Emotion 3: Evoking emotion in the reader

The roof was rotten

Read this snippet carefully and notice how it affects you.

The roof was rotten, and rain dripped through the empty hospital’s interior, spreading damp and decay through the building. The hospital was ranged around a central well, which let in a certain amount of gray and unfriendly light.

The basement world beneath the empty hospital wards comprised more than a hundred tiny rooms, some of them empty, others containing abandoned hospital supplies. One room held a squat, giant metal furnace, while the next room housed the blocked and waterless toilets and showers. Most of the basement floors were covered with a thin layer of oily rainwater, which reflected the darkness and the decay back toward the rotting ceilings.

Neverwhere(1996)
How do you feel when you read this snippet? What makes you feel the way you do?

Our notes below these snippets are quite detailed!

You don't need to write this much detail—we just want to show you how all the different ideas we've talked about appear in even these small snippets.

However, if you genuinely think about how each snippet makes you feel and what about it makes you feel that way, then our notes should be interesting.

(It will also be helpful if you compare the snippets as you go, because they have certain features in common and others are different.)

  • Characters: None.
  • Conflict: None between characters, although you could say there is conflict between the hospital and the environment (to quote Bender in Futurama, "Father Time really took a bat to this place!")
  • Context: Abandoned hospital.

There are no characters, so this is 100% environment description to create mood.

And it's creepy!

This snippet is a relentless stack of details about darkness, decay, and abandonment, plus some grotesque size details thrown in for good measure (a hundred tiny rooms, but one contains a squat, giant furnace?).

How do you respond to this mood?

In particular, what kinds of things do you imagine will happen here? 😬

This snippet is pretty literal: it wants to creep you out, and it does.

If there's a contrasting emotion, it might be something like fascination, excitement, or anticipation—because in a haunted-house type setting we expect a monster to jump out at any second.

Depending on how you feel about scares, you might look forward to that moment!

This is one of the weird contrasting emotional effects of horror stories in general: we're terrified but we love it. 😨🤣

Before we move on, what would you have to do to change the mood of this snippet?

90% of the creepy mood is created by downbeat qualities in the noun groups, plus a handful of distinctively downbeat nouns.

What would this snippet feel like if you switched all these downbeat words to upbeat words?

The roof was rotten, and rain dripped through the empty hospital’s interior, spreading damp and decay through the building. The hospital was ranged around a central well, which let in a certain amount of gray and unfriendly light.

The basement world beneath the empty hospital wards comprised more than a hundred tiny rooms, some of them empty, others containing abandoned hospital supplies. One room held a squat, giant metal furnace, while the next room housed the blocked and waterless toilets and showers. Most of the basement floors were covered with a thin layer of oily rainwater, which reflected the darkness and the decay back toward the rotting ceilings.

Neverwhere(1996)

You can imagine if you swapped just those highlighted words, you could create a very different mood.

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