Category: setting & place

The importance of ‘where’, and how to make it seem real.

Mood and tone

Mood and tone are some of the ways a story’s underlying emotions can be conveyed to a reader. This article explores the difference between mood and tone and helps show how a writer can employ them.

As a start, look at the opening of Jane Eyre:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

From the outset, we’re inside a close household, hemmed in by dismal weather and subject to the whims of Mrs Reed. To understand how much of that situation is conveyed through mood and how much through tone, let’s examine the emotions we perceive in reading.

Looking at the paragraph, words like ‘leafless’, no company’, ‘so sombre’ and ‘out of the question’ all express dissatisfaction and limitation. Look also at the collective ‘we’—there is no ‘I’ in the paragraph; Jane is without personal identity. There’s also a degree of irony that comes through the time-lag between the reader seeing a situation and realising its true cause (Mrs Reed’s controlling nature).

If we look at dissatisfaction, powerlessness, oppression and (more subtly) irony, the question to ask is which of these four are mood-connected and which are tonal? That is, which relate to background emotions and which are elements of the way someone might speak or write?

Firstly, think of how each emotion might sound in a person’s voice; ‘in a dissatisfied tone’ or ‘in an ironic tone’ work perfectly. However, for the most part, we don’t say ‘in a powerless tone’ or ‘in an oppressive tone’ because powerlessness and oppression are abstractions connected to something outside the person. Tone is about the emotional energy of the narrator; mood is hinted at abstractly through background imagery. The turbulence of the weather hints at trouble to come.

It’s in tone that we find the chief mode through which the narrator will overcome her oppression. A tone of dissatisfaction delivered through forceful and vehement language (‘no possibility’; ‘so sombre…’; ‘so penetrating…’; ‘out of the question’) suggests that the narrator has a lot of emotional energy she might put into resisting that oppression. Her light, almost imperceptible irony points to a character with subtle social awareness. Throughout her narration, and despite her situation, we sense clear-mindedness, eloquence, determination and strength of feeling, even though the picture she gives of herself is entirely thwarted.

She’s up against a lot in terms of mood; even the clouds seem to conspire against her. In fact, it’s partly the contrast between elements of tone and elements of surrounding mood that hooks readers and keep us reading. Given this contrast, but also given the subtle way in which both mood and tone work—as backdrops to the action—we sense that the narrator’s journey will be a dramatic one.

While use of weather can come close to telegraphing too much about what a character is up against, and while mood-setting imagery built by weather can be hackneyed (‘It was a dark and stormy night…’), the interplay between well-crafted mood and tone/character can be a great way to hint at the emotional arc of a story without spoiling the journey.

setting the scene in an opening

Kage Baker’s excellent fantasy-of-manners, The Anvil of the World, begins: ‘Troon, the golden city, sat within high walls on a plain a thousand miles wide. The plain was golden with barley.’ This is nice, clear writing with strong imagery we can ‘see’ in the mind. However as the description continues we learn that Troon inhabitants all suffer from emphysema from harvest dust, and that ‘the social event of the year’ is the Festival of Respiratory Masks.

Building droll humour into her description over several sentences allows Baker to make full use of setting to introduce the novel’s tone and themes (a certain blinkeredness of thinking depicted as the tendency here to celebrate one’s own disease). Meanwhile the sharpness of Baker’s imagery and the deftness of her language (short and sweet; nothing overwritten) makes her opening highly enjoyable to read, despite having no actual characters until far down the page.

The trick to building a novel’s opening out of description is to turn the place into a character in its own right. Just as you’d try to sum up a character as neatly, quickly and efficiently as possible the first time he or she is introduced — remember, you can even introduce a character via one single dominant feature, so there’s a lot of room to economise — the place should be expressed via its most crucial or toneworthy characteristics.

For instance, in a serious novel about murder, perhaps you’d start with a setting that can be characterised as lonely, unforgiving, toxic or otherwise suggestive of harm. It helps if you can pare your imagery back to one significant motif as your starting point.

‘The sun is always just about to rise.’ So begins 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Since the reader has never lived in a place where the sun is always about to rise, the opening tells us we’re on a different world, with different rules regarding the observation of sunrises (in fact, we’re standing on something that perpetually moves, driven by Martian solar heat dynamics; but that’s beside the point).

The point is, Stanley Robinson’s opening works because it presents a single clear image that also opens a question in the mind (how can a sunrise always be about to begin?).

I don’t say it’s easy to draw a fast, complete picture in the mind that simultaneously tantalises and uses words economically. Certainly I’ll be talking more about both aspects (how to write with economy and powerful imagery) in other posts. The important thing for now, though, is that good imagery always works hand-in-hand with tone.

See for instance this opening to ‘A Stripe for Trooper Casey’ by Roderic Quinn, published in The Anthology of Colonial Australian Crime Fiction (Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver edited):

‘The magpies had said good-night to the setting sun, and already darkness was moving through the dead timber. The first notes of night-birds came from the ridges, and a curlew mourned in the reeds of a creek.’

Slightly convoluted, though fairly effective, yes? It certainly puts us in the place, expecting something to happen, in part helped by the animated sense of darkness prowling the hillside. In this sense the imagery largely suits the story.

However the writing creaks at the seams when looked at from a modern perspective. For instance, there’s an over-reliance on personification (magpies saying ‘good-night’ to the sun; a curlew ‘mourning’). Giving personlike attributes to animals or things was a far more popular literary device in the 1800s than now, and in the paragraph above it feels slightly intrusive (saying ‘good-night’ is hardly ominous conceptually).

Sharp and economical imagery with judicious use of personification or other metaphors is just one way you can build a strong opening when describing a setting.