Know Your Tone

Tone is an essential in creative expression.

What is the difference between tragedy and comedy? According to Mel Brooks, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” It all depends on the point of view. There is, of course, more to it.

The writer Donald Westlake’s most popular and well-known creation is the Parker series. Parker is a hardened criminal who is always laser-focused on the crime at hand. He is relentless and merciless. People in these books are frequently killed, often by Parker himself. The tone of the Parker series is dark.

Parker is a planner. The stories are about heists, mostly. A surprising amount of time in these books is spent showing Parker meticulously planning the proposed job and assembling a gang to pull off the job. Everything is planned. Often, something will go wrong because that’s life.

Westlake has said of Parker “I’ve always believed the books are really about a workman at work, doing the work to the best of his ability.” It’s like watching any craftsman at work. The earliest stages can be the least engaging until you realize that every bit of mundane information revealed will be of critical importance once the job gets rolling. No point, however minor, is without its significance.

Westlake wrote another series of books about a workman doing his work. These novels are referred to as the Dortmunder series. The protagonist is another planner, John Dortmunder. He plans the heist, he puts the gang together, and he conducts the action. A hallmark of the Dortmunder books is that the capers, as the heists are called in this setting, almost never work out. Dortmunder lives with May, a cashier at a grocery store. They depend on her cashier’s paycheck because Dortmunder doesn’t bring home enough money for them to live on.

Something that sets these two series apart is humor. The Parker books are not funny. Parker is too dark, too determined, and too unforgiving to be funny. People are definitely going to die.

With Dortmunder, nobody dies. His accomplices are always the same gang of misfits, and each character is funny, quirky, and in possession of their own singular voice. Again, we get to watch a workman engaged in his craft as Dortmunder works out a great plan for a caper. He and his crew put the whole thing together and we get the fun of watching it all fall apart.

Westlake has said that he was working on a Parker novel, but it kept turning funny. He realized that it wasn’t a book fit for Parker, so he created Dortmunder. Dortmunder is Parker, but he’s human. Nobody is going to get killed, and it’s possible that nobody is going to get paid, either.

The pleasure in both of these series is in watching Westlake engage in his craft. He explores both sides of the criminal street and he makes it entertaining. But he explores both sides in separate books. Westlake mostly avoids the trap of mixing the tone of the books.

This can be a problem for less experienced writers who may inject some comedy into a serious story as comic relief. The opposite can also happen; a writer is writing a humorous piece but suddenly somebody gets killed. When it happens, the violence is jarring and the light tone of the story cannot be regained, unless you are able to accept brutality and move on.

So, what is tone? The tone is made up of word selection, and what the writer chooses to focus on. The tone of a book should be consistent. Show us the sweat on the face of a liar.  If the tone of the book is light comedy the description of that sweat will be different than if the tone is meant to be grippingly serious.

Here are a couple of examples I made up to illustrate the point.

Ex. 1: “Murphy’s face was covered in sweat. Johnson looked up at the ceiling. He thought maybe something was wrong with the room’s sprinkler system.”

Ex.2 “Murphy’s face was covered in sweat. Johnson knew what it meant. Murphy was lying.”

The same situation is presented in both quotes, but the tone conveyed by the writer (me) is completely different.

Watching Dortmunder escape from a robbery that was foiled by the appearance of a large contingent of New Jersey cops is genuinely funny, ingenious, and a little bit ridiculous. And he gets away. His girlfriend is disappointed because, once again, there is no money coming from this caper. Dortmunder is elated because he recognizes that his getaway was a work of genius. He played it perfectly, to the point that he is not even a suspect. The flustered cops let him, no, they encouraged him, to walk away.

On the other hand, watching Parker make his escape from a heist gone wrong is breathtaking and stressful. Somebody is going to get killed. The tone is completely different. It is suspenseful and we find ourselves cheering for a character who is the worst person we have ever met.

Consider these two opening lines that capture the tone of each book and reveal the character:

Parker: “Running toward the light, Parker fired twice over his left shoulder, not caring whether he hit anything or not.” (Butcher’s Moon, 1974)

Dortmunder: “John Dortmunder was a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed darkness.” (Bad News, 2001)

You can manipulate tone as part of your story, but if you abandon your dominant tone the story you are writing changes. You started a Parker book but wound up with a Dortmunder book. Once you realize the tone is all wrong for your subject matter, you may have to rewrite your whole story.

What Westlake did was surrender to the new tone. He then created a new protagonist and a new way of telling his story. He wound up writing fourteen Dortmunder novels, and twenty-four Parker novels.