Elements of Fiction (53)
Element 53: Mood
All things occur in some atmosphere or ambience, and the careful, skilled writer knows exactly how to create and maintain such mood, which is what makes it a fictional element.
If the fictional mood is controlled skillfully, the reader will soon find him or herself in just that mood, too, re-creating the various dimensions, mood included, of the story.
Here is what some writers and teachers have pondered about mood.
Let’s begin with John Fowles, “All passages of narrative are set in a kind of musical key, and usually you won’t put in accidentals unless they have some special reason, they seem to work. It’s mood.”
John Gardner has also mused on this, of course, “What happens in the writer’s development of characters happens also in his development of atmosphere and setting. The megaliths and walls that form the salient feature of the cities of the Achaians, antithetical to the flowered walkways and the topless towers of Ilium, grow more stern, more alarming in their solidity with each revision. Menelaos’ scepter, which he uses as a cane, takes on a daemonic force.”
As has Ayn Rand, “I give the reader precise information about the sight by means of those details which convey its essence…. I convey the mood by the kind of words and metaphor I select…. I do not try to convey the mood apart from that which creates the mood. Instead, I carefully select those words that both convey the exact physical details and have specific connotations.”
“In your description of a sunrise, you want to convey a certain mood; the sunrise, let us say, in a ominous one. That requires different words than a description of a bright, cheerful sunrise would. Consider how much knowledge goes into your ability to differentiate between the two intentions. What is ominous? What is cheerful? What kind of concepts, words, metaphors will convey each?”
As for John Steinbeck, “It’s the roundabout method that seems so simple and is actually a choice of symbol blended with word sound. The intent is to soften resistance to the mood by the continuing of sounds and small pictures — miniscule things, about imperceptible.”
E.M. Forster makes a nice observation about the mood of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, “Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.”
Eudora Welty puts it very nicely, “We are bearing in mind that the atmosphere in a story may not be the least of its glories.”
And how about this from Virginia Woolf, “The difficulty is always at the beginning of chapters or sections where a whole new mood has to be caught, plumb in the center.”
The mood of a story will often arise organically, based upon the views and moods of the characters and the ambiance of the place of action, but being aware of mood as a separate element may help you control it to your liking and to the benefit of your story.
© Wolfstuff
