Mood Assignment

By Cam

Okay, so I didn’t have time to post my completed assignment yesterday. But I did it. And it’s longer than a couple paragraphs. And it’s rough. And it’s really hard to do when your two-year old insists on replaying Dinosaur Train all. Day. Long.

So, without further adieu, here are my attempts at taking the same basic premise–a first kiss–and applying three different layers of mood: sad, uncomfortable, and dreamy.

Can you tell which is which?

#1

He sways a little and if I close my eyes, I hear wind chimes. Not the laughter of forty kids outside the door, or the collective singing of every girl in my eighth grade class belting it to Lady Gaga, not even Sally Treverton’s shrill call that it’s time to open her birthday presents. No, it’s a delicate breeze of sound. A soft announcement that this is the moment I’ve waited for my whole life.

And it’s only for me and Kenny.

In this room there are shelves of boxes. I don’t know what’s in them but they all lean toward us as if they know what’s about to happen, too. Kenny’s eyes are closed but I keep mine open. I want to freeze this moment, press it into my palm and never let go. Even the aroma of garlic butter—so strong it clings to the cotton of his shirt—is so deliciously warm that I hug my arms around my body to trap it inside. To make my skin never forget how this feels.

He leans closer and I stare at his mouth. It’s a perfect mouth. A mouth I know will match up to my mine like tabs of Velcro or magnets that have no business being apart from one another. “So pizza…” I say, taking the smallest step forward. “With garlic and butter…” I close my eyes and wait, giving him the opportunity to finish my thought.

He sighs, turning the delicate breeze of tinkling sound into a vortex of thunder that’s too loud for this room. “Look, I just wanted to make Lori jealous.”

I open my eyes and see him standing there. The wall of boxes swells with the knowledge that they’ve just witnessed a crushing blow no amount of aid will ever repair.

“But if this is going to be too weird, then I’ll go ask Jessica. It doesn’t really matter to me anyway.”

I don’t even have time to ask him why he’s being so silly because a box from the top shelf crashes down, spilling silver, red, and green all over Kenny.

#2

I don’t know why Kenny chose me, but it’s quiet in this room and I like that. There’s not a pink-packaged gift anywhere in sight. Just brown, dusty boxes bloated with Sally Treverton’s past.

Kenny closes his eyes. I don’t ask him what he’s doing because the sooner he does whatever he’s planning on doing, the sooner I can hide—by myself—from everything screaming “Happy Birthday!,” and the sooner I can forget that yet another year has crapped all over me.

But Kenny leans forward. All I smell is the garlic butter that came with the dozen pizzas that somehow ran out before I had a chance to get a slice. Marty Greene had five slices of pizza stacked onto his plate. Five. He laughed when he saw me place my empty plate back onto the table.

Kenny leans forward. I think maybe he wants to give me my first kiss. Maybe he knows Sally’s birthday isn’t the only one today. Maybe he actually likes me. But I’m sweating and he’s really close and I stammer out with, “So pizza, huh?” I lick my lips. They’ve never felt so flaky before. If he does kiss me and can tell my lips are chapped, will he tell everyone? Will they all make fun of me? On my birthday? He’s still standing there and I think maybe he’s expecting me to say something else. Conversation is not my best attribute. Nothing’s really my best attribute, but I manage to ask, “With garlic and…uh, butter?”

He opens his eyes. Scoots back as far away from me as the walls of shelves will allow. “Look, I just wanted to make Lori jealous.” Of course. That’s how it always goes. “But if this is going to be too weird, then I’ll go ask Jessica. It doesn’t really matter to me anyway.”

I wrap my arms around myself and watch, frozen, as one of the dusty, old boxes high up on a shelf tumbles down and lands on Kenny’s head. Christmas spills out all over the floor. And a card—yellowed with age, corners bent—stares me in the face. It reads: Happy Birthday Lisa.

Better late than never.

#3

A box of Christmas decorations is about to crash onto Kenny’s head. If he were to jump four inches, it’d be all over. But he doesn’t jump because he’s too busy leaning toward me with his eyes closed and air wheezing out of his nose. I think he might’ve spilled garlic butter on his shirt somewhere because I’m tempted to hand him a mint or a stick of gum or a toothbrush (if I had one…which I don’t because let’s face it, kids who carry around travel-sized dental kits are just asking for it).

My back is pressed against the wall and at the moment when I think—this is it—my first kiss will be with a wheezing, stinking boy who doodles boobs in the margins of his notebook, the only thing that really bangs around my head is that I forgot to wear a bra. Who forgets to put on their undergarments for Sally Treverton’s fourteenth birthday party—the biggest mashup of cool and uncool in one place without threat of extra homework or a phone call home?

I am the genetic equivalent to a salted slug.

I cross my arms in an effort to add an extra layer between me and Kenny. Even though his lids are still glued shut, I’m convinced he has some sort of x-ray vision. He tips forward.

“So pizza, huh?” I ask. “With garlic and…uh, butter?” I want to slap my forehead but I can’t. My arms are armor and no way am I leaving myself open for an easy kill.

Kenny’s eyes pop open. He purses his lips and looks like he wants to mash me between his molars and spit me out onto Sally’s three-tiered cake of pink sugar. “Look, I just wanted to make Lori jealous.” He shrinks several inches and I see that the decorations box is a mile away from his head now. “But if this is going to be too weird, then I’ll go ask Jessica. It doesn’t really matter to me anyway.”

And as if by some magical cosmic hand, the box sitting high on top of the shelf—with Christmas wreaths and red, silver, and green bows—sails over the ledge and plummets onto Kenny’s head.

Is Your opening IN THE MOOD? (Part 2)

By Cam

So yesterday I left off with why mood is important not only in your whole story, but also in your opening.  So that begs the question:

How do you capture the mood in the opening?

My tips:

• Pay attention to your character. What are they doing in the beginning? How do they feel? Are their actions in sync with these feelings? Observe other people in various states of mood and see how they differ, how their steps change, how their voice changes, how their face falls flat or lights up. STUDY.
• Pay attention to what your story is ABOUT. Not the plot, not the inciting incident happening in the next page or whatever. What is the takeaway you want your readers to stuff in their pocket and keep forever?
• Write. Revise.
• Repeat. This is a really important step — don’t underestimate numerous revisions and waiting periods to see if your perception changes of what you’re trying to color your story with.
• Share it with your critique partner/group. Ask them what they think the mood is and see if it matches up with your intentions. If it doesn’t…
• Write and revise again. (See? IMPORTANT STEP!) If you feel like you’re still not getting it right, maybe you need to see more visual examples of how the mood can layer in with the story. Watch a movie that evokes the kind of tone you’re looking to portray. Observe the details–setting, characters, dialogue–and see what’s done right to give you the experience you expect as the audience.

I think I went through twenty versions of my first five pages for LIFE AFTER SEND. Is it perfect? Probably not. Will it change if I find an agent and/or editor? Maybe. But does it evoke the hopeful excitement and nervous regret that I want my readers to feel? I think so.

Since mood is something that is utterly impossibly to explain in terms of mechanics, I wanted to show some examples of opening paragraphs that I think capture the overall tone of the story. Just remember—these are the first paragraphs. To really see what I mean, you should buy the books and read them so you can see how the mood plays out over the course of the whole.

Whatever mood you want to evoke in your reader, it needs to start here:

From Courtney Summers’ Some Girls Are:

Everyone is wasted.

Anna is wasted. Josh is wasted. Marta is wasted. Jeanette is wasted. Bruce is wasted. Donnie’s always wasted. I’m not wasted. I had my turn at the last party, called shotgun in Anna’s Benz after it was over. My head out the window, the world spinning. I puked my guts out. It wasn’t fun, but it’s not like there was anything else to do. Tonight, there’s even less to do than that. Tonight, I’m the designated driver.

In this opening, you get a sense that the protagonist is annoyed. That she still has to follow the rules even though she doesn’t like it because that’s how it is in her group of drunken friends. The clipped sentences add into the ‘everything spiraling out of control’ feeling. This tone carries throughout the rest of the book as the protagonist, Regina, loses top-rank in her school’s social scene.

From Jennifer Echols’ Going Too Far:

“That’s the worst idea I ever heard,” I told Eric. Then I took another sip of beer and swallowed. “Let’s do it.”

“Meg,” Tiffany called after me. But I was already out the door of Eric’s Beamer. My beer sloshed onto the gravel as I led the way across the dark clearing to the railroad bridge.

Do you get a sense of Meg’s rebellious nature? The mood is spontaneous with no regard for consequences. That’s true of Meg’s personality too, and it also becomes her greatest enemy throughout the book.

From Dia Reeves’ Bleeding Violet:

The truck driver left me off on Lamartine, on the odd side of the street. I felt odd too, standing in the town where my mother lived. For the first seven years of my life, we hadn’t even lived on the same continent, and now she waited only a few houses away.

Unreal.

Words like ‘odd’ and ‘unreal’ capture the mood of Bleeding Violet. There are so many of these moments woven throughout that at times you wonder if it’s real at all. It’s tone is mysterious and leaves the reader curious just like the protagonist is curious.

From Walter Dean Myers’ Lockdown:

“I hope you mess this up! I hope you blow it big-time! You’re supposed to be smart. You think you’re smart, right?”

“Sir…”

“Shut up, worm!” Mr. Pugh looked over his shoulder at me. “If you had any smarts, you’d be out on the streets. But you’re in jail, ain’t you? Ain’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know this work program is bullshit. Just more work for me and the staff. But I’m counting on you, worm. All you got to do is walk away when nobody’s looking. When they catch you, I’m going to put you in a hole so deep, you won’t even remember what daylight looks like.”

I don’t know about you, but reading this opening jars me out of my happy existence. It makes me feel defensive and lost, like I don’t belong there listening to someone talk to me like that. This fish-out-of-water feeling is layered within the story as Reese tries to find his place while working in a senior home through a program to get out of juvie.

From Nina LaCour’s Hold Still:

I watch drops of water fall from the ends of my hair. They streak down my towel, puddle on the sofa cushion. My heart pounds so hard I can feel it in my ears.

“Sweetheart. Listen.”

Mom says Ingrid’s name and I start to hum, not the melody to a song, just one drawn-out note. I know it makes me seem crazy, I know it won’t make anything change, but it’s better than crying, it’s better than screaming, it’s better than listening to what they’re telling me.

The mood of this opening is pretty obvious, isn’t it? It’s full of loss, melancholy, pain…but there’s also a bit of hope too. Without having read this book (even though it’s on my TBR list), I know what I’ll get just from the first couple of paragraphs.

So there you have it. Mood. Tone. Flavor. Whatever you want to call it. Your opening needs it to ground the reader in the story. To give them that sense of relief that they’re getting what they ordered.

Before I end this already encyclopedia-length post, here’s an assignment: Pick three moods and write a short passage (no more than a paragraph or two) all dealing with the same topic—a first kiss. The players, settings, results should all be the same, but see how different your passages end up when you write with a different mood in mind.

Here are my moods: uncomfortable, dreamy, sad. I’ll try to post the results tomorrow.

Any players?

Is your opening IN THE MOOD? (Part 1)

By Cam

The first bite of a to-die-for pumpkin cheesecake after you skipped lunch. The opening drive of a rival football game with fifty-thousand fans booing in surround sound. Foreplay.

What do these things have in common?

They are beginnings.

The beginning is a moment full of…stuff. And you thought I was going to be poetic, right? Heh heh. But in all honesty, openings really are full of stuff, the—“this could be great!” or “this could suck!”—kind of stuff. Basically openings are just FULL. The beginning of a story is when you have the FULLEST attention of your reader. It’s not the first taste they’ll get of your story because presumably, they would’ve already read the back cover blurb or at least have some inkling of what your story is about. BUT. Your opening is their first real, hearty, bite of your story. It’s the moment when they decide if they’ll put up with your stinky morning breath for the duration of your relationship, or the moment they decide no amount of Listerine will solve your foul, gingivitis-tainted essence.

Sorry for that analogy. But it’s the truth.

That’s why your opening word/line/paragraph/page/chapter is so important. It’s your PLEASE LOVE ME! chance. Your “Hey, I’m on Amazon and I’m clicking through to the first page!” chance. You only get one per book so it needs to count, right?

Now, there are a ton of posts on opening paragraphs. Wonderful examples of what works, what doesn’t. Dissections of why and why not. How to Write Openings for Dummies. How to Teach Your Dog to Write Openings.

I’m not an expert in this subject, but I’m a big reader and I know what I like to read. I know that I like to get a sense of who the character is, where they are, what predicament they’re in, and more importantly (for me), what mood they’re in. What mood am I going to be in while I read this? Am I going to be sad, hopeful, thoughtful, motivated, lost?

But Cam! Is mood really that important in the first line/paragraph/page/chapter?

YES! If you really want your reader to take away the biggest bite of your story’s essence, then you need to open your story with the right mood. Only you, as the writer, will know what that is (or should be). If your story is one of a serious nature—let’s say, death or abuse or something equally grave—then that tone will be lost on the reader if you open with a very comical image. I’m not saying it can’t work and like everything in writing, there are no hard and fast rules, but you may end up distancing your reader from what your story is really about while you’re making that crucial first impression. (Maggie Stiefvater has an awesome post on mood and how she revises for it. Read it and thank me later.)

Here’s my take on mood (or tone):

It’s the sprinkling of seasoning while you cook. It’s the salt or pepper or hot pepper or soy sauce or sugar that, applied to the same content, will drastically change the taste of your story. Some readers like it sweet, some like it salty, or a mixture of both. That doesn’t really matter. But a reader’s palate will know from the moment their teeth sink into that first word whether or not they’ll enjoy the whole four-course meal, or whether they’ll spit the rest into a napkin. They’ll know when the six-layer lasagna they ordered off the menu tastes more like tuna tacos and they’ll send it back.

There’s nothing wrong with tuna tacos—but there is if it’s not what they thought they were getting.

I originally wanted to make this one post, but then it ended up really, really, really long. So I broke it up into two parts. You’re welcome for sparing you today. I’ll post the finale tomorrow with examples of how to capture mood. Plus homework! It’ll be fun!