The attitude or emotional quality that comes through in a piece of writing, shaped by word choice, rhythm, and detail.
Tone is the emotional temperature of your prose. It's how the writing feels to read - sarcastic, earnest, melancholic, playful, clinical, urgent. Tone is created through the combined effect of diction, syntax, imagery, and pacing. It's not what you say but how you say it. The sentence "She left" and "She vanished without a word" convey the same event with completely different tones.
Tone is how you tell your reader how to feel without explicitly saying so. Get it right and the reader is emotionally locked in. Get it wrong and they'll feel confused or manipulated. A horror scene written in a breezy tone undercuts the fear. A comedic scene with a somber tone becomes something else entirely. Controlling tone is controlling the reader's experience.
The tone shifts brilliantly between Ignatius Reilly's pompous, mock-intellectual narration and the earthy, exasperated voices of everyone around him.
McCarthy maintains a tone of quiet, relentless devastation throughout. The sparse prose and muted descriptions create a bleakness that never needs to announce itself.
Austen's tone is witty and gently mocking, which lets her skewer social conventions while making the reader feel like they're in on the joke.
Tone is the writer's attitude. Mood is the feeling created in the reader. They're related but distinct. A sarcastic tone might create an uneasy mood.
Abrupt tonal shifts jar readers out of the story. If you need to move from humor to tragedy, build a bridge. Use a transitional scene or let the humor slowly darken.
Writing 'it was a sad day' is declaring tone. Writing 'the kitchen was exactly as she'd left it, her coffee mug still on the counter, still half full' is creating it.
Write a 200-word scene describing someone eating breakfast alone. Write it four times with four different tones: peaceful, ominous, comic, and grief-stricken. Keep the basic facts identical each time. Compare the four versions and circle the specific word choices, sentence lengths, and details that shift the tone. This is your tonal toolkit.