What is the mood of your story? I just read a deliciously creepy short story, Slip, by horror and suspense writer, S.H. Livernois.

The atmosphere of her tale begins innocuously enough, but this is horror; I knew things wouldn’t go smoothly for long, and the author didn’t disappoint. Her sentences are crafted with just the right telling details to pull the reader into her fictional world. 

Years ago I stumbled upon a writing exercise that I found much more challenging than the writing prompts I’m used to. I’m not sure who named it, but it’s called The TS Eliot/John Gardner Killer Exercise. Would you like to be able to construct a particular mood or atmosphere in your stories?

This exercise is quite possibly the most difficult, demanding and important exercise a writer can ever do. The poet and critic, TS Eliot, coined the phrase “objective correlative” to designate what he believed was the most important element in writing: rendering the description of an object so that the emotional state of the character from whose point of view we receive the description is revealed without ever telling the reader what that emotional state is or what has motivated it.

The late John Gardner, recognized in his lifetime as the leading creative writing teacher in the United States, developed the following exercise for students: A middle-aged man is waiting at a bus stop. He has just learned that his son has died violently. Describe the setting from the man’s point of view without telling your reader what has happened. How will the street look to this man? What are the sounds, odors and colors that this man will notice? What will his clothes feel like? Write a 250 word description.

Here’s an example of how this exercise might look:

Car keys dangled from the man’s lifeless hands as he waited in the breezeless shelter for the 5:12 express. The afternoon sun bore down on him, lighting up his grief, but igniting nothing; his heart was still an icy thing. His wife had called him cold. What would she think now? Nothing, he realized; she wouldn’t be thinking of him. So much was suddenly irrelevant.

After the call, he’d looked around his office trying to recognize the everyday fixtures of his life. He needed to do something but nothing made sense anymore. His mind only offered three options: stay at work, run away, or go home. He didn’t like the first, the second was appealing but too confounding presently, so he chose the third.

At the bus shelter women in cotton shifts and sandaled feet stood with men in rumpled linen suits damp with sweat. They steered clear of the man sitting alone on the scorched wood of the slatted bus bench. They vied instead for a little elbow room in the open-air shade of the tall downtown buildings and wondered what was wrong with the nut job. Still, some noticed, his linen suit, the color of mocha according to his wife, was dry and appeared freshly pressed. He did not fan himself with the evening edition of the paper or crane his neck every few minutes to see if the bus was coming. He just stared blankly ahead, slightly slumped on the bench, car keys in hand, waiting.

Understated: sometimes less really is more

As seen in the example exercise, you don’t have to overwhelm the reader with emotion in order to convey what your character is experiencing. Atmosphere too needn’t be portrayed with a heavy hand. Assume your reader is intelligent and can read between the lines. With well-chosen details that paint just the picture you have in mind, your story will throb with life, and your readers will keep coming back for more.

(Photo by Ryan McGuire.)