PHILIP CIOFFARI

Creating Mood in Crime Fiction

PHILIP CIOFFARI has published a story collection, A History of Things Lost or Broken, which won the Tartt First Fiction prize and a D. H. Lawrence Fellowship award; and a mystery/thriller, Catholic Boys. His latest novel, Jesusville, was published in 2011.

 

 

One of the first flat periods I reached as a writer occurred after several years of writing. I felt that I’d hit a wall, that I’d traveled a certain distance but I’d stalled out. I couldn’t get beyond where I was. My prose seemed competent enough, yet I felt it was uninspired. Something was missing: some element of passion or intensity or texture.

In an effort to determine precisely what that missing ingredient was, I revisited those novels and stories that had most captivated me in my teenage years, works that included William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, and virtually all of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.

What they all have in common is a highly developed sense of mood that permeates every aspect of the story: the place, the characters, and what those characters say and do. Every one of those novels and stories, each in its own way, created for me a world complete in itself, a world with its own distinct colors and sights and sounds, its own emotional resonance—a world, at least for the time it took to finish the book, more interesting and compelling than the mundane, real world I lived in.

I realized that in my own writing I’d managed to get the facts as well as the basic story structure onto the page, but that coloring those facts so that they resonated deeply with the reader would be a more challenging task.

So I began to think about all the ways I might enhance my fiction by paying closer attention to mood and atmosphere, which touches upon every aspect of the writing process: setting, character, dialogue. I have come to think of it as a necessary part of each and every scene in a story.

Setting is perhaps the most tried and true vehicle for establishing mood. Take, for example, Poe’s effort to make us feel the doom and gloom of the house in “The Fall of the House of Usher”:

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. . . .

He uses the room’s accessories and limited light to convey an overwhelming sense of dread and trepidation.

Equally important is establishing the mood or condition of our investigator’s mind, as Martin Cruz Smith does with his detective, Arkady Renko, in the opening scene of Gorky Park. In addition to the physical details of setting, a glimpse into Arkady’s mind-set brings us more fully into the moment: “A chief investigator should have smoked a fine brand of cigarette; Arkady lit a cheap Prima and filled his mouth with the taste of it—his habit whenever he dealt with the dead.”

Engaging us in the inner life of the detective brings us more intimately into the story. Not only are we reading to find out if and how the crime will be solved, but we are reading to learn more about who the detective is, what he or she feels about life—which is, in effect, another puzzle to be solved, another mystery to be unraveled.

Albert Camus creates his murderer’s mind-set—one of alienation and detachment—quite simply in a courtroom scene in The Stranger when he has Meursault paying more attention to the room’s excessive heat and to an annoying fly buzzing about than he does to his being indicted for taking a life.

Dialogue also plays a part in creating mood. Each section of dialogue within a scene should have a specific tone—comic, thoughtful, menacing, or whatever. We can manipulate that tone with both diction and syntax, and as much by what is unsaid as what is said.

In developing mood through setting, character, and dialogue, I would suggest the use of motifs. These repeated patterns of imagery are a reliable way to reinforce atmosphere within a scene or throughout an entire story or novel. If it’s a hot day or a cold day, a fall day or a spring evening, repeated images and details—of heat, cold, things withering or blooming, light and shadow, to name just a few choices—can engage the reader in a sensual way and add immeasurably to the world you’re creating.

 

 

 

EXERCISE

 

Once you have a draft of a scene, work on enhancing the mood and atmosphere. You can begin with any of the aforementioned elements but let’s, for example’s sake, begin here with your setting. Use the physical details of the place—its colors, its quality of light, its sounds and smells—to reinforce the action of the scene. Consider using details typical of the place, as well as details not so typical to such a place. In other words, go beyond the generic details to those details that make this particular motel room unique, that make it somewhat different from all other motel rooms in its class. Then add at least one motif related to the setting, an image (something visual, auditory, tactile, or olfactory—something related to the quality or feel of the place) that you can weave through the scene and, if applicable, through successive scenes.

Then add details to create the inner mood and mind-set of your characters, especially your hero and your villain. It’s not only what a character does, but what he feels or thinks as he does it. In other words, what’s the climate inside his head and heart? What mood is he in? Is this typical of how he feels, or is this something new or unusual for him? And so on. Again, if possible, employ a motif to illustrate his inner climate.

Look, too, at your dialogue. Is each speaker’s voice distinct, reflective of his personality, social class, educational level? Does it reflect the speaker’s inner life? Motifs can be useful here, as well. Are there expressions, turns of phrase, word choices you can repeat that will help the reader get a better feel for the speaker?

Each successive scene you write can build upon the foundation you’ve laid.