Write Better: Tips and tricks

Crafting Visual Atmosphere

One of my favorite compliments from readers goes along the lines of, "This scene/story/paragraph was written so well, I could see it in my head!"

Sight is often the first sense readers engage with, making it essential for setting the scene and establishing the mood. Effective visual descriptions transport readers into the world of your story and make it come alive. 

Use these elements to create an immersive visual setting:

Lighting

Lighting is crucial to your atmosphere. Whether the source is natural or artificial (or even absent!) light affects mood, visibility, and the way objects are perceived. 

Bright Lighting: Bright light is known for its ability to expose. Bright lights, like daylight, or walking into the afternoon sun after being in a windowless office all day, adds a sense of cheer, safety/security, freedom, and at times, evokes cleansing. In some cases, bright light is an indicator of sterilization and starkness. 

Examples: Running out of a cave into broad daylight, entering an operating room, the morning after coming to grips with a major life event

Dim Lighting: Creates shadows and obscures details, amplifying a sense of mystery and magic. It leaves room for imagination and can be described in a positive or negative manner very easily. Dim lighting adds limitations to what can be seen and brings in shadows, allowing you to mask/hide/blur the identities of things, such as a creature emerging from a den on a wooded hill. It also allows you the ability to "Create" boundaries, motion, and objects. 

Examples: a vampiric showdown in the shadow of a clock tower, flickering candlelight, shadows appearing as monsters, the soft purple haze to the summer air as carnival lights flicker on and you stroll arm in arm with your spouse.

Flickering Lights: Implies instability and unpredictability. Usually more of a negative feature, as it often pairs with something broken, old, or weak. Flickering lights can also act as a threat of impending darkness.

Example: The lantern flickered erratically as if it might go out at any moment.

Moonlight: Provides a cool, soft illumination, often associated with supernatural events. The moon is calm, mystic, distant. Moonlight is helpful for establishing the right mood for evening scenes, be it a thin sliver in the sky, intermittent between clouds, or full and round. Even its absence is noted in storytelling! Able to be quite bright or rather faint, you have a lot of play as far as descriptions go. Like sunlight, moonlight can reach into places and act as safety or escape - and make other areas all the blacker and more dangerous. 

Example: Pale moonlight filtered through a broken window. 

Shadows: allows you to hide elements you don't want your reader to care about. Used with a light source, shadows can direct your reader's attention to exactly where you want it to go. Shadows can have a life of their own. They can move or dance, be playful and mischievous, or can appear flat and stationary. Shadows can make something feel more serious or stern, such as the expression on a sculpture. Shadows can make you feel cozy as you cuddle up by the fire, or relaxing - it's all up to you.

Examples: A picnic in the shade of an old oak tree, the shadows of birds flitting overhead, that pile of unfolded laundry you dumped on your desk chair and forgot about until you went to pee at 3AM.

Deep Shadows: Obscures entire areas of your scene, leaving its contents to the reader's imagination. Deep shadows activate one of the most primal fears: fear of the unknown. Deep shadows make things scarier, darker, larger, brimming with almost infinite possibility, in the right setting. The light, and everything it symbolizes, never reaches here.