Addison

One of the qualities I am most interested in projecting into my stories is an innate sense of mood - usually in my case a vaguely languid, somewhat dreamlike state, perhaps reminiscent most of drifting from one point to another rather than having a series of sequences hammered out in a fairly staightforward manner.

What do you think is the best method of infusing this sort of moodiness into your writing?

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Hodge

That sounds less like mood and more like surrealism, maybe magical realism if done a certain way.

The only way to do it is to do it. No one can tell you how to because it's your own style that you must develop. Just keep practicing at it.

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Addison

Quite, well, I suppose I hadn't made myself terribly clear - what I mean to ask is what is the easiest way of effecting a particular mood in your writing?

(And yes, I'm afraid I am rather a surrealist - or perhaps an ultra-realist, as life never seems either as fast-past or rational as it is made out to be.)

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Great God, how frail a thing is man; how swift his minutes pass:
His age contracts within a span, he blooms and dies like grass.

Hodge

You have to tie your description, imagery, and other elements into that mood. If you want to write The Metamorphosis you don't start out with it being a happy and sunny day where Gregor just can't wait to leap out of bed--only if he could! No, you make it a grey, cloudy day, with Gregor barely giving his change a thought at first because his life sucks so much--where he just wants to stay in bed and not get up and have to support his lazy, deadbeat father and the rest of his manipulative family.

If you want to create a mood that makes everything seem dreamy and disconnected, then you might want to use passive voice more often than usual, you could insert a lot of internal monologue and just gloss over what's happening outside the character's head, maybe describe the world as hazy or pale or in some other atypical manner--there's lots of ways to create a mood.

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Mike C

Hodge is right. You can only get the effect you want by writing it, rejecting, writing again, and again, and again. You're looking for short-cuts; there aren't any.

One of Van Gough's most famous paintings is the Sunflowers. Do you know how many times he painted sunflowers? Nobody does, but he painted them obsessively, over and over, determined to get every nuance exactly right.

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glennstewart

'Mood' is a flexible and varied thing. One word, five or 200 may be employed. Stephen King, in my opinion, can set a mood, convey a feeling, in a sentence where I require a full page at times.

for example:
Mary and I were in the rear of the launch, just in front of the helmsman. The Frenchman stood between two sets of oars and two oarsmen; Michael, Anthony and Libby were in the bow. Conversations turned to whispers, which dwindled to silence. All aboard were hypnotized by the rhythmic sameness of the oars.



Have fun...Glenn

TimK

Hi, Addison. This is a great question. I think you mean, how does a writer manipulate the reader's feelings. In your particular example, it sounds like you want a millieu that feels surreal.

Here's a process that might work:

• Think about what apects of the millieu might generate the feelings you want in your readers.
• Ask what the implications are of those aspects. How do they affect the characters and conflicts?
• Have your sympathetic characters react to these aspects the way you want your readers to react.

If you simply want writing that is stylistically dreamlike, you can just jump from place to place or include other discontinuities in the writing. But really this accomplishes nothing until you think about how it affects the characters. What if the characters realize that the setting jumps from place to place, as in a dream, but they think this is completely normal? Your audience will also want to think of this as normal, this strange universe you've put them in. This will produce one set of feelings. If the characters see it happening but think it's abnormal, this will produce a different set of reactions. If the characters, don't jump from place to place, but the reader does, he will simply readjust his compass after each scene change and try to integrate the scenes into a coherent whole.

-TimK

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glennstewart

Addison, my suggestion? Don't overthink it...how does it feel when you read it? Keep up the good work...Glenn