#Mood words literature cracked#
#Mood words literature full#

But instead of feeling overwhelmed and irritated, hopefully, you feel calm and light.įor the winter scene, instead of a cabin, there’s a tent. Now, you can infer it’s hot and sunny–there are no clouds, our characters brought umbrellas and a cooler, and the bottles are dewy because of condensation.

#Mood words literature full#

If I was going for a lighter mood, instead of sand and mosquitos, I could mention the clear sky and stripped umbrellas and a cooler full of ice and dewy bottles of water. In the above summer example, I mentioned heat, cicadas, and a drought at the beach, sand and mosquitos. The same is true for creating atmosphere. A scientist will notice different things than say, an artist. We already know the details you choose can establish character and voice. The key of course, is not just the setting–it’s the details and the language used to describe them, our next two tools. Even setting the scene at night (moonlight) can evoke feelings of peace and wonder, rather than fear and isolation.

Not to mention the love interest in a knit sweater making hot cocoa in the kitchen with extra marshmallows. Snow blankets the ground, glittering like diamonds in the moonlight, and inside the small, log cabin, a crackling fire provides warmth and comfort. The sand is burning hot, there are mosquitos everywhere, the tide is too strong for swimming and the crashing waves are not soothing but frustrating–they are marking the slow passage of time, a ticking clock, a tapping foot.Ĭontrastingly, imagine a winter romance. Now that beach scene is no longer peaceful all your characters have gathered there on the hottest day of the year, hoping for some relief.

#Mood words literature cracked#

Imagine a suspenseful thriller that takes place during summer instead of fun and bright, the heat is suffocating, the non-stop sunlight is scorching, cicadas are hissing in the trees, getting louder every day, and there’s a drought, too, so the land is dry and cracked and dying. However, you can also use setting conversely to mood, too. Even the season can elicit mood–think fun summer romance versus bleak winter thriller. A scene at the beach is more likely to be joyful or peaceful than one set in an old, abandoned mansion. A scene set at night is likely to have a different mood than one set during the day.

“It was a dark and stormy night.” This is a classic, often-joked about for it’s heavy-handedness, example of setting a mood. So here are some tools you can use to create atmosphere in your writing: Writing is a craft, and we can all learn and hone new skills and level up our writing. But the truth is nothing in writing works that way. So, how do we achieve this? I used to think atmospheric writing was either something you had or you didn’t. For example, I might write a psychological thriller that has an overall atmosphere of paranoia and suspense, but an individual scene could have the dial turned up to absolute horror, or there could be a scene of reprieve that has an atmosphere of calm–though it won’t last. Individual scenes can have a particular mood, while the overall novel has another mood those scenes contribute to. Atmosphere: what is it really? It sounds ethereal, hard to describe and even harder to define in your own writing.Ītmosphere is another word for mood it’s the feeling a writer wants their readers to experience, like suspense or foreboding, longing or joy.