Beware the frightening story killer known as Monotone. He’s as nefarious as they come – stalking down perfectly good stories and senselessly draining them of all that’s interesting and good. You may have encountered him once or twice in a dark book aisle. You pick up a novel, read the jacket. The story piques your interest so you skim a few pages and … OH NO! It’s Monotone! Every paragraph reads the same, the words fall flat, the characters are indistinguishable, the dialogue is a droning buzz of boring, the world is as vibrant as office cubicle beige. Terrified, you toss the book aside and run for your life.

Keep this killer out of your writing.

How? The same way you avoid being monotone when you speak. Your voice rises when you’re excited, falls when you’re sad. When you’re telling your spouse about an argument with a friend, you use a very different tone, pitch, volume and vocabulary than when you’re telling your child a bedtime story. Those same rules apply to your writing.

Quiet moments whisper. Action shouts. Fear screams. Love swoons. One tried-and-true way to spot Monotone in your own writing is to read your work aloud. Do your word choices, sentences, pacing and flow shift depending on the rise and fall of the action and as your characters experience different emotions? Look at your pages: Are they dominated by dialogue or exposition? Monotone lurks in the sea of sameness. Mix things up to guard against him.