Excerpt

Immersion

When I was eight, I found the shack next to the woods on the lake's edge. Holes punched through the wood-shake roof, and high, small, rectangles of black gazed across the shore where windows used to be. It slouched, the only silent and still thing amidst the lapping waves, the squawking blue jays, and the warm breeze bending the reeds and pine boughs. Somehow none of those things touched it, like it was slightly removed from them, or beyond them the way the mountain cliffs and the blue sky were.

I wanted to crouch away from it at the same time I had to find out what was inside it. As with all potentially dangerous discoveries made by small boys, the call to adventure sang far more sweetly than the call to retreat. Besides, the ancient hut hadn't noticed me, stuck as it was ruminating over times passed.

I circled around back, looking for a window I could reach. It was obviously abandoned, but just as obviously, the place didn't want to be disturbed, so I placed my feet carefully to avoid crunch of sand or snap of twig. Weather-beaten pine walls grew a fuzz of feathery splinters and soft moss. Empty swallow nests hid in the eaves.

Around the front, with my back to the lake, I faced a pair of barn-style doors, sagging on rusted hinges, pitted chains gnarled around the door handles. They clicked and clacked like old bones under my hesitant touch. Below the doors, some other curious creature had already burrowed inside, and for all I knew, whatever it was lay hunkered down, saliva dripping from its fangs waiting for some stupid little boy to poke his face inside.

I stared at the burrow for a good minute. Behind me, the warm summer breeze ruffling my hair. Before me, the shack breathed cool, clammy air in my face.

I could fit through the burrow.

The ground felt colder than it should have when I got down on my belly and wriggled forward. Halfway through, heart banging in my ears, I lifted my gaze above the rim of the hollow, fully expecting beady red eyes staring back at me out of the shadows.

Empty. No eyes. None that I could see yet, anyway. And I wasn't about to lay around, half in and half out of a hole, waiting for them to open.

The slivered wood at the bottom of the door clawed at the back of my shirt, trying to hold me in place, while I struggled out of its grasp. I bolted to my feet, eyes wide, skin around my ears and scalp tight.

The shack was all dusty blades of light slicing through deep shadows. The scents of earth and musty wood soaked the air, thick enough to taste. Even though the roof was full of holes, the outside world felt muffled and far away, the heat of the day utterly unable to penetrate this small, cold space from another time. I took a few slow steps forward. The space felt bigger inside than I had imagined from outside. The silence was thick. I felt like moving through it sent ripples splashing against the darkness in the corners and in the eaves where the vanes of sunlight couldn't touch.

Against the walls, wooden shelves and boxes emerged from the gloom as my eyes adjusted. An open stall yawned along the righthand wall in a line with two closed doors. A peaked ceiling supported by open-beam trusses reached far higher than I'd expected. The interior walls did not extend all the way up, leaving the unbroken expanse of the roof in broad, murky shadows.

Dirt blanketed every surface and thick cobwebs hung festively across the open spaces between shelves, between beams, in corners, over a trio of rusted gas cans, and drooping raggedly into the middle of the room. Odd metallic chunks and pieces lay strewn on counters under the broken windows, a horseshoe here, an old license plate there, and what looked like the shattered bits of a very large drill. But the thing that riveted my attention was a brown trunk sitting on the ground in a column of white light.

Treasure. Treasure for sure. I felt like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I kneeled before that glowing chest, me in the dark, it bathed in glorious illumination. I wiped some of the dirt away, its thin, leather skin brittle against my fingertips. An old iron lock looped through the clasp holding the lid closed. When I tested it, the whole hasp came off the trunk, lock and all. I froze, having broken a thing that wasn't mine in a place I wasn't supposed to be, and guiltily looked into the shadows surrounding me. I couldn't hear the birds outside, or the breeze in the reeds, or the waves on the shore, and it felt as if those broken, windowless eyes had suddenly turned inward to watch me.

But the damage was done, and my curiosity blistered the back of my mind. I opened the lid on hinges that should have squealed, but the silence in that space swallowed the noise, preventing a mundane creak from defiling its solemn rumination. I wrinkled my nose at a smell something like minty ammonia mixed with housepaint.

Inside, within a peeling floral lining, lay an assortment of newspapers, old magazines, some playing cards, and an old pulp-fiction magazine with a man holding a revolver on the cover. I remember something showing a Model T, and a yellow issue of National Geographic missing its top righthand corner. The castoff memorabilia of a person I would never know.

On the right side of the pile, surprisingly crisp and clean, but with a white fold line dividing Ben Franklin's profile picture, lay a one-hundred-dollar bill. My dad had shown me a one-hundred-dollar bill once and this one was different. It was special and subtlety alien looking.

I had to show my dad!

Remembering spiked traps and giant, rolling boulders of doom, I caught my breath and gingerly picked the bill out of the sunlight. When nothing immediately happened, I closed the lid like it was made of eggshells, then scrambled to the burrow and crawled out into the warm, living world.

Even looking back after several decades, I can still feel what it was like being inside that derelict shack. I can feel that sense of being slightly removed from the rest of the world, the thick silence, the draw of adventure, and the prickle of unseen eyes watching me.

Have you ever been somewhere that made you feel like you were being watched—that no matter which way you turned, it felt like there were eyes on you? Have you ever been to an old house, an abandoned factory, or a particular spot in the woods that lifted the hairs on the nape of your neck?

The "haunted house" is a ready example of atmosphere, but certainly not the only one. Maybe you've found a spot in a garden, or a park, or on the ocean that felt removed from all the things of man. Or a deer meadow opened in front of you while hiking, full of joy and invitation and sunlight. Maybe you've felt the electricity in the air and permeating the crowd at a rock concert.

Think of that classic opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his novel, Paul Clifford. While this line has become a meme and a joke and a stereotype in more recent times, when it was written, it was a brilliant way to serve an important purpose in the opening of the story. What did it do? It created a strong and pointed atmosphere.

Mood and atmosphere are not as acclaimed or as widely discussed as structure, character development, setting, or pacing, but they are just as powerful as those elements. A scene or a setting doesn't have to include only one or the other. They can counterpoint each other, or act in tandem. Your characters can serve as conduits to heighten and enhance the native atmosphere of a setting through the mood they bring to it.

I'm going to show you how to bring the emotionality of your story to blazing and intoxicating light. Or darkness if that's what flips your pancakes.

What Are Mood and Atmosphere?

"In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs."

— H.P. Lovecraft

I've seen these terms thrown around a lot and, especially while researching this book, come across a cornucopia of definitions—or perhaps Pandora's box might be a more appropriate designation. Many writers and editors seem to agree on the basic size and shape of the definition, but just as many of them diverge on the details.

I'm going to squish all those ideas together into clear definitions that I hope everyone can agree on.

Mood is the full palette of emotions a piece of writing evokes in its reader, including what goes on with the atmosphere, but we'll get to that in a moment. By its nature, mood is going to be specific to the individual experiencing the writing. There are two kinds of mood. One is the mood that you as the writer seek to create, and the second is the mood that is actually created when a reader takes what you've done and filters it through the lens of their experience. We cannot control how another person feels or reacts, but we can create the landscape that coaxes feelings to germinate in our readers. Being able to inspire a specific reaction is the goal of strong writing, and we have a whole toolbox to help us do that. In fact, getting your reader to do the emotional heavy lifting in response to our written suggestions is key to creating immersion.

A quiet, sun-soaked deer meadow is going to strike a nature lover differently than a city slicker who once got lost in the woods, or someone who was chased by a mother bear through one, or someone who was accidentally winged by a deer hunter, or someone who got pooped on by red-tailed hawk.

Do not confuse this use of "mood" with the grammatical mood, which is a verb form (like subjunctive, indicative, and imperative), that expresses how an action or state is perceived by the speaker.

Every aspect of your writing can contribute to its mood, from the setting, theme, conflicts, characters, and dialogue to your specific choice of words and sentence structure.

Mood

Mood is the emotional response that the writer wants to evoke in the reader. It is the emotion suffused into a story through the characters as they move through the plot, conflicts, and themes. It is the emotional framework of a piece.

Here is a great example of mood from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

"Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!"

"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you."

Carroll's use of a fantastical beast that talks to Alice creates a wonderous and whimsical mood. A talking unicorn, added to all manner of other odd creatures and goings-on, helps to create a dream-like feeling in the story.

Now you might notice that there is a big chunk of mood-creating machinery missing from the above definition. The setting! The setting is an integral weaver of the emotional tapestry, and it does its work by evoking atmosphere. Atmosphere is a kind of mood that deserves its own definition.

Atmosphere

Atmosphere is an important form of mood. It is the emotion suffused into a story through the setting and worldbuilding. It's the emotional framework of a scene created through the environment, sensory descriptions, and their specific details.

A quick and dirty way of understanding the difference between mood and atmosphere is that mood is emotional response created by the characters, and atmosphere is emotional response created by the setting.

A great example of atmosphere is from Madeleine L'Engle's opening of A Wrinkle in Time, where you'll find a familiar line:

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraith-like shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

This excerpt creates a strong sense of emotion. It moves beyond a simple description aimed at creating an image in your mind's eye. This setting has feeling!

PRO TIP: It's Alive!

Treating your setting like a character will help you create atmosphere. If your setting isn't coming to life for you, imagine your environment as a person and figure out how it would be feeling, what it would be thinking, and how it would be acting. Name it to help personify it! You'll see a shift in the way you view the setting, which will allow you to write it more dynamically, interestingly, and characterfully.

Together, mood and atmosphere create what I call the emotionality of your story. The emotionality is the sum of the kaleidoscope of feelings your story evokes in readers.

Mood and atmosphere work best and are most effective when they build off of one another, even if they're acting as counterpoints. They work best when they work in concert to create a full, three-dimensional experience. You should establish an emotionality that enhances the story you are telling. Sure, the ending will have its impact, but the quality of your emotionality is something that lasts beyond the final words. It will determine if your readers walk away thoughtful, frightened, delighted, or dehydrating from their eyeballs.

Think of it this way: your characters end up stranded on an island. The emotionality could be Lord of the Flies, or it could be Robinson Crusoe. The predicaments are basically the same, but the way those stories make you feel afterward is profoundly different.

What Are Mood and Atmosphere Good For?

Every piece of writing has a mood, regardless of whether it's intentionally focused. How do the characters make you feel as you're reading? That's its mood. Often individual scenes will have their own emotional flavor, but the entire piece will still have a prevailing mood—that is, a central mood that carries through the story.

And, yes, a single piece of writing can inspire a different mood in different people. There's simply no way to account for every single reader having the same response to your story when they all come from different life experiences. Despite that, you can still guide their story's emotionality and aim it toward a goal—toward the feeling you want readers to walk away with. If most of your book is aimed toward making readers feel a particular way—hopeful, for example—the scenes that don't evoke the response you want will be overwhelmed by the ones that do.

Generally speaking, short stories are more likely to have a focused mood and atmosphere that doesn't bounce around. Limited in length, they must commit to something and shape the other elements in the story to evoke that thing. Novels have the luxury of length, and therefore their moods can change and evolve with more freedom. This is one more reason why writing short form is a different art than writing long, but writing short is an excellent workout for your ability to craft mood and atmosphere in spare, powerful ways. As a bonus, when you do write long-form, this new strength can translate to a much greater mastery over your emotionality.

Whatever the length of your story, consider and plan its emotionality because it will enhance your readers' experience. By creating the right mood and atmosphere you facilitate their emotional connection to your characters, settings, and therefore your world as a whole. This is key to immersion. Successfully crafted emotionality gives readers a personal and real connection to your story, because though you guide them, their responses are wholly their own. Through that personal connection, that emotional impact, your story, your theme, and your message will be deeper, richer, and clearer.

They'll get it.

A story with a cohesive and well-constructed emotionality creates a lasting emotional response in your readers. When you create that connection with them, not only will it act like a hook for all your other stories, but it will also invite readers to absorb and consider your theme and message, if you have them. Theme and message are powerful tools that fit hand in hand with mood and atmosphere to create a work that lodges in the minds and feelings of readers. We'll look at theme in chapter seven, and really dissect theme and message in a different book, later in this series.

Do note that over the course of your novel, your mood may change, and that's okay, sometimes it's even necessary for the emotional journey you want your readers to go on. It will also change as readers become attached to your characters and begin to want things for them, good or bad. Know that mood doesn't need to be constant, it can shift through a whole rainbow of shades from start to finish, but it does need to be present, and should be purposeful.