What tone tells us is that if fiction regularly presents a difficult world, it also indicates how to make sense of that world—and for whom the world is difficult. Whether positive or negative, fiction always says something about how we live, and not in an individual sense but a contextual one. When we write fiction, we write the world. Even if that world looks almost the same as ours, it will always be a representation, not a universal. If there is a distance tone inhabits, it is the distance between our world and the world of the story.