By Merle Massie
I’m working on a new manuscript set during the Great Depression in Canada. The exploratory process of writing (for me, the weft) is threaded through the warp of reading – be that primary documents, oral history, my family history, or secondary sources. Sometimes I’ll catch myself. My writing style can change in response to whatever I’m reading. A chiding interdepartmental memo from 1936 on ‘sub-marginal lands’ elicits austerity and submissiveness; a bleak personal history will leave my words equally bereft; a newspaper article extolling the virtues of ‘poor man’s land’ might have me cheering and piling on the adjectives.
I’ve come to realize that it is not the words or the subject matter that I’m responding to. In all of these examples, the subject matter is more or less the same. I am responding, quite simply, to the tone of the work. Tone, as noted here in the blog Daily Writing Tips, is “what the author feels about the subject.” (This is different from voice, which is the author’s personality.) The authorial attitude toward subject of the penned work – do they like it? Support it? Hate it? Abhor it? Embrace it? Fear it? Look down on it? Love it? – infuses the word choice, the pace, the arc of its narrative, its tone. Continue reading
