Narrative Mood · 8:44pm Oct 18th, 2015
Invisible Ink
Conflict of Interest: Narrative Mood
With all the groundwork done, it’s time to talk about the minutiae of how intensity of conflict affects how we write prose. Storytelling is conflict, and pacing is controlling the intensity of your conflicts. It makes sense that learning how to best write high-tension prose for high-tension scenes would be advantageous – and vice-versa – but what about writing high-tension scenes in low-tension prose?
Does that even make sense? Let’s see.
I spoke about this once after a review, so I’ll reuse the example I write before as a jumping off point:
I could hear it. It was out there. Somewhere in the darkness it was moving, stalking, towards me, yet I could see nothing. Each scrape and scuff echoed from a dozen directions at once, but each was closer. I pressed my muddied hand to the slick cobblestones beneath me. Could I run, or would I come crashing down the moment I tried to flee? Did it even know where I was?
I froze. Maybe it didn't know. I held my breath as best I could.
Maybe…
Fine, so it’s hardly literary genius, but we can pull it apart to see what it’s doing. Opening with short, simple, and precise sentences gives it punch – gives it immediacy. Just like all pacing, however, you can’t overuse it without it grating on your reader, so it goes short, short, complex. The third sentence uses a little show of sophistication to keep the flow somewhat broken while still deviating from the overt brevity of the previous two.
Now, chopping and changing too much can be annoying, so I continue with a mid-length complex sentence, followed by a mid-length simple sentence, both of which use the mid-paragraph lull to focus on building on the atmosphere instigated at the beginning. Then things get sharper again as I start a sentence with what feels like a short sentence, but actually runs on into a longer question that implies anxiety and fear.
Lastly, I finish on a similar question that is shorter and sharper than its predecessor, and the then following paragraph is all fairly short and punchy to pick the tension back up.
Let’s break it down into sentences and see how that looks:
I could hear it.
It was out there.
Somewhere in the darkness it was moving, stalking, towards me, yet I could see nothing.
Each scrape and scuff echoed from a dozen directions at once, but each was closer.
I pressed my muddied hand to the slick cobblestones beneath me.
Could I run, or would I come crashing down the moment I tried to flee?
Did it even know where I was?I froze.
Maybe it didn't know.
I held my breath as best I could.Maybe…
But note that the careful use of an aside in the third sentence breaks up how the prose paces, so I would assert that it actually looks more like this:
I could hear it.
It was out there.
Somewhere in the darkness it was moving,
stalking,
towards me,
yet I could see nothing.
Each scrape and scuff echoed from a dozen directions at once,
but each was closer.
I pressed my muddied hand to the slick cobblestones beneath me.
Could I run,
or would I come crashing down the moment I tried to flee?
Did it even know where I was?I froze.
Maybe it didn't know.
I held my breath as best I could.Maybe…
Now, obviously I can only talk in terms of what I was planning when I created the passage – you’ll have to determine its efficacy for yourself – but I think this presentation better shows off that intent. It shows just how the length of each information chunk vacillates between short and medium. The placement of pauses is just as important in how a piece of prose reads as the length of the full sentences; if you find yourself forced into longer sentences, you can use asides to forcibly break them up where it helps with tone.
I’ll speak much more on this in another post on sentence sophistication, but the difference between putting a subordinate clause at the front of a sentence rather that at the back should not be underestimated.
I grabbed my coat before leaving.
Before leaving, I grabbed my coat.
The necessary pause that is the reason why front-loaded subordinate clauses take a comma at all, and writers can use minute details like that to fine tune their writing for optimal flow while still establishing the desired tone. The many other ways this can be achieved are best left for another day, but I want you to at least see that what you’re writing about is an entirely different subject to how you’re writing it. The needs of the plot are not an excuse for insufficiently nuanced structures.
To complete the example, here is a similar series of events, but intentionally written to be reflective rather than immediate and tense:
I would never forget it. It wasn't dark like an old mansion at midnight, but pitch black, as if the very idea of light had been swallowed up by whatever that thing was that stalked me. I can remember the sounds. I remember the scratching and clicking of claws on hard cobblestones, the sounds echoing off walls I could not see and bombarding my mind like a strobe light dazzles the eyes; I couldn't tell where it was, or even what it was.
I remember the ground was wet – too wet to run across in the dark – so I froze. I held my breath and hoped, blood ponding in my ears.
I hoped it didn't know where I was, either. It was the only defence I had against the darkness…
There are still short sentences that heighten the sense of tension, but many of the sentences are long, complex, yet hopefully still flowing and very readable. Note, though, that each of the long sentences uses a different methodology to get that length without any individual part of it becoming unwieldy.
Let’s look at just those:
It wasn't dark like an old mansion at midnight, but pitch black, as if the very idea of light had been swallowed up by whatever that thing was that stalked me.
I remember the scratching and clicking of claws on hard cobblestones, the sounds echoing off walls I could not see and bombarding my mind like a strobe light dazzles the eyes; I couldn't tell where it was, or even what it was.
I remember the ground was wet – too wet to run across in the dark – so I froze.
The long constructions lean towards the remembrance of anxiety, rather than directly expressing it, which leads to a less intense experience while not trivialising what is being described.
So once we have delineated out different forms and styles of conflict, considered our pacing, and decided what intensity we want from any given passage, we can employ our skills as writers to heighten or flatten our prose to achieve that goal. That modification through construction, rather than narrative, is what I call narrative mood: it is the mood conjured by the writing style itself. By matching the right mood with the needs of the story, you can be one step closer to your writing being invisible. You don’t have to force your narrative or pad your prose, and these are things your audience would thank you for, except they’ll never notice if you’re doing it right!
So all in all, we have:
Background conflict (setting)
Narrative conflict (characters)
Abstract conflict (plot)
Narrative mood (writing style)
Each of these has a place in directly engaging your reader, and it is that engagement that needs to be sculpted in order to creating proper pacing.
These are your tools.
Learn them.
-Scott ‘Inquisitor’ Mence
So, this whole this is a lot more draining on me than I'd initially imagined. I suppose it shouldn't be a huge surprise that trying to straighten out my thoughts is like wrestling a giant eel, but it does mean that virtually everything else is off the menu while I'm doing so. No writing, no reviewing, and I haven't PR'd anything for TRG in weeks. But the bottom line is, I'm kind of enjoying it – struggling with motivation, but enjoying it. As always, if anyone has a question or topic they would like me to wax lyrical about, now would be a good time to leave me a message.
YES GOOD YES :D I like examples.
Inquisitor,
First off, all these 'Invisible Ink' blogs are awesome, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to read them.
By way of a suggest/request, I'd love to hear you talk about Mood as it relates not to a scene or a paragraph, but on the scale of an entire chapter or work. For an arbitrary example, it has always seemed to me that a well-conveyed horror story has something pervading the entire work beyond simply having every scene conform to the ideas above in created a 'spooky mood'.
Thanks again, and keep up the great work.
Consider this another note of support.
I don't like writing advice that puts more emphasis on following rules than understanding the underlying principles, so it was a nice surprise to come across this series.
3480004 Once I have laid the groundwork for my own understanding of how to explain these topics, I'm hoping to include more examples in the written-up documents for these topics. That's going to be the really rough bit.
3480013 Thank you. That means a lot. We might have to have a bit of a chat about exactly what information you're looking for with that question, or perhaps we need to have a Skype chat/Hangout where I can answer some questions and post it as a video (or a SoundCloud file, or whatever). I'm sure we can figure something out.
3480162 Well, it's lack of commonality was more or less the reason I first considered writing like this. The fact that it happens to be exactly what I'm good at would appear to be a happy coincidence :)
Thank you all for the support.
_Scott