No, not a bucolic farm romance between a dairy owner and one of his employees, or a cheese maker. Unless you want to do that. I was rereading Witch World by Andre Norton, and thinking how my impression of the book has not changed. One of the things that struck me about it was how misty and silver it is. When Simon gets to Witch World, it is foggy. Other places have fog, and the slow revealing of the world is like shapes emerging from the mist. The reader sees more of them, and knows more, but a lot remains hidden, hinted at but still concealed. The atmosphere reinforces the mood, the sense of mystery.
Witchworld isn’t a milieu novel, but how Norton described the land cues the reader that there are a lot of mysteries, and that the place is old, or has an old feel to it. Distances unfold slowly as the PoV character learns to fit into his new world, like fog slowly lifting. It suits the books and the setting.
Gothic novels are another place where the mood really matters. You could probably argue that mood defines a gothic romance. Something lurks, the male protagonist tends to be brooding, distant, mysterious, a sense of danger hovers over the scene … Wary, mysterious, that’s generally how the novels I remember reading started out. Fall of the House of Usher is weary, curious, as the narrator visits his friend in the literal house as the bloodline house also seems to be failing. I suppose someone could write a gothic romance or horror novel set in a warm, sunny place with an upbeat backdrop, but it would be very hard. The mood would be wrong, at least the background mood.
Setting, tone, choice of words and language style, all those can help you evoke a mood. If you are writing a chick-lit, fun book, you want to invoke upbeat, happy, chipper moods around your story. A war novel – sci-fi, historical fiction, fantasy – needs a darker, heavier, serious mood, tense perhaps. Or you can use one mood but a very different story, with the mood being a way to show the humor. Sort of like me at LibertyCon reading “Pizzas in Paradise.”* I tried to start off very serious and intense, like a nature program or a typical “there-I-was” hunting story. Except the subject is anything but serious – trapping pizzas. It is much easier to do if you can write with a straight face, so to speak, and let the reader catch that it is not serious at all.
How do you show the mood of your stories? Or do you know what the mood is yet? If your readers say, “it’s supposed to be X but it feels like M,” you might have a mood problem.
*No, the story has not been published yet.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Moody Stories and Settings?”
If I recall right (although I have not read the book itself yet), Cold Comfort Farm was a sendup of Gothics set in a sunny and bucolic setting, which worked because it was actually a comedy. Most of the characters were trying just SO HARD to be in a gothic, but actually weren’t–and the visiting Bright Young Thing was busily moving them into a non-gothic state.
Exactly. Cold Comfort Farm took every older Gothic trope and poured sunlight on them till they withered.
I SAW SOMETHING NASTY IN THE WOODSHED!!!!
A lot of mood comes down to word choice, but also emotional reaction by the characters. My current series would probably be a lot more gothic if the POV characters weren’t a cowgirl with a tolerantly interested gee-you-people-are-funny attitude and a posh monster hunter for whom the gothic stuff is Tuesday (and Wednesday, and…)
I was not going to really torture a bunch of high school kids so I didn’t go too dark and moody with my original series. The follow-up, however, is significantly harsher. As such, I don’t want the first issue to be too light only to have someone get to a certain point and wonder just what the heck happened. I’ve written and rewritten the opening issue several times over the past year and only this week do I think I’m getting it right. I can’t exactly go full Robert-A-Heinlein-in-Friday with it, but I wish I could. Instead, because I am a hack, I started it on a dark and stormy night like I said I wanted to a year or so ago.
Wrestling with the mood on a story where the heroine is about 12, and the mood has to be suitable for middle-grade. How high to escalate the villains’ actions. . . .
it rains a lot. Or, the mist coming up off the streets after the rain.
*taps foot* *crosses arms* Waiting.