Mood Ring

I write for mood.  This was an epiphany I had this week.  I started writing long before I started reading about writing.  What I wrote reflected who I’d been reading—mostly Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury.

Contemporary writing gurus indicated that we should cut to the chase.  The modern attention span isn’t comfortable with the building of mood.  They keep a finger on the mouse at all times, my friend, ready to click off your page if a yawn even starts.

And this sickness has infected editors.  We want the quick fix.  Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.  Literary foreplay is so twentieth century.  And the millennia before that.  The earliest recorded stories, like the Gilgamesh Epic, are repetitive and build to the action slowly.  We don’t have time for that any more.

Many hours of my childhood were whiled away behind a Ray Bradbury collection of stories.  Some were little more than prose tone poems, but they were beautiful and transformative.  I read them because they were a little weird.  I can get enough of everyday life by opening my eyes, if I can pull them away from a book long enough.

But mood!  That’s what Poe is all about.  Well, that and the macabre.  Reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” always sets me in mind of this.  It is the buildup that matters.  How would the story be if it began with the collapse?  When did the collapse begin?  Are not all the fictional events tied together?  Isn’t it better to understand from the tone why the house had to fall?

Reading is a leisure-time activity.  We live in a world, however, where even leisure is rushed.  TMI.  Too much information.  We can’t possibly hit every single web page.  Those that have something to say had better say it quick.  Literary promiscuity thrives.

As I grew older and began to read H. P. Lovecraft, I saw that horror, especially, was a genre that relied on mood.  I start nearly all my stories with mood.  Editors quickly toss them aside.  “Give us action,” they seem to say.  “Now!”

Of course, the novelist goes nowhere without mood.  Even the existentialists knew to give their tales a vacuity that sucked readers in.  As fall settles in, I am again moody.  It is the season for expressing yourself, and word counts be damned.