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Awaken The Writer Within

Create An Atmosphere

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CREATE AN ATMOSPHERE

A party with a really good atmosphere can ‘take you out of yourself’. A party with no atmosphere has you casting surreptitious glances at your watch, wondering how soon is too soon to leave. It is the same with a story or a book. How do we create an atmosphere that makes people want to stay?

Find out how other writers do it

When writers are successful in creating atmosphere, they have probably immersed themselves in the setting (as discussed in Chapter 1). This is the first step. The following exercises help you to look at how experienced writers craft the material generated in this way.

  • What sort of atmosphere is created in the opening pages of your chosen book? Is it a general ‘feel’ for the setting, or does it evoke a specific response?
  • What words, phrases and images does the author use to achieve this?
  • What are the main vehicles the author uses for this purpose, e.g. colour, sound, other sense impressions, action, contrasts, character’s response?
  • Use these as headings to sort the author’s words in note form. ‘Chunk’ the sections on the page (see Chapter 1, Figure 1). This gives a clear overall picture, which offers considerable insight into the author’s craft. It also makes the elements of that craft readily accessible as a stimulus for our own creativity.
  • Repeat the exercise with some other favourite books.
  • Repeat it with a favourite screen-drama video.

Use what you have learned

  • Choose one page of notes from the previous section. Let your eye move at random around the chunks of words, until a particular phrase comes to the fore. Use it as the centre of a word web (see Chapter 2, Figure 2).
  • Let your eye move around the word web until a new phrase emerges. Create atmosphere through 10 minutes of timed writing starting with this phrase.
  • In one word describe the atmosphere you created.
  • Write a word that means the opposite.
  • Brainstorm everything that comes to mind when you say that word.
  • Sort and chunk your words as above.
  • Use these notes to write a piece evoking this opposite atmosphere.
  • Choose one of the pieces you have written. Tape yourself reading it. Use this as a guided visualisation to stimulate ideas.

More ways of working

Let the surroundings create the atmosphere

As in the previous chapter, let the surroundings tell their story. If the place we were in could speak, what would its voice be like? What would it say? Choose a tarot card which evokes the same atmosphere as you want to create. Let it represent your setting. Let it speak.

Imagine a soundtrack

What sort of music would go with this place? Close your eyes and imagine a soundtrack accompanying your opening scenes. Let your inner camera move around the location, focusing on different features and bringing some of them into close-up. Let the soundtrack change and intensify as this occurs. If you have a suitable piece of music, play it as you read your work aloud.

CASE STUDY

Sheila worked outdoors with binoculars to help her create an atmosphere of tension and mystery (see Chapter 2). She also found it useful to take photographs to view through a magnifying glass at home and recreate that atmosphere. When she added an imaginary soundtrack to these techniques, she said she felt her writing come alive, giving it the ‘edge’ it was lacking. This made her more confident about continuing with the new play she had started to write for radio.

Work with a colour

For example, imagine something you own – or something connected with you in some way which is red. Allow it to become really vivid in your imagination. Make it brighter. Make it bigger. Imagine some stirring music to accompany this image. Make it louder. Imagine yourself in a crowd, wearing red, dancing around the object to this music in brilliant sunshine.

CASE STUDY

This approach really appealed to Zubin, one of my writing students who teaches art. He decided to incorporate painting into this exercise, and said he would discuss the results with the group the following week.

Play themed Scrabble

Sample themes: gothic, erotic, depressed, elated, Scandinavian, Mediaeval, Monday morning, Christmas, airport, garden fete. Only words which evoke the atmosphere in question are allowed. Use them as suggested in Chapter 3.

CASE STUDY

David found this a good way of generating sinister and threatening words as well as helping him gather a list of words to evoke the atmosphere of a police station. Karen found it a good way of combining family time with writing time. When she and another student, Shamina, got together with their children to play themed Scrabble, they came up with the idea in the next section.

Word Banks

CASE STUDIES

Like themed Scrabble, Karen and Shamina’s Word Banks, help – among other things – to evoke atmosphere. They got the idea from one of the literacy activities at their children’s primary school, where each pupil keeps a personal book for recording words they need to help them write. They decided to start their own books to record the words that came up in themed Scrabble.

After a while they felt that the nouns were not all that useful, whereas having a collection of verbs and adjectives to call on gave their writing a boost. Eventually they decided to move away from themed Scrabble and collect verbs and adjectives from anywhere and at any time that they presented themselves. They found that advertisements provided some particularly lively and unusual examples. Within a few weeks they had quite a large bank of words which they could dip into to give their writing extra interest.

Other students took the idea on board and came up with some suggestions for using these word banks. One was to simply let the eye roam around the page until something clicked (as we did with Word Webs in Chapter 2). Another way was to open the word bank book, point at random to a word and use it – unless it made absolutely no sense. Two examples I particularly remember from doing this with verbs were: (from David, describing a military academy) ‘The windows marched across the front of the building’ and (a fellow tutor, Pete, describing the sounds on a farm) ‘The piglets were crackling in the straw’ – a rather neat double meaning. David’s example came from organising his word book into themes, so that he had brainstormed every verb he could think of to do with the army. Pete, being a great fan of unexpected juxtaposition, had collected his words at random, opened his book and pointed at random – and the foregoing was the happy result bestowed on him by fate.

Sheila organised her Word Bank alphabetically and, in some of her early drafts, experimented with replacing adjectives or verbs which she found uninspiring with others from her word bank beginning with the same letter. Children who previously ran into the play area now ricocheted, while the elderly gentleman who had stepped gingerly through them, now slalomed gamely- a much more lively and memorable image.

Checklist

To develop a sense of atmosphere:

  • immerse yourself in the setting of your story
  • study the work of other writers
  • let the surroundings speak
  • imagine a sound track
  • work with a colour
  • play themed Scrabble
  • build up a Word Bank to draw from.
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