You set the tone

or, what I learned from ER

I used to love watching ER and in the days before streaming, I would sometimes miss an episode or have to ask a friend to video one for me. There was an episode I remember well, where my favourite character, Dr. Greene, was about to leave the hospital due to ill health. He had a EL token - and these weren’t used any more - and, on his last day, he gave it to Dr. Carter (played by Noah Wyle, now starring in The Pitt, and he said, ‘You set the tone.’ A powerful gift, a reminder of the power you can have in an organisation, to set the tone, to get it right. For those who use a service. For those who work there.

As novelists, we have people using our service, aka readers. And we have those who work there, aka characters. And, as the one in charge, we set the tone. A genre has a tone - what the reader/service user might reasonably expect. What feels right and fair and good. If we are reading a cosy crime novel and suddenly a horrific murder is graphically and vividly described, we will be surprised and shocked, the tone we were promised, the contract we made with the writer has been broken. Or a character, who has been likeable and real, suddenly does something uncharacteristically cruel. We ave not set the tone but broken it.

My cosy crime nove, ‘To Muddy Death’ is a third written and I need to keep reminding myself of that EL token to keep me on the right path - light, fun, quirky, heartfelt, goodhearted with lovable and intelligent characters who broadly look on the light side of life. People you want to hang out with, people you can imagin havng a coffee with in a beachside cafe, not drinking Buckfast from a broken bottle after being thrown out of a pub at midnight. Wise and kind people, not tortured. I like those novels too but that’s not what I’m writing this time.

So I keep looking at my metaphotical EL token. I keep setting the tone.