Melody v Tone
Mar. 2nd, 2006 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranDisclaimer: I'm going to be using musical terms here which I know very little about, and I'm probably misusing them.
When I started out writing, I thought my biggest strength was in description, particularly emotional description. Looking back now, and remembering the last time I got to read some of my juvenilia, I think my main strengths and interest lie in situation and story. In musical terms, I'd characterize this as Tone vs Melody. Tone is all about trying to convey all the emotion you can in every note or chord. Melody is about trying to convey emotion by the sequence of notes. The notes themselves can be quite simple, but it's the way they fall one after another that makes the difference.
It's a bit like comparing Mozart or Haydn with Wagner or Mahler. In Mozart, an astonishing amount of emotion can be conveyed in a seemingly ordinary melodic line, it all depends on what happened beforehand and what context was set up. With Wagner, on the other hand, a huge amount of emotion can be packed into a single, unsatisfied chord.
In writing, I think it's the difference between being able to immerse a reader in every moment, to be able to show exactly how a character is feeling, and being able to convey emotion by showing a sequence of events and achieving deep emotion even the characters are still shown at distance. A simple story beautifully told versus a beautiful story simply told.
That is not to say you can't do both at once, of course. You're going to need to do both of them to be able to tell a decent story. Just as, in music, you will need to be at least passable in both Tone and Melody, even if you only specialize in one.
When I started out writing, I thought my biggest strength was in description, particularly emotional description. Looking back now, and remembering the last time I got to read some of my juvenilia, I think my main strengths and interest lie in situation and story. In musical terms, I'd characterize this as Tone vs Melody. Tone is all about trying to convey all the emotion you can in every note or chord. Melody is about trying to convey emotion by the sequence of notes. The notes themselves can be quite simple, but it's the way they fall one after another that makes the difference.
It's a bit like comparing Mozart or Haydn with Wagner or Mahler. In Mozart, an astonishing amount of emotion can be conveyed in a seemingly ordinary melodic line, it all depends on what happened beforehand and what context was set up. With Wagner, on the other hand, a huge amount of emotion can be packed into a single, unsatisfied chord.
In writing, I think it's the difference between being able to immerse a reader in every moment, to be able to show exactly how a character is feeling, and being able to convey emotion by showing a sequence of events and achieving deep emotion even the characters are still shown at distance. A simple story beautifully told versus a beautiful story simply told.
That is not to say you can't do both at once, of course. You're going to need to do both of them to be able to tell a decent story. Just as, in music, you will need to be at least passable in both Tone and Melody, even if you only specialize in one.
