In the fifth of our five part series on where to begin developing a story idea, we start with a mood. Some stories are compelling because of a particular feeling they cause due to their compelling atmospheres. So you start with an emotion you want to instill, perhaps dread in a horror story or longing in a romance story or serenity in a cozy story. For myself, this is the hardest place to start, but for other writers I know, the “mood board” comes first. They gather images and songs that will help them get into the right imaginative space to strike the tone they are going for. The story spills out of this ethereal environment and stays true to the mood throughout.
I talked to my writing critique partner, Brenan Chase, about her use of mood boards. Here’s an edited version of our brief conversation.
AT: What does “mood” mean to you?
BC: It’s one of those things that’s hard to define, like how do you define “love?” It’s a feeling, a vibe. I use other works as reference. I want my book to make readers feel like Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart made me feel. Mood is not this concrete thing, so I have to attach it to something concrete. For my current project, I want it to be “enchanting” in the same vein as Erin Morgenstern.
AT: So you’re looking to evoke a specific feeling that you had reading something else, and as you imagine the story, you’re thinking about it from that emotional place.
BC: Yes. I think, “How do I describe this setting to evoke that feeling?”
AT: Then you build a mood board. Tell me how you go about that.
BC: It’s a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. I love Pinterest. I have so many Pinterest boards.
AT: Are you going around consciously looking for images or is it just when you find one, you say, “Oh, this is for my current project.”
BC: Once I have a mood in mind, I will go consciously for images, and I usually start with characters.
At this point, Brenan showed me several mood boards on her Pinterest account. What struck me about them was how different they were from each other in color, content, character, and feeling, even though they were all collected by the same writer, who is writing in an incredibly specific genre. Even so, each project’s board had a distinctive mood. One was more brooding, another whimsical, another awe-inducing. Each story was a male/male fairy tale retelling, but their moods couldn’t have been more different.
As we finished up the conversation, Brenan had this fascinating analogy to share.
BC: The story and the mood are two separate things, in a weird way. I ask myself, “This is the story I want to tell; what is the mood I want to overlay?” I think in terms of theatre design. My story is my set and costumes and my players, and what lighting I put on it is the mood. It’s what I cast the whole thing in.
I don’t think much about mood when I’m writing, to be honest, which is why I needed a friend’s help with this article. And when I’m reading, I doubt I notice the moods other writers attempt to instill in their work. Perhaps this is a deficiency on my part; or else it’s just not where I live as a reader. And that’s okay and reminds me why my not particularly liking a certain book doesn’t mean the book is bad – it’s just not for me.
But every once in a while, the mood of a book will be so obvious that even someone like me who has no moodar (just made that word up and I feel pretty good about it), will still pick up on it. Such was the case with The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss’s 2007 fantasy masterpiece that is still awaiting it’s final installment. I must have reread the brilliant first page half a dozen times before turning to the next one.
The single page describes three different types of silence lying upon the Waystone Inn. There’s the hollow silence “made by things that were lacking.” There’s a “small, sullen silence” made by men who “drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news.” And then there’s the third silence that “was not an easy thing to notice.” It’s made by the main character of the book, whose gravity pulls every element of the story towards himself.
The last paragraph of the first page reads in full:
“The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”
This single paragraph reveals the specific “lighting” that Brenan likened to the mood of a story. Autumn moving toward winter. Eons of river water smoothing a stone. And that last sentence – the silent sound of cut flowers who are already dead but haven’t yet wilted. This single page evokes such a profound sense of melancholy and regret that they pervade the entire rest of the book. That’s the mood.
Adam Thomas, Author 