Friday 18 July 2014

Creating mood in fiction

For readers to appreciate your work, they need to feel something. It is summed up by writer Blair Hurley who says: “When asked what makes our favourite books our favourite books, sometimes we're hard pressed to find an answer. Often it's just a feeling that makes the book special -- a mood that is splendidly cultivated throughout the story and succeeds in immersing us in the world. To improve the impact and feeling of your stories, writers should always consider working on mood and consistency.”

How do we do that? Well, we can use setting to evoke mood. Let the place create the atmosphere for you. If you want scariness in a ghost story, a scene like a pleasant suburban house may work against you. For scariness, there’s nothing wrong with a graveyard, an old rotting house or an empty building at night.

For sadness, there’s also nothing wrong with a graveyard or a funeral home. For happiness, think of a happy place, make the sun shine, make people cheery etc.

Secondly, tie the character to a place. Put your character in a place that helps create an atmosphere. A criminal often occupies dark areas, a romance is set on sunny riverbanks etc.

Finally, get the language right. The key to cultivating a mood in a story is to use language that evokes that mood. If writing a gritty story make the writing gritty, short, sharp, edgy as well. If writing romance, things have to be more soft and sensual, not brutal or disgusting.

Finally, feel free to ignore everything I have just written! It’s all broad brush, I know, and there are a thousand permutations, ghosts in nice houses, villains in respectable businesses, romance in difficult locations.

Every guideline is there to be challenged, it’s what makes for good writing, but as a solid base to work from it’s not bad.

The big rule here is that the reader has to feel that they are there - if we do not then the work fails.

John Dean

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