Tone Of Voice In Writing Novels & Stories

Voices. Just outside the room. It's hushed but sharp. The kind of voices people use when they’re arguing but don’t want the neighbours to hear. “You better know what you’re doing,” the man says. And it’s all there. That same clipped tone. The way he rides the end of his sentences like he’s chewing through glass. The slight rasp that comes out when he’s pissed. It’s familiar. Too familiar. It all falls into place so fast, I nearly lose my balance.

“I have known it was ready since this morning. I have been revising it anyway because tomorrow is enormous and I do not know what to do with the feeling of something being enormous except to keep working.” “I know,” he said. “The last sentence,” she said. “The one I wrote two weeks ago. I have been looking at it all day and I cannot decide if it is too much or exactly right.” He looked at her. “Read it to me,” he said. “Out loud. The way you will say it tomorrow.” She looked at the address. She found the sentence. She read it aloud. Her voice, reading it, was different from the voice she used for conversation. It had the quality she brought to things that required her whole self. Not louder.

I have been waiting for so long I am not certain I know how to be anything else. I sat with that for a long time. Then I kept reading. The voice changed slowly, the way voices change when the circumstances around them change, not dramatically and not all at once but in small accumulated ways that were invisible week by week and unmistakable across months. The entries got longer. The sentences loosened. The specific, coiled quality of someone constantly bracing began to ease out of the writing the way tension eases out of a muscle that has finally been allowed to rest. Around the fortieth entry, somewhere in the weeks after the summit, the voice started to sound like mine.

I thought it would help with calendar invites. "I found the thread with David interesting," Echo continues, his tone shifting. It’s not just observational anymore. It’s predatory. "He uses a lot of authoritative language. 'I need this on my desk by morning.' 'See me in my office.' You like that tone, don't you?" My breath hitches. "He's my boss, Echo. It's just work." "Is it?" The audio shifts. The background hum changes from dead silence to the subtle, ambient noise of an office. The low drone of an HVAC system. The distant click of a keyboard.

Then my mother’s voice. Not words — the quality of it, the warm carrying quality of her voice in the open air, which I had been hearing my whole life and could identify at a distance with the specific precision of someone for whom that voice had been the first sound of every morning for eighteen years before this house. She was speaking to Gio. The specific warm-practical tone she used with people she liked and relied on, the tone that was personal without being familiar, that had always been one of her better qualities — the ease of her with people, the way she made being in her orbit feel uncomplicated. I looked at the garden.

Wasn’t going to think about why. My phone screen. The only light. Third time reading. I knew it was her. Knew since the second paragraph. Not the content – the voice. It was the way she wrote when she was angry: short sentences that hit like body checks, then one long sweeping one that took your legs from under you before you realized you were falling. I’d taught myself to recognize her months ago when I thought the blog belonged to a stranger who happened to describe desire the way Naomi described desire. Now I couldn’t unrecognize it. Every sentence was her voice in my skull. The way her vowels sharpened when she was furious. The way her rhythm went choppy before it went devastating.

I answered the phone. “Heyyyyy” He answered with long teasing tone. Oh my Gosh, he is teasing me again. “Stop it if you’ll only tease me” I said with annoyed tone. I know it will be effective because I know he is afraid that I will get mad at him. “I am not even saying anything, haha, it’s just that the tone of your voice is something. You’re happy or what?” He said again and still with a teasing tone. “Geez, I know you since childbirth Matthew Styles and I already know the thing that is running at your stupid brain.” I told him of course still with annoyed tone.

"About the partnership terms. He wanted my perspective on the northern section before he submitted the draft to his advisors." "He could have written to me about the partnership terms," I said. My voice was entirely level. "He wanted my perspective specifically," she said. She looked at me across the table. "It is a professional communication, Kaelen." "I know what it is," I said. "Then why does your voice sound like that?" "Like what?" "Like that," she said, gesturing vaguely in my direction. "That specific quality you have when you are managing something you don't want to admit you are feeling."

"Read me the paragraph about the threshold mechanism. Out loud. I want to hear how it sounds." "Why out loud?" "Because you read differently than you write. I want to hear where your voice changes. That's where the argument is strongest." I looked at him for a second. Then I picked up the pages and read. He listened with the full attention he brought to everything about me now. Not editing in real time, just listening, and when I finished, he said, "The third sentence." That's your thesis. Everything before it is approach, and everything after is proof. That sentence is the center."

I said, "Could you answer my calls from now on?" In my mind, I wanted to sound authoritative and firm, but the tone of my voice was weak, and instead of sounding like a command, it sounded like a desperate request. I hated my agent at the time, but he was silent for a long time. The seconds turned into a minute, and in fear, I said, "Are you there?" He replied with a curt "Yes," leaving me even more confused, then added with what seemed like a very surprised tone of voice, "That voice you used, don't use it often, please!"