1000 Writerly words: Building Atmosphere
1000 writerly words episode 6: Establishing atmosphere
Our atmosphere is the layer of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen wrapped around the fine marble that is the earth. From our perspective on the surface, it’s invisible, yet we all feel it. It keeps us breathing, it absorbs the energy from the sun’s harmful rays, and regulates the climate. If its chemical composition changed, we’d die instantly, and Earth would be just another rock orbiting a star among billions of other rocks in the galaxy.
Atmosphere is also an element of setting description. It’s hard to comprehend as a concept, but incredibly vital.
To explain: A setting’s atmosphere is not the setting itself. It’s a layer atop the regular setting description, yet it’s also a lens to view the setting from. Atmosphere cannot exist without setting, yet setting can perfectly exist without an author putting effort into building an atmosphere.
However, without atmosphere, the setting is flat, dry, and worst of all; boring. Basic setting description is just bones. The atmosphere is flesh, the component that makes it unique.
Every planet has an atmosphere after all, but there’s only one green, inhabitable earth.
Similarly, every story has its own setting. That description on its own is just words and objects. A spaceship, no matter how high-tech it is, is still a pressurized box blasting through the great void. And that’s an entirely writer-invented setting. A writer doing contemporary fiction of any type will likely use modern earth settings, which are even more familiar to us.
Words on their own are building blocks, the same building blocks all English-speaking writers use. Description is still paragraphs of those words. I’m not saying they’re not interesting on their own. I’m saying paragraphs of standard description are just that; paragraphs standing alone, of flat description.
Atmosphere makes all the difference.
Atmosphere in writing is the way the reader interacts with the setting. It’s not concrete; it’s a collection of all five senses written down in words. It takes the threatening familiarity of a writer’s setting description and inverts it into a boon, by using signposts of special description to call up familiar feelings and sensations to the reader and wrapping their scenery description in that image of what the writer wants the reader to experience.
Let me give an example of the most efficient atmosphere establishing I’ve ever read; the opening sentence of William K Gibson’s Neuromancer, the book credited with establishing cyberpunk as a genre.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Let’s look at the signposts. Gibson pulls the familiarity of a television, the gloominess of a dark, rainy sky, and the gloominess of a dead channel together in one sentence. Mentioning the port also gives it a seaside location. It’s all a signpost that this is a high-tech setting, yet a gloomy one in one go. When I first read it, I spent the rest of the story viewing all the fantastic technology through a lens of decay and failure.
He could have just called it a rainy sky, or separated each element like the port, the technology, and the gloom into their own separate sentences. It’s the combination of elements in one that makes the atmosphere.
These signposts are all sensory input. So, when you write a setting, put yourself in it. Don’t think about what should go there. This is not reality; this is your setting described like you. Think about what you want to go there.
Start with the most important sense to perceiving that setting. You walk onto a beach, what will you notice first? The hot sun, the blue waves, the sand beneath your feet, or the smell/taste of salt in the air? Whichever sensation is the strongest to you is the one you write first.
After that, fill the scene with as many sensory details as you can fit. Is it a fresh sunny day? Or is it night on the beach? If it’s day, you’d see the waves first, but at night you can hear them hammering the shore forever, long before you feel water under your feet.
Look past yourself and see what else is going on. What kind of ambient sounds can you hear from the shore? Waves, as mentioned above, but maybe some people are playing, or it’s just you and your dog.
All these interactions make the setting yours. And therefore, your readers since they are experiencing those things.
Now, go a step further and add time into the mix. What season is the beach? Summer is the obvious one, but standing on a beach in winter would add a completely different feeling and raise some questions from the reader about why you’d be on a beach in the middle of winter.
What year matters too. Certain decades have different pieces of scenery associated with them. There’s a reason every show from the eighties or set in the eighties has big, ugly hairdos and even uglier cars. As an aside, everything from the eighties was ugly, down to the Hollywood stars at the time.
Back on topic, those time periods have specific signposts associated with them. By deliberately invoking those signposts you are calling readers back to that era and inviting them to experience that time. Call it nostalgia, but nostalgia is deliberately invoking a specific type of atmosphere based on specific yearnings, for past times when things were ‘better.’
The last idea I can offer is on spacing of atmosphere. To pack every paragraph with heavy description would drag the story to a crawl and drain the reader’s attention.
So, most good scenes start with a paragraph or two of the foundational details; what you’re experiencing and where you are. As you go through your scene, throw in supporting details. Remember, you are constructing a coherent setting first, and adding atmosphere over.
The end result is your world. Not any generic description but your world as you’re experiencing it.
And that is what makes any writer’s world worth remembering.
Thank you for reading friends. If you liked this and are interested in future pieces of advice, feel free to like and subscribe.