Are you in the mood for improving your stories?

How concentrating on tone and mood can help you seduce your readers

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

Hello everyone.

What kind of a mood are you in? Up, or down, or somewhere betwixt and between? Is your mood going to colour your day? Is it going to have an impact on your interactions? Is it going to influence how you perceive what happens around you? I think the answer to those last three is likely to be yes, which is why I believe mood and tone are such important elements for writing better stories.

As a literary magazine editor and competition judge, I’ve read lots of stories which have many positive aspects - well-defined characters, interesting settings, well-paced, or with punchy dialogue. But they lacked something crucial - a distinctive mood and tone. As a result, they felt generic and flat. They didn’t seduce me enough. 

Good writers create tone and mood from the get-go. Sure, that tone might change through the course of a story or book. But it’s there at the start, to compel the reader to read on. There’s often a range of craft techniques at play to achieve this:

• Emotional temperature – Is it angry, whimsical, ironic, sad, scared, informal, detached? This may undergo a deliberate shift (when a seemingly humorous story turns dark for example) but an initial emotional temperature needs to be established from the start - there’s no point having three paragraphs of bland before you add the heat. 

• Language and word choice – Vocabulary, diction, syntax, rhythm and style are hugely important in establishing distinctiveness. Think about the bluntness of Raymond Carver, or the cool precision of Alice Munro, or the quirky, specific language of Amy Hempel or Lydia Davis. 

• Pace – from driven and rhythmic at one end, through to slow and meditative at the other. Pace is often the energy engine in your story.

• Point of View – First person, second person, third person close or distant?  POV can have a profound effect on how the story resonates with the reader.

• Distinctive details and sensory description – a focus on the some distinctive vivid details that bring the setting and situation to life. Don’t go to cliché club.

Here are a couple of examples to see tone and mood being established from the start in stories:

Mermaid In The Jar by Sheila Heti

I have a mermaid in a jar that Quilty bought me at a garage sale for twenty-five cents. The mermaid’s all, “I hate you I hate you I hate you,” but she’s in a jar, and unless I loosen the top she’s not coming out to kill me.
I keep the little jar on my windowsill, right behind my bed, right near my head so if I look up in the middle of the night, up and back, I can see her swimming in the murky little pool of her own shit and vomit, and I can smile.
“Hello, mermaid! How are you this fine evening?” I can say, and sometimes do. “How very sad it is that you’re so beautiful, and you’re so young, and you’re so fucking trapped you’ll never get out of that bottle, ha ha!”

Here’s an example of how the character’s voice creates the mood of this story - it has energy and verve, it has a dark tone of vengefulness and spite, it’s got a bit of humour, the word choice is direct, the rhythm pulses and flickers, the dialogue pace is snappy, that first person point of view holds our hand to the flame of the narrator’s spite (which, we will eventually think, is actually self-loathing). The full text is available from the Short Story Project. 

Offering by LaToya Jordan

The first time I birthed a blood baby it plopped to the tub floor and slid to the drain, trail of red staining the porcelain. I didn’t know what it was. It looked like a chunk of canned cranberry sauce. It wobbled in the shower spray, too big to be washed away. I pressed my big toe against its smoothness and smashed it down the drain in pieces.

The third time it happened, I picked up the thing to examine it, turning it around in my hands, soft and squishy like an overripe plum. “Keep me,” a voice said. I slipped and almost dropped it. I turned off the shower thinking the water was playing tricks on me. Trevor wasn’t home, so it couldn’t be him. “Keep me,” the squeaky voice said again. There was only this bloody blob in my hands. Sitting naked on the tub’s edge, I looked for a mouth. No arms or legs, no mouth or face, but its voice vibrated in my hands; it was all heart. “Keep me,” it pleaded.

This opening combining different tones. We have the slightly detached curiosity of the narrative voice alongside a situation that is deeply personal, almost uncomfortable, but also intriguing. There are several elements at work here – the first person point of view, the language full of strong verbs. That use of repetition. The strangeness of the repeated entries from the ‘squeaky voice’. The full story is available on the Anomaly website.

Finding the right tone and mood can be used as a tool during the writing process to overcome the blank page. Here’s a situation that might sound familiar – we have a set of prompts or a story idea or a scenario that intrigues us as writers, but we can’t find a satisfactory route into the story. To deal with this, try focusing only on the tone, the mood music, of the prompts (or the scenario or setting). What’s their emotional register? How do they make you feel? 

Here’s an example of the process, which I am writing on the fly, noting down what comes to me.

• I get the story prompt: ‘Shoe’.

• I begin by thinking about what the shoe is like (a smelly sports shoe). Or I might think about a shoe in a difficult situation (stuck in mud). Or I might think about a character associated with a shoe (an old woman trying to lace up a boot). My suggestion is not to ignore these ideas as they swirl around your head, but try to find the tone or mood generated by them.

• As I write this, I’m drawn to the smelly old sports shoe. The more I form a mental picture of that shoe, neglected and worn out, the more I get a tone of melancholy.

• If I dwell on that tone a bit longer, I suddenly picture a mother whose child has gone to university, leaving her (and the shoe) behind.

• I keep focusing on the melancholy tone and another idea comes - this mother has found the shoe in a plant pot (which, when the child was still at home, would have led to an argument about “putting things away properly”). But having discovered the shoe, the mother is struck by a sad yearning, because it represents a time in her life that she won’t ever have back.

• I still keep focusing on that melancholy tone and now I see the mother thinking back to other shoes of her child’s that she discarded or passed on. Now she is just left with this one. And while it’s just an old shoe that she knows should go into the bin, she is faced with the emotional impact of that simple act and a choice to make.

• And there you have it - a story idea is born.

There are a couple of things I need to add. Firstly, tone can contrast with subject matter. For instance, you could have a highly dramatic story told in a calm, almost detached, tone. This throws up lots of interesting possibilities.

Secondly, tone can change during a story. For example, you might start with something full of melancholy (like my shoe story) but it could change and lead to something darker or lighter. You might start with something whimsical, that takes a menacing turn. You could start with an angry first person narrator who mellows. The point is, if you have tone and mood in the first place, you have the option for a tonal shift. Without that distinctive tone in the first place, there is nowhere to go. 

Tone & Mood - A Quick Exercise

Imagine a young child witnesses an accident (the scale of the accident and the seriousness of it is up to you). Write about the same accident from three different points of view. Your aim is to explore how tone changes with the different POV perspective. What might seem funny to the child might have been very serious. Or a non-serious accident may have had long term effects. Or maybe there’s possibilities in having a cold, detached perspective. Spend 5-10 minutes on each of the following:

• Write about the accident in First Person viewpoint, as if you were the child.

• Write about the accident in Second Person viewpoint, from the POV of the child as an adult, looking back eg ‘You were only four when you saw that man thrown from his horse…”

• Then write the same incident from a Third Person point of view.