A Single Word Can Change the Tone

by Jodie Renner, editor & author  

In your WIP, are you inadvertently tossing in a word here and there that jolts the readers out of your story or gives an incongruous impression?

Once you’ve completed a first or second draft of your story (or your muse is taking a break), now’s the time to go back and reread each scene carefully. Does every word you’ve chosen contribute to creating the overall tone and mood you’re going for in that scene? Or are some of your word choices unintentionally detracting from the impression you want readers to take away?

Is it possible you may have unconsciously inserted the odd “cheery” word into a tense scene in your story? Or a relaxed-sounding word in a scene where the character is stressed or in a hurry? Or maybe your teenager or blue-collar worker sounds too articulate? I’ve seen examples of these quite often in the fiction I’ve edited over the years.

For example, the heroine and hero are running through the woods, pursued by bad guys intent on killing them. The debut author, thinking it’s a good idea to describe the setting, uses words like “leaves dancing in the light” and “birds chirping” and “babbling brook.” These light-hearted, cheerful words detract from the desperation she’s trying to convey as the young couple races frantically to escape their pursuers. In this situation, it would be better to use more ominous words, perhaps crows cawing, a wolf howling, water crashing over rapids, or thunder cracking.

Read through each of your scenes and make sure every word you use to describe the setting, the people, and their actions, words, and thoughts contributes to create the impression you’re going for in that scene, rather than undermining your intentions.

DESCRIBING YOUR SETTING:

Here’s an example, slightly disguised, from my editing. It’s supposed to be a tense, scary moment, but the author has, without thinking about the impact, inserted relaxed, even joyful imagery that counteracts and weakens the apprehensive mood he is trying to convey (my bolding).

He locked the door behind him, his harried mind ricocheting between frightened alertness and sheer fatigue. He took a furtive glance out the window. No one there, so far. Despite the cold, a warming shaft of morning sunlight filtered through the stained curtain, and languid dust particles slow-danced in its beam.

What had he gotten himself into? They would certainly be on to him now—it was only a matter of time before they found him. He looked out again through the thin curtain. Sunbeams were filtering through the branches of an old tree outside the window, the shriveled shapes of the leaves dancing in the breeze, playing gleefully with the light. He swore he saw movement on the ground outside—a figure.

Some of the wording in the two paragraphs above is excellent, like “his harried mind ricocheting between frightened alertness and sheer fatigue” and the phrases “furtive glance,” “stained curtain” and “shriveled shapes of the leaves.” But the boldfaced words and phrases, warming, languid, slow-danced, sunbeams, dancing in the breeze, and playing gleefully with the light weaken the imagery and tone because they’re too happy and carefree for the intended ominous mood. Perhaps the writer, caught up in describing the view outside in a literary, “writerly” way, momentarily forgot he was going for frightened.  

Check to be sure every detail of your imagery enhances the overall mood and tone of the situation.

Here’s another example where the description of the setting detracts from the power of the scene and doesn’t match how the character would or should be feeling at that moment.

The protagonist has just had a shock at the end of the last chapter, where she’s discovered her colleague murdered. This is the beginning of the next chapter, a jump of a few days.

  Mary gazed at the brightening horizon, immersing herself in the beauty of the rising sun. She watched as the dawn’s rays danced across the waves. Mary adored this time of day when the hustle and bustle had not yet started, and she could enjoy watching the waves wash in and listening to the seagulls overhead. It was one of the many reasons she loved this area so much.

  Since the murder of Teresa three days ago, Mary had been in a state of turmoil. Teresa’s death had changed everything. Gruesome images continually flickered through her mind like an unending motion picture. She could think of nothing else and was racked by guilt.

 To me, the two paragraphs seem contradictory in mood. If she’s racked by guilt and can think of nothing else, how can she enjoy the sunrise so much?

Be sure to choose words that fit the mood you’re trying to convey.

 THOUGHTS, IMPRESSIONS, & IMAGERY:

Here’s another example of a tense, life-threatening scene whose power and tension have been inadvertently eroded by almost comical imagery.

...

To read the rest of this blog post by Jodie Renner, published over at The Kill Zone Blog, click HERE.

Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor and the award-winning author of three craft-of-writing guides in her series An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: FIRE UP YOUR FICTION,  CAPTIVATE YOUR READERS, and WRITING A KILLER THRILLER, as well as two clickable time-saving e-resources, QUICK CLICKS: Spelling List and QUICK CLICKS: Word Usage. She has also organized two anthologies for charity: VOICES FROM THE VALLEYS – Stories and Poems about Life in BC’s Interior, and CHILDHOOD REGAINED – Stories of Hope for Asian Child Workers. You can find Jodie on her Amazon Author Page, at www.JodieRenner.com, and on Facebook. 

People in Motion – Vary Those Verbs!

by Jodie Renner, editor & author    

(Excerpted from Fire up Your Fiction - An Editor's Guide to Writing Compelling Stories, by Jodie Renner)

Want to write a bestselling novel? To bring your characters and scenes to life in a way that readers can relate to, it’s critical to choose just the right nuance of meaning to fit the character, action and situation. Say you’ve got a character walking. How are they moving? There’s a huge difference between strolling and striding and shuffling and sauntering and slinking and strutting and sashaying and slogging, for example.

Find Vivid Verbs

Verbs are especially important, as there are so many variations in the way someone can move or speak or eat or whatever, depending on their personality, mood, age, gender, size, background, health, fitness level, and of course the circumstances. So it’s worth the effort to find just the right verb that nails the action and makes sense in the context of the scene. A verb that doesn’t quite fit can be jarring and turn a reader off, whereas finding a stronger, more specific verb can really enhance the mood and strengthen a scene, resulting in greater reader involvement and enjoyment.

People in Motion

For example, check out how many ways you can say “walked” or “moved.” (Hint – look up the present tense – “walk” or “move.”) You can use the handy thesaurus in Word (under the Review tab) or another online thesaurus, or go all out and buy the best print one out there – the huge J.I. Rodale’s The Synonym Finder.

For the verb “walked” for example, Rodale gives us a long list of great synonyms to help us capture just the right situation and tone. He just lists them, but here I’ve roughly categorized some of them to suit various situations, and changed them to past tense, to suit most novels and short stories.

 ~ WORDS FOR “WALKED”

Situations:

Drunk, drugged, wounded, ill: lurched, staggered, wobbled, shuffled, shambled

Urgent, purposeful, concerned, stressed: strode, paced, treaded, moved, advanced, proceeded, marched, stepped

Relaxed, wandering: strolled, sauntered, ambled, wandered, roamed, roved, meandered, rambled, traipsed

Tired: trudged, plodded, slogged, clopped, shuffled, tramped

Rough terrain, hiking: marched, trooped, tramped, hiked, traversed

Sneaking, stealth: sidled, slinked, minced, tiptoed, tread softly

Showing off: strutted, paraded, sashayed

Other walking situations: waddled, galumphed (moved with a clumsy, heavy tread), shambled, wended, tiptoed

So in general, it’s best to avoid plain vanilla verbs like “walked” or “went” if you can find a more specific word to evoke just the kind of movement you’re trying to describe.

~ But don’t grab that synonym too quickly! Watch out for show-offy or silly words.

After you’ve found a list of interesting synonyms, choose carefully which one to use for the situation, as well as the overall tone of your book. For example, for “walk,” don’t go to extremes by choosing little-known, pretentious words like “ambulate” or “perambulate” or “peregrinate” (!), or overly colloquial, slang, or regional expressions like “go by shank’s mare” or “hoof it.”

~ And beware of words that just don’t fit that situation.

Also, some synonyms are too specific for general use, so they can be jarring if used in the wrong situations. I had two author clients who seemed to like to use “shuffled” for ordinary, healthy people walking around. To me, “shuffled” conjures up images of a patient moving down the hallway of a hospital, pushing their IV, or an old person moving around their kitchen in their slippers. Don’t have your cop or PI or CEO shuffling! Unless they’re sick or exhausted – or half-asleep.

Similarly, I had a client years ago who was writing about wartime, and where he meant to have soldiers and officers “striding” across a room or grounds or battlefield, he had them “strutting.” To me, you wouldn’t say “he strutted” unless it was someone full of himself or showing off. It’s definitely not an alternate word for “walked with purpose” as is “he strode.”

Also, be careful of having someone “march” into a room, unless they’re in the military or really fuming or determined. “Strode” captures that idea of a purposeful or determined walk better.

Here’s another example of a verb that doesn’t fit the situation:

Joe stood up, shocked and numb, after his boss delivered the tragic news about the death of his friend. He dreaded his visit to Paul’s widow. He sauntered back to his office, his mind spinning. 

“Sauntered” is way too relaxed and casual a word for the situation. The guy’s just been told his friend is dead. Maybe “found his way” or “stumbled” back to his office.

So after you’ve found a few possible words in the thesaurus, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to check the exact meaning in your dictionary. For that, I recommend Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. I use Merriam-Webster online for quick reference.

 ~ REPLACEMENTS FOR “RUN”

I found a list of synonyms for run, just listed in alphabetical order, then reordered them here to fit specific circumstances:

Situations:

Fun, play: amble, skip, scamper, scoot

Start off running: take off, bolt, make a break, light out, make off, dash, tear out, make tracks, split

Tense, frightened, being chased: barrel, dart, escape, flee, dash, hurry, race, rush, hasten, hustle, speed, sprint, scramble, scurry, tear

Athletic training, exercise: jog, pace, race, dash, sprint, travel  

In a hurry: hasten, bustle, hurry, hustle, rush, dash, hasten, scurry

Animals: scamper, trot, scurry, take flight, travel

Colloquial, humorous: hotfoot it, skedaddle, make tracks, scoot, take off, tear out

And serendipitously, I was just reading Robert Crais’s thriller, The Last Detective, and discovered another great list of synonyms for “run.” The anonymous narrator is describing a recurring dream:

“I am desperate to escape this place. I want to beat feet, boogie, truck, book, haul ass, motor, shred, jet, jam, split, cut out, blow, roll, abandon, get away, get gone, scram, RUN…”

But proceed with caution. Again, once you have the list, choose your word carefully. Obviously, if you’ve got someone running for their life, you wouldn’t use such light-hearted synonyms as “scamper” or “scoot” or “skip” or “trot” or “amble.”

And it’s also important to consider the overall voice of the scene and the inner thoughts of the viewpoint character. Are they the kind of person who would use “skedaddle” or “hotfoot it” in their personal vocabulary?

 ~ DIFFERENT WAYS OF LOOKING

Try looking up the verb “look” in a good thesaurus. Here are some of the synonyms J.I. Rodale lists:

see, visualize, behold, notice, take in, regard, observe, study, inspect, examine, contemplate, eye, check out, scrutinize, review, monitor, scan, view, survey, scout, sweep, watch, observe, witness, gaze, peer, glance, glimpse, ogle, leer, stare, goggle, gape, gawk, squint, take a gander, spy, peek, peep, steal a glance at, glare, glower, look down at, look daggers… (and the list goes on).

Again, choose carefully.

Some of these, and others he lists, are just too specific or archaic for general use in fiction, so proceed with caution. For example, don’t use “behold” for “look” in your present-day thriller or mystery! And “reconnoiter” works for military situations, but not for everyday use. Also, watch for eyes doing weird physical things, like “his eyes bounced around the room.”

Also, there are a lot of nuances for showing a character looking at someone or something. The verbs “glare,” “glance,” “scan,” “peer,” “study,” and “gaze” have quite different meanings, for example.

Before:

Brock glared at the intruder with the gun, eyes wide with fear. He shifted his stare to Gord, mouthing, “Help.”

“Glared” doesn’t go with “eyes wide with fear.” Glared is for anger. Maybe “stared” here? And “shifted his gaze”? Or maybe:

Brock’s eyes widened with fear at the intruder with the gun. He shifted his gaze to Gord, mouthing, “Help.”

Similarly,

At the funeral, the widow caught Peter’s glance and squinted her eyes in accusation. She no doubt held him responsible for her husband’s death.

“Squinted” is like against the bright sun. I’d say “narrowed her eyes” or “glared at him.”

For more, check out my posts "A Single Word Can Change the Tone" and "It's All in the Verbs" on the Kill Zone Blog.

Click HERE for options to receive email alerts of new posts published on this blog.

Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor and the award-winning author of three craft-of-writing guides in her series An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: WRITING A KILLER THRILLER, FIRE UP YOUR FICTION, and CAPTIVATE YOUR READERS, as well as two clickable time-saving e-resources, QUICK CLICKS: Spelling List and QUICKCLICKS: Word Usage. She has also organized two anthologies for charity: VOICES FROM THE VALLEYS – Stories and Poems about Life in BC’s Interior, and CHILDHOOD REGAINED – Stories of Hope for Asian Child Workers. You can find Jodie on her Amazon Author Page, at www.JodieRenner.com, and on Facebook. 

QUICK CLICKS: WORD USAGE and QUICK CLICKS: SPELLING LIST both $0.99!

I've been busy creating a new series of handy, clickable e-resources for writers, editors, students, teachers, instructors, journalists, bloggers, and anyone else with a writing project on the go. I just published the second one last Wednesday, and yesterday, I decided to play around with the titles to re-brand them a bit. (Until yesterday, they were called Grammar on the Go and Spelling on the Go.)

So far, two e-books in the series are out: Quick Clicks: Spelling List - Commonly Misspelled Words at Your Fingertips and Quick Clicks: Word Usage - Style and Usage Tips for Writers and Editors. And to introduce the second one, I've just put them both on sale for $0.99 each, tonight through Tuesday, Nov. 18. Click on the titles to go to the e-resources on Amazon.com. I'll list the links below for Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk, where they're also on sale for the equivalent of 99 cents USD.

Why more spelling, word usage, and grammar resources? Because these are designed to be super quick and easy to use, so they'll save you a lot of time - and you can rest assured that the information presented is well-researched and accurate.

At the beginning of each guide is a bank of letters like this, only with live links to small groups of words or terms in the document that start with those 2 or 3 letters:

A  ad  af  al  am  an  ap  as   Ba  be  bi  bo  br  bu   Ca  ce  ch  ci  co  com  con  cr   Da  de  di  dr   Ea  ef  em  en  ev  etc.

You click on a pair of letters and you jump right to the words starting with those two (or three) letters. Then on every page is a link to get you back "Home" or to the "Key" to look for another word or term.

The idea is to have the e-resource on your computer, e-reader, tablet, or phone beside you, or the PDF up on your computer, behind or beside your WIP, and just click to the word or term, check it, then get back to your writing project within seconds.
 

You can buy the PDF for $2.99 ($1.50 during this sale) by contacting Jodie Renner at info (at) JodieRenner (dot) com. You'll need a PayPal account, but they're very easy to set up.
 

If you click on the links to Amazon, you can open the book and preview the first 10 pages or more to check them out.
 

Spread the word about this great sale, as it's only for two days!

Quick Clicks: Word Usage on Amazon.ca ($1.12) 

Quick Clicks: Word Usage on Amazon.co.uk (0.77)
 

Quick Clicks: Spelling List on Amazon.ca ($1.12)
 

Quick Clicks: Spelling List on Amazon.co.uk  (0.77)

And suggestions welcome for more words and terms to include in updated editions! Please add any suggestions or comments below. Thanks!

 Besides publishing her popular craft-of-writing books under the series, An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction, the award-winning Fire up Your Fiction and Writing a Killer Thriller (and the upcoming Captivate Your Readers), as well as her handy, clickable e-resources, Quick Clicks: Spelling List – Commonly Misspelled Words at Your Fingertips and Quick Clicks: Word Usage – Style and Usage Tips for Busy Writers and Editors, Jodie Renner is a sought-after freelance fiction editor and author of numerous blog posts on writing captivating fiction. Jodie is also a former English (and French) teacher and has a master's degree in language and literature. Find Jodie on Facebook and Twitter.