Evoking Setting & Mood

Atmosphere can make or break the immersion that writers strive to achieve, both in fiction and nonfiction. Let’s learn how to craft an effective one in this week’s blog.

In this post:

• Grounding you & your readers

• Atmosphere in nonfiction

• Setting as a character

• Voice & language

• Case study: unsettling your readers

Grounding you & your readers

As writers, our goal is to envelop our readers so thoroughly that they forget they are reading. We want them to be transported to a particular setting, to feel the emotion in our words, to find value in what we are saying. To do that, we must take care in setting the place, time and tone of our work.

How can you tell if you’re doing that? Well, for one thing, you ought to feel connected to your work. It may feel different for everyone, but there can be magic in writing for the author, just as there is in reading a well-written piece. You might make note of interesting turns of phrases here and there, but for the most part, the words should melt away to reveal the world beyond.

If a reader, and even you as the writer, do not have some sense of orientation in this world, the words on the page will be plain as day, and worse yet, they will not land.

Atmosphere in nonfiction

Though we often focus on building atmosphere in fiction writing, it plays a tremendous part in nonfiction too.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is in memoir. We want to emulate particular times or places in our lives, especially if they bear personal significance.

But beyond this, the application becomes a little more abstract. A how-to manual might not need “atmosphere” so much as a specific tone (though it could help, depending on the inanity of the subject), but other kinds of writing can certainly benefit. Storytelling is a strategy that’s used all the time in persuasive writing, especially for marketing and advertising. (Think about anytime anyone has told you, “Picture this…”)

People like telling and hearing stories. Humanity has passed down oral histories from the time we could speak. We relate to each other through storytelling, and we remember certain information better because of it.

Setting as a character

So how do you put these principles to work in your writing? One easy way is to treat your setting as its own character.

As writers, we can get attached to our characters. We pour our hearts and souls into these people, which is what they become—people. They have their own distinct personalities, they have strengths and weaknesses and moods, just like a real person would. Settings can do the same.

A great example of this is in pathetic fallacy. This literary device shows us that there can be a connection between what is happening in the interior world of our characters and the outside world of our setting. If a character is happy, the sun may shine in full force. If they’re sad, then the rain clouds blot it out. Sometimes a setting knows more than its inhabitants, and the weather and general mood of the place can set our readers up to anticipate something that our characters don’t yet know.

Another important facet of setting and mood is to take your time with it and let it build. Description goes a long way to grounding our readers, but it doesn’t need to be crammed in all at once. Settings can be mysterious, guarding secrets that reveal themselves over time. You can add description in little chunks throughout a work, sprinkling it into your characters’ interactions with the setting.

Voice & language

Beyond these elements, your narrative voice and language choices also reflect on the time and place of the piece. If you’re writing Victorian historical fiction, it may behoove you to use more rigid, formal parlance. Conversely, if you’re writing about the Wild West, your tone might be more in line with the slang of the day.

Note that you can overdo this. Remember that one of the goals of good writing is that it should disappear on the page. You can afford to be choosy.

Lastly, consider how seriously you want your reader to take the work. This should also be reflected in your voice. Perhaps the narrator is a bit of a joker. If that’s the case, then your readers may come to expect that the subject matter is humorous. That said, there can be interesting consequences when juxtaposing tone with subject matter. A serious narrator might come across as even more silly if the subject is irreverent. A friendly, joking narrator could lend more heft to an unexpected emotional gut-punch if done correctly.

Case study: unsettling your readers

Take the following two examples describing the same moment. In them, we’re trying to make our readers feel a range of unsettled from vague creepiness to dread.

Example 1:

I stopped at the top of the stairs. Something didn’t quite feel right. I put my foot out to test the next step and stopped again.

“Hello?” I called out. “Is anyone there?”

It was dark in front of me. I fumbled for the phone in my pocket, then turned on its flashlight. Nothing but my own familiar basement greeted me.

I took another step.

Example 2:

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled and I stopped at the top of the stairs. I forced my toes to reach out and test the next step. The stair creaked and I stopped again.

“Hello?” I called out. “Is anyone there?”

The darkness beyond my step held its breath, as I did out of reflex. It seemed to reach out toward me, its tendrils slowly consuming the light from upstairs. I fumbled in my pocket for the phone that lay there, turning on the flashlight as quickly as my fingers would allow. Cobwebs and the furniture I had stored here six months ago greeted me. The white of the sheets I had covered everything in reflected back in the light of the flashlight.

I took another step.

While both of these passages might work for a project, depending on the goal, it’s fairly safe to say the second one is imbued with more atmosphere. There are just a few key differences in the language and approach to describing the same event.

Note that the perspective does not change from first person, but there is a difference in the state of the narrator and the state of the environment. The first example shows the narrator as active, while the second puts them in a more passive or reactive state. Conversely, in the second example, the setting—the basement staircase—takes on a much more active role. It seems to hold its breath or reach out.

The other important distinction to make is that we spend more time on the description here. The narrator describes not only what they’re seeing, but how they feel about it, engaging more senses. Additionally, the second example moves away from an outright telling of events to showing (compare “Something didn’t feel quite right” to “The hairs on the back of my neck prickled”). This is powerful when we want our readers to stop and reflect on what may really be happening.

A goal of good writing is for our characters and readers to develop a relationship with the world around them. To do that, we need to ensure we give as much thought to the character that is our setting, and be particular in how we describe it, just as we would any other character.

Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.

She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.