Setting the Mood in Your Short Story
One of the most difficult aspects of writing short stories is establishing the mood. Unlike in the case of novels, the writer has much less time to effectively describe the setting and characters, and must do so in order for the plot to take off. A story consisting only of places and people would be boring, because the reader has no vehicle via which to become involved in the story.
The mood of a short story is established through detailed descriptions of the settings, people, and atmosphere of a story. For example, if you are writing a scary story about a haunted house, the mood will be dark and foreboding. The setting should be dark – muted colors and shadowy corners – and the characters should be feeling a mixture of excitement and delicious fear. If, however, you are writing about Jessica’s Great Adventures, the mood should be charged with energy and bright in feel. Sunny skies, green grass, excitement in the air; you get the picture.
The entire point of the mood is to prepare your reader. Surprises are acceptable in a suspense story, but the surprise should not disconcert your audience. You have a sertain liability to your readers to not mislead them in your writing, which will happen if you fail to set the correct mood.
Take this excerpt from the beginning of Scott Russell Sanders’ short story Under The Influence.
My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food – compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he quit drinking, but because he quit living. That is how the story ends for my father, age sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling and forsaken on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer. The story continues for my brother, my sister, my mother, and me, and will continue so long as memory holds.
In the perennial present of memory, I slip into the garage or barn to see my father tipping back the flat green bottles of wine, the brown cylinders of whiskey, the cans of beer disguised in paper bags. His Adam’s apple bobs, the liquid gurgles, he wipes the sandy-haired back of a hand over his lips, and then, his bloodshot gaze bumping into me, he stashes the bottle or can inside his jacket, under the workbench, betweeb two bales of hay, and we both pretend {that} the moment has not occurred.
It is relatively easy to determine the mood of this story, and not because Sanders expressly stated it. He never said, “This is a sad story about the death of my father, who was a raging alcoholic.” He didn’t need to. The vivid imagery created by his description of his father is quite enough to signal the reader about what is to come.
Also notice that Sanders’ introduction was very brief. Had he been writing a novel, he might have gone into more detail about the scene in the barn; that anecdote alone could have been stretched for several paragraphs, identifying what was said and how it looked. In a short story, you don’t have the luxury of time, however, and you must be able to combine several powerful images into just a few short sentences. If done well, you can create the same image in your readers’ minds as if you had gone on for pages.
If description does not work well for the setting of your mood, you can also use dialogue to convey the feel of a story. Words and phrases can create powerful images of their own, and can leader the reader directly into the point of the story. Take this excerpt from Jonathon Thompson’s Doppleganger, for instance.
“Todd, I’ve got a question, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. I just thought I’d ask: have you ever thought about killing someone?”
My best friend Todd was looking intently at me with eyes the color of saphires. There was a wildness about him that I’d never seen before, and I wasn’t comfortable with what lay beyond them.
“Killing someone? What the hell? No, never. Never, Todd. I’ve never thought about killing someone.”
“But what if you could get away with it? What if you could experience the most intimate of relations with another human being – their death – and never be caught? Would you do it?”
In this story, Thompson tells the chilling tale of two boys who get caught in a whirlwind of murder and psychotic mayhem. The mood of the story – dark, terrifying, morbid – is conveyed in the first first line, and in the subsequent dialogue. We can tell from what the characters are saying that Todd is thinking of commiting murder, and that the narrator – his best friend – is not comfortable with the direction of the conversation. In case you’ve never read it, that particular theme is carried throughout the story.
When using dialogue to create the mood of a short story, it doesn’t have to be as brief as when using description, but the spoken words should be as short as possible. In an actual conversation, the narrator would probably have had quite a bit more to say than what was written in the story, but the author portrayed the feelings of the character succinctly, so as not to bore the reader or drag down the story. The goal is to give your reader the essence of what is going on, but nothing more.
The third way to create mood is through action. This is a little bit more difficult, but it can be effective in suspense and horror stories. Jumping directly into the thick of the plot will provide momentum for your reader, and will keep the pace as long as you continue to the very end. Here is an example from my own short story, Pacemaker.
Footsteps on hardened soil. The pounding of blood through arteries and veins. The snapping of twigs and the crackling of leaves underfoot. She couldn’t run forever, and yet she couldn’t stop. Her assailant was behind her, running at full speed, and as she dodged trees and bushes that stood in her way, she wondered how quickly he was gaining on her, and whether she could reach the road on time.
Doubtful. Very doubtful. She leapt over of a large puddle of water, ignoring the backsplash of icy liquid on her jeans, and just barely dodged a low overhanging branch that stretched like a disembodied arm across the path. She could hear his footfalls behind her, could smell the foul stench of sour perspiration, but she did not even consider turning around to look. That was when the victims in horror movies were caught.
In this story, the action is already taking place. There is no backstory, no objective observations, because the main character is already in the middle of the horror that is meant to befall her. If the action keeps the same pace throughout, then the reader won’t be bored, and will want to discover what happens.
Setting the mood in short stories is essential, because as I said, the reader expects you to be straight with him. Prepare your audience for the type of story that you expect to unfold, and do so in a way that catches the reader’s attention.
