Finding the Right Tone for Your Memoir

Today’s post is by editor and book coach Stephanie Mitchell.

As a memoir writer, one of the early things to decide about your book is what tone you want to write it in. It helps set the mood of your book. Is your voice formal or relaxed? Is it optimistic, wry, aggressive, intimate? Your tone could be any of these, or many other options besides.

On first thought, the tone to use may seem obvious: the one that suits your content. If your book is sad and harrowing, shouldn’t you choose a mournful or dark tone for it?

Not necessarily.

When I was a teenager, my best friend and her mother took a beginning Yiddish class together. One week, my friend sang me a song she had learned—it was just about the most miserable tune I’d ever heard, basically a dirge. It turned out to be a children’s song teaching the days of the week: “Monday potato, Tuesday potato, Wednesday potato…”

The melody was completely divorced from the lyrics. Like so many Yiddish songs—or at least so many of the ones I know—the melody was aching, made for bending on a clarinet. But the lyrics were fluff. I laughed, a lot, at the disconnect.

I tracked down that song recently to find out whether it was actually as mismatched as I remembered it. And what I found was that rather than being a silly children’s song written in a doleful key because, well, it’s Yiddish music, it was in fact an ironic, self-deprecating meditation on poverty, disguised as an educational song for little kids.

Let’s think of the melody as the tone of the song and the lyrics as the content.

Tone and content don’t have to match. And when they don’t, they can combine to create something greater than their sum. 

Assuming you’ve read reasonably widely, you’ll probably have noticed this in fiction. But it works in memoir too. Divorcing your tone from your content does not strip your memoir of its authenticity—in fact, it deepens it. There’s more to your book than just what happens in the story. Pairing content and tone can give you access to meaning beyond merely the scope of the plot.

You can partner a sarcastic tone with dark content to create an ironic voice, reflecting on your circumstances with distance and then dipping into true feeling when you want a scene to really hit home. You can write with humor and warmth, infusing your book with hope despite what’s happening on the pages. You can choose a lyrical, poetic tone, bringing a beauty to all you have been through.

One of my favorite examples of a counterintuitive content–tone pairing is Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir, by Jenny Lawson. Lawson’s tone is humorous and fast-paced and a little frenetic, no matter what she’s writing about. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to her book:

The reason this memoir is only mostly true instead of totally true is that I relish not getting sued. Also, I want my family to be able to say, ‘Oh, that never happened. Of course we never actually tossed her out of a moving car when she was eight. That’s one of those crazy things that isn’t quite the truth.’ (And they’re right, because the truth is that I was nine.)

What follows is, naturally, a fairly harrowing story. But she writes it all in that same funny, chatty, relaxed, rapid-fire tone. And later, when she writes about her grief after pregnancy loss and her struggles with mental health, she still writes in that same tone.

The Outrun, by Amy Liptrot, is another example. Liptrot’s content is on the gritty side—the book is about her recovery from alcoholism while living in the remotest reaches of the Orkney islands—but her tone is lyrical, describing her worst moments, her most golden moments, and the blasted landscape around her all with a poetic grace:

On the clifftop my heart is wild and open and empty. I’ve reached the edge. I howl as loudly as I can into the churning Bore, my cry caught by the waves and blown back to the shore, into the inaccessible caves, echoing and rumbling deep below my feet.

The beauty of her language moves what could have been a raw, chafing story to something almost spiritual, turning it into a revelation of the splendor of her harsh environment and her own tender potential.

You will likely find that some tones come more naturally to you than others. That’s part of what defines your individual voice as a writer, and it probably reflects your innate lens on life. If you tend toward the cynical, there’s a good chance your tone will naturally veer ironic and sardonic; if you run through the world with an open heart, your tone may default to uplifting and spirited. But that doesn’t mean every page of your memoir has to feel the same.

Within the bounds of the tones that make up your personal color palette, you can experiment with different angles on your writing, playing with this at the scene level.

How would this scene feel if you wrote it with an edge of anger?

And then, her face a mask of heartless rage, the friend I had loved since we were babies together lifted that knife and charged me.

What about writing it stripped back to the bones?

She picked up the carving knife in her right hand, turned the blade outward, and ran at me.

What if it’s funny, even if it’s horrible?

I didn’t know things could glint under fluorescent lights, but that blade sure did. Or maybe it only glimmered. Whatever. It was flying at my face now.

Try things out. See which version brings up the feelings you want your readers to feel.

You have huge freedom with your tone. It isn’t tethered to your content. And it creates the meaning you want your writing to have. A bright, bouncy melody creates a folk song that means “let’s learn the days of the week!” An over-the-top, miserable melody creates a folk song that means “isn’t it absurd that all we have to eat is potatoes?”

Same words. Same content. Different tone. Different meaning.

Go play.

Stephanie Mitchell

Stephanie Mitchell has been a book coach and editor for over fifteen years. She specializes in working with people to write their first memoir—whether they’ve got a published novel under their belt, a long-running blog, or no writing experience whatsoever. She has been published on the Brevity blog and by Tŷ Newydd, home of Literature Wales (though, sadly, she isn’t Welsh), and has appeared on a range of podcasts talking about the power of writing to heal and to inspire. Join her Facebook group The Memoir Writers’ Book Club, where she gives daily tips on what’s working in traditionally published memoirs, or download her free workbook to identify which stories to keep in yours and which to cut.