word choice

What’s in a Word: Emotional Atmosphere

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This post by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff originally appeared on Book View Cafe on 8/25/14.

Like all writers, I have a special relationship with words. In my case, I love them. I am fascinated by the way they work (or fail to work), the myriad ways in which they can be misunderstood, misused, even abused by people who don’t know any better or who should know better or who abuse words with malice aforethought.

I know some writers who have a love/hate relationship with words, who claim they hate using them but love having used them. I don’t get that at all, so I’ll leave it to someone else to blog about that. This blog is about the use of words to create emotional atmosphere.

As a writer of fiction, I rise or fall on how well I can use words to create an atmosphere in which my characters live and move and in which my readers exist with them during the length of a story. Words are symbols. They are signposts. They are colors. They tell the reader how to view a place, a person, a thing.

There are two parties to this, of course, the writer has to know how to use the words, but the reader has to know how to read them. This requires a shared knowledge base or shared experience or, at minimum, a shared definition and/or connotation for the words.

 

Click here to read the full post on Book View Cafe.

 

Creating an Ironic Tone in Your Fiction

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This post, by Jack Smith, originally appeared as a guest post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s site on 12/9/13.

Let’s say you want to create an ironic tone in a story or novel—it’s just needed.

First off, what is tone? On the one hand, we might say that it’s the apparent attitude of the narrator toward the characters and the world they people. But it should also be said that everything in a fictional work relates in some way to the tone. If every character in your story drives crazily and exceeds the speed limit, this will certainly affect the tone. If all the clocks are off twenty minutes, this will too.

To create the right tone, you need to think about character actions, dialogue, and setting. All of these will affect the tone of your story or novel. But you also need to attend to matters of style.

Being something of an iconoclast, I tend to go for irony. An ironic tone is, of course, the right tone for satire—which is my usual medium.

And so when I’m thinking about creating an ironic tone in my work, I find myself—and this tends to happen as I write—depending on the following useful tools:

1. Diction—words that create a witty, humorous tone

2. Irony and Paradox—both deal with contradiction, the first with the gap between what you expect and what you get; the second with apparent contradiction.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s site.