Tone plays such a vital role in the overall feeling of your manuscript that it’s essential to get it right. But what exactly is it, and how can such an intangible idea be worked correctly?

Tone is how you say things in your story. Now, this isn’t to be confused with voice, which is more of what you say in your story. Your writing voice will come from practice and act as your intuitive, unique relationship with readers. Your tone, on the other hand, can and likely will be different with each book you write and depends on your subject matter. So here’s how you can decide what your novel’s tone will be.

Experiment before committing
One of my favorite warm-up writing exercises is to compose different paragraphs that describe the same basic event—a trip to the grocery store, taking your dog for a walk around the neighborhood—but with a different tone each time. It’s a fantastic way to really grasp just how much word choice and syntax can make a difference in the feelings that your writing exudes.

As for which tones to use, the world is your oyster: formal, casual, happy, depressed, funny, stuffy, ironic—whatever you’re feeling, write it! Not only will it help hone your writing skills, but there’s something undeniably fun in, say, writing sarcastically about a child’s birthday party. Or maybe that’s just me.

Funnel it through your main character
Readers will be spending the most time with your protagonist, so it makes the most sense to channel your novel’s overall tone through their emotional state. The feelings that your book evokes should mirror those felt by the main characters within.

If your novel is a bleak, brutal tale of family dysfunction and drama, for example, your tone should portray that sense of hopelessness or listlessness that your protagonist feels. If it’s a bubbly romance that finds your main character jet-setting across the world on a glamorous escape, on the other hand, choose words and phrases that portray that eagerness and an adventurous spirit. You’ll quickly find that filtering something as simple as a sunny morning through your character’s emotional state can say so much about them without having to directly say anything about it at all.

Details make all the difference
You probably know by now that adding details to your world-building is an important way to convey that fictional environment so that readers can fully experience it. However, the tricky part comes into play when you want to avoid being too specific with descriptions—otherwise, your reader has nothing left to imagine (which, let’s admit it, is a major appeal of reading!).

That being said, tone is often conveyed most effectively through this kind of detail-oriented word choice. This means using plenty of adjectives that will literally set the mood for your characters and their future experiences.

Remain consistent throughout
Keeping a consistent tone is key to avoid giving readers emotional whiplash. If your serious novel suddenly devolves into a scene or two of pure comedy gold, then dips back into more serious topics, your poor audience won’t know how they’re supposed to feel—and will subconsciously hold back investing themselves emotionally into your novel after being thrown so off balance.

Of course, you shouldn’t interpret this as meaning you can’t have any jokes or lighthearted moments in, say, a heart-wrenching tale of unrequited love. Tonal shifts during different scenes and with various characters provide a much-needed depth to any manuscript. It simply means that the overall tone of the novel needs to remain consistent—not that individual characters can’t have their own varying personalities.

Hone through plenty of revision
Tone is one of those elements that almost always takes time (and multiple revisions) to get exactly right. If you become overly concerned with tonal consistency during the initial writing phase, chances are you’ll become so bogged down by checking and rechecking your sentences that you’re going to sacrifice some other big-picture part of the novel.

So what does this mean for your writing process? Keep the overall tone you want for your manuscript in mind, but don’t necessarily pause your progress to double-check it. That will come during the second, third, even fourth rounds of editing. As a book comes to life, there are often subtle shifts that occur—either to the characters, the overall plot, or sometimes both—that can render certain decisions, like word or atmospheric choices, obsolete. New decisions will have to be made and, with it, appropriate tonal changes made.

Andrea Moran lives outside of Nashville with her husband and two kids. She’s a professional copywriter and editor who loves all things books. Find her on LinkedIn.