Mood and Consistency in Fiction
Improve the impact of your fiction by evoking mood.
Use carefully chosen language and settings and tie them together to create atmosphere in your fiction.
When asked what makes our favorite books our favorite 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, consider working on mood and consistency.
First, choose a lexicon. The key to cultivating a mood in a story is to use language that evokes that mood. If writing a gritty, noir story, all of the words must fall within the noir lexicon of hard-boiled language. If writing romance, things have to be soft and sensual, not brutal or disgusting. The tone of the words chosen is crucial toward creating a consistent atmosphere. If trying to create a frightening scene, for example, the frightening atmosphere can't be diluted with jokes. If creating a sad scene, words must all be in somber tones and colors; jump out of the mood even once, and you'll lose your reader.
Second, use setting to evoke mood. One of the more powerful ways to imbue a scene with atmosphere is to not start from a vacuum. Instead, let an evocative place do the work. It's not cheating! If you want scariness, a scene like a pleasant suburban house will be working against the story. For scariness, there's nothing wrong with a graveyard, old rotting house, or empty building at night. For sadness, there's also nothing wrong with a graveyard, funeral home, or lonely moor. For happiness, pull out the three-ring circus. The natural trappings of each of these settings will contribute a great deal to the story's mood. They also help translate your desired mood and atmosphere into a language the reader can easily understand, identify with, and imagine. Stimulating the reader to vividly imagine the happenings of the story is the ultimate goal.
Third, tie character strongly to place. Some of the more memorable characters in literature are those who have a very strong sense of place. Scarlet O'Hara and her Tara, Don Corleone and his New York, or any Dostoevskian character and their Mother Russia, are a few examples. If you follow the second step without the third, the settings will feel forced and artificial, thrown in merely because they are the appropriate cliches. The way to avoid that forced feeling is to make it feel perfectly natural for the character to be in that place. Something about the character's personality or state of mind at the time must make a journey to this particular setting relevant and not random. As the old adage "truth is stranger than fiction" reminds us, in life people often behave randomly, but it feels cheap and unearned if it happens in fiction. The world of fiction, in many ways, is a more orderly version of the world we inhabit, where every metaphor is consistent and nothing happens without a reason.
To sum up:
• Choose your lexicon
• Use setting to evoke mood
• Tie character strongly to that setting
