: What do you think about having very different tones in a single story? What if a chapter is incredibly depressive, dark, with intense language. And the next reads almost like a dialogue from

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If you switch narrative tone, it will distance the reader and make it harder for him or her to achieve suspension of disbelief. If you are writing a post-modernist novel, or a post-post-modernist novel (say, a fable about life in a you-tube-saturated short-attention-span society), this might be a good thing. Otherwise, it is probably something to avoid.

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You could get away with drastically different tones if you had two different POV narrators. If one is Tina Fey and the other is Sylvia Plath, they will of course see the world differently. The contrast will probably make your book lean more towards humor/dark humor/satire, so as long as you're okay with that, give it a shot.

This is not the same as a lighter passage in a bleak book or a dramatic scene in a funny book. We're talking about entirely different tone, vocabulary, and imagery.

I would not have a third-person limited or omniscient narrative voice which changes from Fey to Plath without explanation. The whiplash would be off-putting.

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In Shakespeare's Othello, Othello's speech often changes tone between scenes. He often sees himself as uncivilized however his tough is quite the contrary. However, in some scenes his language becomes more "brutal".

This was just an example, I think that changing the tone of dialogue in a character can both allow the reader to identify the mood of a situation. For example, if a character who is always optimistic suddenly starts contemplating his life and mortality it would allow the reader to see that this character is in a perhaps "grave" circumstance.

This question allows for a lot of opinion and this is just mine, you may find some people who think that changing a characters tone is "inconsistent" with the story.

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