Every now and then, I get a feeling. A mood that I want to capture in words. A sensation that I want to wrap someone else in. It goes beyond imagining the world. It goes into experiencing the world as a set of complex emotions.
It's like trying to wrap a cloud with brown paper and string. Wispy. Multi-faceted. Completely tenuous.
My default mood is the sad stuff. It's a bit of a cop out really. A light fun mood that completely embroils the reader in stitches is difficult to achieve. It can be dangerously superficial and tacky. And yet, how joyful to find the book where you're smilling page after page, chuckling inside, and then occassionally bubbling forth in literal LOL.
I write in silence mainly. I mean, I don't usually have music playing in the background. I find it distracting because a part of my brain is tethered to rise and fall of the song's emotional landscape. If I have it on repeat, then I find myself rhythmically inserting borrowed sentiments. And then how do I know the narrative is pure in its mood, or layered only when the song plays. What if my readers can't hear the music? Will the piece lose it's emotional texture?
I use the terms mood and emotion interchangeably in this post, but really, there are great differences between them. Mood transcends whole blocks of texts. Its lingering. It's the atmosphere. You could find tendrils of emotion floating within, contributing even, but not necessarily define it. If mood is a current that bobs the reader around, then emotion is a wave that sweeps them, churns them, dumps them. It's more precise, amplified, intense. It's in the words, in the gaps, in what was, what wasn't and what could have been.
There are times when I do use music. Mainly when pieces demand a sustained emotional energy. To keep that precious frame of mind that could snap out if I don't bask in a specific emotional charge. Sometimes, I find songs which correlate exactly to a concept, a feeling, a predicament of a character. Those are gems. They go on repeat. I have to use them carefully though. Sooner or later, it deteriorates. Desensitizes. My playlist is a set of rather emo songs.
Then, there is the technique of setting moods and emotions. How did Stephanie Meyer manage to convince teenage girls world wide of the obsessive love between Bella and Edward? Was her strategy in convincing the reader that Edward was the perfect lover? Was it the way she painted his mystery, his smouldering good looks, yet with relatively plain and simple, unsophisticated prose? How did she transpose the emotions of Bella onto a million screaming girls?
I'm just grasping how many unknown variables there are in writing, and how precise a writer needs to be in selection. A word, a repetition, an omission, all go toward lighting the imagination in flames, or drowning it in luke-warm temparaments. And how neither of these detract from the other - its success is in meeting the goal. Did it do what it was supposed to?
