World-building vs Atmosphere . . .

By Belle Noire:

Have you ever noticed that your story is lacking something? It’s frustrating when you’ve built a world that you feel is incredible, and yet still, still, there is something missing. You have your setting; you have your currencies; you have your language especially designed to reflect the fact that your characters belong to a race of beings with split tongues, or no lips; your character morphology and intellect and emotion reflects the environment (or not, if that is the central struggle); in short, you have built a world entire, and yet with all of this development and consideration and creativity, THERE IS STILL SOMETHING WRONG.

Have you considered atmosphere?

Yes, yes, of course the stuff they breathe, but more than that. If you have created a fantastic world like the one above, and yet haven’t given it an atmosphere, it can very much lead the reader to believe that it is just a bog standard world not much different from her own. It can leave the reader feeling that the world-building is somehow incomplete. In certain genres, like horror, lack of atmosphere can be absolutely fatal, particularly if your subject is esoteric; and lack of atmosphere is why some paranormal horror stories fall flat despite the plot. Nonetheless, atmosphere is useful in all genres. And yet, because it is so subtle, it is often the most difficult thing to include, because the nuances of a world are the easiest things to overlook.

For instance—

The cricket in the forest; do you hear it? Do your readers? What about the rustle of the leaf or the smell of the rotting log it’s hiding under? You don’t have to write about these things explicitly, but you certainly have to evoke them so that the reader knows they are there, so that they are represented in the reader’s inner vision of your world. In fact, where atmosphere is concerned, delicacy is everything. Lengthy descriptions often bore the reader, and while you may think you are creating a world for her, it’s often better to let the reader do it for herself.

When a reader gets a feeling from a story, it’s the nuances that she gleans from the language that shape her feelings even if she misses other clues. We create that atmosphere with language, by choosing the right word to evoke the feelings needed. You don’t choose happy words for a horror piece; but beyond that, even within the pool of appropriate words, you have to dive for the one that can say a sentence’s worth by itself. Lack may work, but void is more intense. In that one little word is a whole religion’s worth of subtext and psychology, subtle and nuanced and weighted from 2000 years of use, and you’d be a fool not to use that for your own ends. Atmosphere comes from choosing those weighted words, the words that evoke the images you want without having to describe them. Subtlety is, after all, the whole point.

Often, though, this subtlety is the reason we overlook them in our everyday lives, and thus, our writing. The first way to develop atmosphere is to start noticing it in your life. No doubt, at some point in your life you will have come upon a situation in which people described the atmosphere as “electric” or “heavy” or “charged” or “thick”. Think about what these terms are describing: they are metaphors, certainly, but are there physical responses on which these metaphors are based? A “heavy” atmosphere, for example, is a description of a reaction to stress, which prompts a physiological response similar to that of bearing a weight: changes in posture, body temperature, blood pressure and pulse rate, and more subtly, changes in breathing and pupil response. Yes, these things are understated and easily missed, and yet they all contribute to that amorphous thing called a “heavy” atmosphere. You feel it even if you miss every one of those tiny clues on a conscious level. Similarly, a reader should be able to get a feel for your story even if they choose not to wade through your three page description of local geomorphology. Atmosphere allows you to do away with long, boring descriptions and get to the heart of the story. It's all in the words you choose.

Whatever, keep writing.