, and I think about that in terms of it, Erin, as you suggested, the score. because the song of, 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, I can change the breath of what's happening, and govern the mood in the same way that an orchestral score might.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I think when you're looking at it, that you kind of have two choices. You can either... When you're combining tone and mood, that you can either have them match, or you can have them in juxtaposition. And when they match, you get what Edgar Allan Poe called unity of affect, where you are reinforcing an underlining this is... Things are really bad or things are good. And in juxtaposition, when they don't match, you can create tension by a contrast between the narration and the character. If the narration is like, oh, there is... Bad stuff is going down, and the character is like, I love this place. You're like, uh-huh, things are... No. It creates that anticipation.

[DongWon] It's funny that you mention that because the Fall of the House of Usher show that 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 he just kicks you in the heart. And it's when those align.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's the trick he pulls. It suddenly aligns, and then we slip out of that again for the finale, but it's interesting to point that out. I'm like, oh, that is a good trick to pull.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have got 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.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.