The Alley is Becoming a Runway: Tone in Fiction

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Friday, August 17, 2007
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We found a teenaged girl sprawled on the pavement in the alley behind our building. Her shoulder dug into a brick wall and an impossibly long leg -- pale and bare -- extended straight out. The other was bent, like she'd slipped, and it must have been a terrible slip the way her body was twisted around. I stopped in my tracks, but Laurie kept going.

"This is a popular spot for them," she said over her shoulder. "I've been running into them all summer."

Them? Who were they? I peered into the doorway beside the girl and sure enough there were several others standing around, conferring with one another in whispers. I gazed again at the girl on the ground, and she looked more dazed than hurt. Eerily thin, too, with a pallor than glowed in the shadowy doorway. Ah, I thought. Drugs.

Shouldn't we do something? Laurie kept moving and, indifferent Samaritan that I am, so did I. As we neared our car, though, I stole a glance sideways to see if the girl had managed to get up. That's when I noticed the people with her in more detail. Two women in their mid-thirties. One of them held a piece of what looked like shiny foil, and the other hefted something black and menacing in her hands. A camera. Then it dawned on me. The contorted, heroin-thin girl on the pavement wasn't a junkie. She was a model.

That was the first of several encounters I've had with models in the past two weeks. Whenever I fetch the car from the alley, I can't seem to steer clear of them. Once I had to step aside to let a file of statuesque blondes march past, each one a little taller and a little older than the last. A family of models, presumably. Monday, I had a conversation with my pastor out in the alley, standing beside his parked car, and as we spoke a girl in a pink tutu ran and leapt in the air. Again and again, right over his shoulder. The photographer was tucked near the wheel well of an SUV, clicking away with intensity.

"Are we in the way?" I asked nervously.

"If you are," she replied, "I'll tell you."

I certainly felt like I was in the way. It's hard not to notice when someone's jumping a few feet away -- hard not to stare -- but I'm the sort of person who insists on not taking notice, not gaping like an idiot. My ideal facial expression at all times is unsurprised. The models make it hard, though.

My alley is a runway -- but it's hardly glamorous. The pavement's broken up and often slick with oil. The buildings that back onto the alley are uneven and slipshod in comparison with their facades. Layers of painted signs cover most of the surfaces, the newer ones slapped on over the obsolete without quite covering them. In comparison to the picturesque streets all around, our alley is a scarred, dystopian cityscape. In other words, it has atmosphere.

That's what brings the photographers, I think. They're looking for more than an interesting background. They want their photos to have a tone. Sure, they may be shooting local girls on behalf of some homegrown retailer, but they want to do it with a certain amount of style. I've never seen the resulting pictures, so I don't know how well it's turned out -- but the fact that so many different photographers bring so many different models here suggests that something's working.

Tone is one of those qualities authors often struggle to bring to their work. Tone is treacherous, easy either to forget or overdo. In other arts, tone might consist of a certain sound, or a certain look. It suggests mood and theme. It helps bring unity to the work. In prose there is nothing to see, nothing to hear. We can't bring out laptops out to the alley and start writing. For writers, tone is an abstraction waiting to be embodied.

Some basic words we use to talk about tone are dark and light. When we say something's light, we either mean that it's comic or that it's inconsequential (which is not the same thing). When the tone is more serious, we might describe it as weighty. Tragedy is dark, but darkness sometimes implies cynicism, too. The book of Ecclesiastes is dark, while the Song of Solomon is light. Revelation is dark, too, and the Old Testament prophets are weighty. This isn't very precise language, but it's our way to describing the feeling that goes along with the content.

As an artist, you can juxtapose content and feeling. The photographers in my alley are doing just that. They take fresh-faced girls in nice clothes and pose them against a patch of scorched brickwork, constrasting light and dark. This time of year, the way the sun filters down through the alley, choked back by the high buildings, creates a similar contrast. An author who handles tragedy with a light touch creates the same effect, and so does the one who takes trivialities seriously. The safe thing is to match tone and content, but the safe thing doesn't always produce the best results.

It would be safer, for example, to put pretty girls against pretty backgrounds and take pretty pictures of them. I'm guessing that's what at least some clients would prefer -- just as some readers or editors might. But the artist's instinct seems to stray unerringly toward these juxtapositions of light and dark. We do the unexpected -- and do what's expected in unexpected ways. It's not a question for originality as much as it's a search for texture.