Line Editing –Tonal Fit to the Audience and Genre.

Let’s talk about my garden for a moment:

This garden is a touch overgrown...

The garden stretched out like an open wound, raw and gaping beneath the heavy sky. Lavender stood in jagged rows, its pale purple blooms like bruises blooming on the sickly green flesh of its leaves. Russian sage curled in ghostly tendrils, a spectral mist creeping low to the earth, whispering secrets to the dead. Nearby, Shasta daisies leered like wide, unblinking eyes, their yellow centers the color of old bones. Coneflowers drooped like weary limbs, their petals ragged and torn. Phlox sprawled in tangled knots, a mass of white teeth belonging to a creature lying just beneath the surface, waiting to rise. Even the scent of lavender, sweet to the untrained nose, carried the cloying heaviness of decay, like the lingering scent from Grandmother’s funeral.

So… would you want to take a walk in that garden? Is that a description you would see in a gardening book about how to plan your flower patch?

No! Because the tone is all wrong. It is jarring to describe a garden like this.

This is much more normal:

The flower garden stretched in soft, flowing rows, a tapestry of purples and whites swaying with each gust of wind against a carpet of vibrant green. Lavender stood proudly, its fragrant spikes buzzing with the hum of bees, while Russian sage spilled like a misty haze, its silvery foliage catching the sunlight. Shasta daisies beamed like little suns, their bright white petals radiating around golden centers, while coneflowers stood tall, their delicate drooping petals swaying with every passing butterfly.

Now we have a tone match.

There are no hard rules for matching tone. If you are writing a horror piece, it is entirely possible that the first example is exactly how you want to describe a garden in which a detective needs to search for blood or a discarded knife. If you are writing a pastoral scene where first romance blooms, it is probably a bad choice.

The same is true for all your writing. When we pick color descriptions, smells, images, and their comparisons or metaphors, we have to be aware not just of definition but of connotation. Something may truly smell like rotting eggs, but if you describe it with "rotting eggs," the idea is generally negative to a Western nose. Something might be blood red, but that has connotations beyond just the color. Words carry associations.

For your genre, you can try building your own list or searching for lists compiled by others that fit the tonal match of ways to describe colors, sights, and smells that align with your desired emotional impact. Go through your book, stopping approximately every page or so. Ask yourself: Is this matching the tone I want to have in my work? What images do I see, and what emotions do I feel from the words I selected?

It is slow going, but your book needs this level of scrutiny to hold together.

Next up: Grammar… Love it or hate it, we need it.