Hello,Sunday Dinners is out in a few weeks and so I'm goi...
Hello,
Sunday Dinners is out in a few weeks and so I'm going to carry on with my series of short blogs about the book. Today I'm going to talk about tone. Yeah, I know, it sounds boring, but trust me it isn't (hopefully).
Tone is one of the first things I think about when I start writing a book. Tone is everything. Tone literally sets the tone - see I told you it wasn't boring - jokes already! When you watch a television show or a film, great work has gone into the tone of it. How it looks, the set, the characters, the colours, the music - everything adds to the tone. You probably don't even realise what's happened behind the scenes to make things look the way they do, and perhaps we shouldn't see it, but it makes a HUGE difference to the final product. When writing a novel, it's obviously harder than a visual art like television because we're only working with words, but you can still create so much tone and for Sunday Dinners, I knew tone was going to be crucial.
The first inspiration for Sunday Dinners was the novel, The Pile Of Stuff At The Bottom Of The Stairs, by the brilliant Christina Hopkinson. It's a novel I really love. It's funny, serious, set firmly in London suburbia, and about a husband and wife having all sorts of trouble. It shows us family life in all it's hilarious ridiculousness. I took a lot of inspiration from this novel and especially the little details about marriage and parenthood. Another book that inspired me was the wonderful, Us, by David Nicholls. Us is the sort of book that is right on the line between humour and drama. I was also inspired by the television show, Outnumbered, because it shows all the mundane day-to-day realities of family life and this is exactly what I wanted to do with Sunday Dinners.
I wanted Sunday Dinners to have elements of all of these. I wanted it to have the tension and humour of The Pile Of Stuff At The Bottom Of The Stairs. I wanted it to be as funny and dramatic (and well written!) as Us, and have all the gritty day-to-day reality of Outnumbered. If this novel was going to be a success, it had to have exactly the right tone. It's taken me about a year and a half to finish Sunday Dinners and the main reason is tone.
When I finished the first draft it was too mundane - not enough happened. It was more a series of ordinary suburban events and yes it was funny and I think the characters instantly jumped off the page, but as a novel it failed. I injected more drama, lost some jokes and it became too serious and so I started again - time after time. More jokes, less drama, more events, more emphasis on the marriage, more flashbacks etc. It became like a giant jigsaw puzzle and no matter how I put the pieces together, it never quite worked. The important thing was though, I knew it was there. I knew I could make it work and eventually the tone would find itself.
It took me a long time to get it just right. To balance humour and drama is by far the biggest challenge in writing - in my humble opinion. Whether I have got it right, I'll let you be the judge of that. I hope I have. It's been my biggest challenge yet as a writer, but hopefully the finished book will be worth the long wait and all the struggles to get it done.
SUNDAY DINNERS is out on October 26th. You can pre-order it here!
Until next time.
Hugs,
Jon X
Sunday Dinners is out in a few weeks and so I'm going to carry on with my series of short blogs about the book. Today I'm going to talk about tone. Yeah, I know, it sounds boring, but trust me it isn't (hopefully).
Tone is one of the first things I think about when I start writing a book. Tone is everything. Tone literally sets the tone - see I told you it wasn't boring - jokes already! When you watch a television show or a film, great work has gone into the tone of it. How it looks, the set, the characters, the colours, the music - everything adds to the tone. You probably don't even realise what's happened behind the scenes to make things look the way they do, and perhaps we shouldn't see it, but it makes a HUGE difference to the final product. When writing a novel, it's obviously harder than a visual art like television because we're only working with words, but you can still create so much tone and for Sunday Dinners, I knew tone was going to be crucial.
The first inspiration for Sunday Dinners was the novel, The Pile Of Stuff At The Bottom Of The Stairs, by the brilliant Christina Hopkinson. It's a novel I really love. It's funny, serious, set firmly in London suburbia, and about a husband and wife having all sorts of trouble. It shows us family life in all it's hilarious ridiculousness. I took a lot of inspiration from this novel and especially the little details about marriage and parenthood. Another book that inspired me was the wonderful, Us, by David Nicholls. Us is the sort of book that is right on the line between humour and drama. I was also inspired by the television show, Outnumbered, because it shows all the mundane day-to-day realities of family life and this is exactly what I wanted to do with Sunday Dinners.
I wanted Sunday Dinners to have elements of all of these. I wanted it to have the tension and humour of The Pile Of Stuff At The Bottom Of The Stairs. I wanted it to be as funny and dramatic (and well written!) as Us, and have all the gritty day-to-day reality of Outnumbered. If this novel was going to be a success, it had to have exactly the right tone. It's taken me about a year and a half to finish Sunday Dinners and the main reason is tone.
When I finished the first draft it was too mundane - not enough happened. It was more a series of ordinary suburban events and yes it was funny and I think the characters instantly jumped off the page, but as a novel it failed. I injected more drama, lost some jokes and it became too serious and so I started again - time after time. More jokes, less drama, more events, more emphasis on the marriage, more flashbacks etc. It became like a giant jigsaw puzzle and no matter how I put the pieces together, it never quite worked. The important thing was though, I knew it was there. I knew I could make it work and eventually the tone would find itself.
It took me a long time to get it just right. To balance humour and drama is by far the biggest challenge in writing - in my humble opinion. Whether I have got it right, I'll let you be the judge of that. I hope I have. It's been my biggest challenge yet as a writer, but hopefully the finished book will be worth the long wait and all the struggles to get it done.
SUNDAY DINNERS is out on October 26th. You can pre-order it here!
Until next time.
Hugs,
Jon X
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