Select Page

Welcome to the forty-second of our Creative Challenges.  WriteMovies’ 100-Day Creative Challenge 42 is about tone in writing.

Guidance: For the next 20 minutes, use whatever method you like – thoughts and ideas, mind maps, diagrams or sketches, a sample of script, prose, poetry – as you prepare a creative piece, about:

Someone preparing a speech to make at a wedding.

  • As you work through this task, you might also consider how this activity relates to tone in writing.
  • Save or photograph your work as a document called “100DayCC42”. Then reflect on this experience and what it has taught you about you and your writing: what comes naturally to you, which aspects  were easy and difficult, and the subjects, angles and attitudes that you like to focus your writing on.
  • Share online if you like using the hashtag #100DayCC42 to compare to other people’s experiences and support each other, or submit to our Academy Lite if you’re a subscriber!

When you complete the Challenge – or if you get completely stuck – then look at the Feedback below!


Feedback:

Tone is about how it FEELS to be experiencing each part of the story. Tone establishes the emotional reaction conveyed in the dialogue, acting, direction, reading experience, audience responses etc, at every point. Certain words can successfully establish a tone – and others can totally destroy it in a moment. Every word counts.

Don’t stray too far away from your project’s core tone – but vary it frequently, don’t be a one-note tune!

For many – perhaps most – people, a wedding speech (or funeral speech) is likely to be the most difficult thing they’ll ever have to write. Why? They’ll have to say it themselves to a potentially big audience – who they will have to meet many times again – at a major life event, which everyone will be remembering and photographing. But that’s not what makes it so hard to write. The problem is striking the right tone, and finding things to say that will both engage and connect with the whole of the (multi-generational, multi-family) audience at the same time. Getting the right tone, is rarely more difficult than this. No wonder then that wedding speeches are much more often seen in romantic comedies than any other kind of story – the easiest way out for the writer is just to be funny or inappropriate. Not that being funny is ever easy – but at least it’s a tone everyone can relate to.

General tips and feedback:

Many writers, naturally, don’t find it easy to be creative ‘on tap’ – especially for work that they didn’t set themselves. But to write professionally, you will usually need to meet deadlines and requirements, that can’t be put off, for briefs you didn’t choose for yourself: even if you’re ill or feeling down, you’ll usually have to just find a way through, and get the results that are needed, to the quality that’s necessary. So the WriteMovies Creative Challenges are designed to help you find ways around the crucial issues of ‘block’.

We do this by setting a (deceptively!) simple brief, and encouraging you to use a variety of methods, approaches and creative products in order to find ways around it, and generate some kind of outcomes that might be useful to you in the future. Whatever state your mind and mood are in – energetic or tired, stimulated or bored, motivated or disengaged, etc – there are different ‘modes’ of creative productivity which you can engage, to make the best of it: editing your work if you can’t write, making notes if you can’t generate script, etc. Try a mix of methods to make the most of activities such as the Creative Challenges, especially anytime you get stuck: just keep adding notes, sketches etc freely, you can decide later whether any of them are useful! Also note that the brief is to ‘prepare’ a creative work – not to actually make it straight away, before you feel ready to! But if you’ve come away from this with a passage of prose or script or even poetry, well done!

Hopefully this activity will have shown you the potential value of our Creative Challenges, and the benefits of making a routine to complete them, and persisting with it day by day to gradually improve all aspects of your writing and to develop solutions to ‘block’, that you will become more and more proficient with over time. We recommend that you commit to fulfilling the 100-Day Creative Challenges, sharing your outputs to gain the support and feedback of other writers working on the same activities, and if you’d like expert daily feedback from us on this and much more, additional material, subscribe to the WriteMovies Academy Lite now!

Go to the 100-Day Creative Challenge homepage HERE, to access further Challenges! Use our hashtag #100DayCC on your social media to discuss the Challenges more generally!

Sign In

Register

Reset Password

Please enter your username or email address, you will receive a link to create a new password via email.