Write On: Finding the Mood

If you’ve been reading along with this blog so far, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I have a writing voice that has been described as “fun” or “playful.” That’s not something I ever worked on exactly – I love writing and I think that comes out in my pieces. I believe it’s that simple.

That said, a “fun and playful” tone isn’t going to work for a mystery about a missing person.

No, I had to get my head into the same space as my main protagonist. This is a character who was already feeling blue and lonely before the gut-punch of her boyfriend going missing. Simply writing “she was so lonely” wasn’t going to cut it – I want my reader to feel it. 

Which meant I needed to feel it as I wrote. Is it really necessary to take such a method approach to writing a story? Probably not, but that’s what I did.

I cast myself back to a time where I felt that way: My very first semester of college. As excited as I was to go off to college, I missed my high school girlfriend terribly. I was young and this was my first serious relationship so every emotion was amplified to maximum levels. I tried to be present and find the excitement in being away and on my own for the first time, but I was always acutely aware that I was six hours away from the girl I wanted to be with. Despite my best efforts, I was often quiet and distant, floating through my days with a constant heaviness in my chest. My sadness was always just under the surface, and something as simple as seeing her favorite flavor of Snapple iced tea on a shelf could cause my eyes to swell with tears.

Man, I must’ve been a real barrel of laughs that first month.

Anyway, I did learn to cope with the distance and ended up having a great time at college, thank you. But learning to cope and adjusting to a “new normal” are all things my main protagonist would be going through, too. 

To help get into that mind-set, I put together a playlist – yes, much like a soundtrack – to listen to while writing. Not all of these may be quite right for a 1991 setting, but they have the feeling I’m aiming for in my story. I've included a couple videos for those songs here: