Tonal consistency is often overlooked in fantasy writing. Today I’m going to discuss a topic that ranges from extreme, blatant violations to subtle, accidental slip-ups and why they matter.
Fantasy Writing
The language of fantasy writing is much harder to get right than many “literary fiction” writers give it credit for. In fact, I’d say it is much, much harder than novels set in modern times on Earth.
Let’s start with Shannara because I recently decided to watch the MTV series based on The Elfstones of Shannara.
Major spoilers for the books; minor spoilers for the TV series.
Shannara
Shannara puts a clever twist on the fantasy setting. Instead of it being some mystical past, Terry Brooks made it a futuristic world.
The implication is that a nuclear war happened, destroying technology, and then the radiation mutation of people became elves, gnomes, goblins, humans, etc. I think this is described in one of the “prequel” trilogies/books, but I never read them to be sure.
The number one concern when doing something like this is consistency. Some people might not like this change up because it violates genre conventions, but I couldn’t care less. If something is done consistently, then you should be allowed to do it.
The series does a pretty good job at keeping everything consistent with this setting.
Safe Hold
For example, the hero has to journey to a place called Safe Hold. We find out that this is the Sa(n) Fr(ancisco) (G)old(en Gate Bridge), where the sign has the letters smudged out and disfigured to create the words: Safe Hold.
This is a pretty neat discovery, fully consistent with the setting.
But the consistency of the setting isn’t the only type of consistency. There is also something I’ll call tonal consistency.
Tonal Consistency
Despite being the future, the tone of the series keeps to a traditional fantasy tone. This means no guns, no modern music, and so on.
This is where the TV series is at its worst.
When guns appear in an episode, it is a big shock that totally pulls you out of the tone up to that point. When modern music and a video projector appear, you lose the suspension of disbelief for the tone.
As I’ve already said, you can put all of this stuff in your fantasy setting if you want (I mean, urban fantasy is a whole subgenre!).
The problem isn’t the breaking of a genre convention. The problem is that the reader/watcher has experienced hours of this world and seen no evidence that such things exist. There must be consistency from the start (or done for very deliberate and good reason).
These types of errors occur in a lot of period fiction, but no single example is usually enough to ruin anything.
The problem is that you can only lose the tone of a work a certain number of times before you get pulled totally out of the atmosphere it tries to create. It’s mostly a subconscious thing that you probably don’t even notice until it’s too late to get back into the mood.
Word Choice
Let’s talk about some more subtle examples that are the reason this is so hard to do well. The language itself can be the source of these consistency problems.
One obvious one is using the word “earth” when the characters don’t know about the planet Earth.
It is so easy to accidentally do this (not actually from Shannara): “Wil dug into the ground and felt the warm earth fall between his fingers.”
You can pretend that the narrator has “translated” this for the reader. The word here is technically synonymous with “soil” or “dirt” and not referencing the name of the planet.
But then why take the risk? Just use “soil” or “dirt” if that is what you mean.
If the characters haven’t heard of Earth the planet, then they wouldn’t be using the word “earth” ever.
Period.
The way this usually sneaks in is with similes and metaphors.
The pieces fit together like clockwork.
Wait a minute. Does this world have clocks? Are they precisely put together?
An emotional roller coaster.
Really? Does this world have roller coasters?
Idioms can be problematic as well.
When hell freezes over.
Does anyone in the setting believe that hell is normally full of fire and brimstone?
Sneaky Ordinary Words
Those ones slip in but are usually pretty obvious and easy to catch if you’re paying attention to it. The truly nefarious ones are when a word is perfectly ordinary and not a noun referring to something that doesn’t exist, but it’s etymology contains something that doesn’t exist.
Wow these are subtle, but a great fantasy writer will make every effort to weed these out as well for consistency of tone.
Here’s one: quixotic (this is actually used in The Scions of Shannara, which I started reading, inspired by the show).
It means foolishly impractical in the pursuit of ideals. But wait a second. The only reason it means that is because of Don Quixote. So if this book doesn’t exist in your setting, this word also doesn’t exist.
I’m torn on whether this is appropriate in Shannara. Since we know the book did exist, it seems okay. But still, it seems to conflict with the tone, since the prequels hadn’t been written yet, and we aren’t supposed to know it’s okay.
Measurement
Measurement tends to be a judgment call. I could go either way. English and metric units definitely ruin consistency of tone, but this might be one of those “lesser of two evils” situations.
If there is an easy way out, for example, use “two-day walk” instead of “eighteen miles,” always go with that.
Sometimes you have to get creative enough that it ends up causing more confusion than it’s worth. My rule is to avoid precise measurement in that case, but there may be situations where it is needed.
Final Remarks
As a final note, I’ll say this can go too far. Every writer has to decide for themselves where the cutoff is.
Is “stoic” okay even though it originates from the ancient Greek school of philosophy Stoicism?
I draw the line with these cases by allowing a third-person narrator to use them if that narrator is clearly not someone in/from the world. A character is not allowed to think or say words that originate from a culture that didn’t exist in their setting.
Along the same lines, what about “philosophy?”
The word itself is borrowed from Greek, and so if Greece doesn’t exist on their world, does this break tone? I’d say that’s going too far.
Both narrators and characters are allowed to say borrowed words as long as the word isn’t in reference to a concrete person, place, movement, etc.
You have to realize that most words in English are borrowed or have pretty clear traces from other languages, so you can’t remove all of these for practical reasons.
Anyway. Sorry for spoiling anything. The series got me thinking about this topic, and I realized I had never written about it.
