Do you know how to set the mood?
No, I’m not talking about dimming the lights, opening a bottle of wine, and putting on “Rich Baby Daddy” by Drake.
I’m talking about evoking a specific emotional vibe in your readers.
(Less Drake, more Grateful Dead.)
One of the best ways to create a mood in your writing is with the literary technique of pathetic fallacy.
That said, pathetic fallacy can be a confusing term.
I think the confusion just might have something to do with the fact that, in this case, ‘pathetic’ doesn’t mean ‘pathetic’.
Oh, and ‘fallacy’ doesn’t mean ‘fallacy’.
Huh?
What the heck is Kevin talking about?
(Perhaps he DID open that bottle of wine?)
No, no — fear not, fellow word warrior; I am sober as it gets.
In fact, I’m ready to break down exactly what “pathetic fallacy” means when it comes to literature and how you can use it in your writing.
It all happens here in the latest episode of The Writing Coach podcast.
Listen now!
The Writing Coach Episode #189 Show Notes
Registration for the March 2024 edition of Story Plan Intensive is now open!
The Writing Coach Episode #189 Transcript
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Hello, beloved listeners. And welcome back to the writing coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. John’s here.
I am recording this fresh off a great webinar last night. I love teaching in general, but I love doing webinars. It’s always fun to kind of hop on there and make it an event and do some teaching both for people who are familiar with me, as well as perhaps some new people who don’t know me and who are on my mailing list or heard about the webinar or something. It’s a fun way to kind of meet people and teach and hopefully get some new clients out of the process as well.
One of the really cool things about last night’s webinar was Valerie Levine attended. She’s a Canadian like me, and she had some really nice things to say. She said, “I want to let you know I really enjoy your podcast, and they always make me want to write more,” which is so nice to hear. Podcasting is really a strange art form; you put it out there into the world and there really isn’t a lot of feedback. There’s not even a lot of great metrics. I get general estimates of the number of listeners out there, so I know hundreds are people are listening to the show every week, but I don’t ever hear back from them. Maybe that’s why webinars are so fun: you get instant feedback from folks like Valerie. Anyway, it was really nice to hear from a listener of the show, and especially that it was inspiring her to get some writing done because that’s what it’s all about. I’m hoping to inspire you to pursue your artistic goals and hopefully share a little bit of craft knowledge each week and just keep you energized and interested in the world of writing. So, shout out to Valerie. Thanks so much for attending the webinar and for the kind words.
I normally host that webinar nearing the end of Story Plan Intensive, and it is indeed the end of another round. We had a great group of people go through it. We had some great people inside the VIP group coaching portion of it, which is always fun. So the wrap-up of this edition just means it’s time to start shouting out and building up the promotions for the next round.
The next round of Story Plan Intensive is going to take place this March 2024, which means registration is open now. From now until March, we’ll be welcoming folks into the next round. If Story Plan is something you’ve heard me talk about before and you’re curious, but you haven’t taken the leap and signed up yet, this is your chance to do it. If you’ve perhaps done it before, but you didn’t complete it, or you didn’t choose to upgrade to the coaching component of it, maybe now is the time you sign up again and choose coaching this time.
Maybe you’ve never heard of Story Plan. Maybe this is your first time listening to my podcast. If so, welcome to The Writing Coach Podcast! I am always happy to have you here. There are about 188 episodes that you can go back and listen to and get caught up on things. But for now, I’ll let you know I have a program called Story Plan Intensive. It’s a four-week email program where every day I email you training videos, and on Fridays, you get creative homework assignments, all of which are intended to help you develop your craft knowledge while planning an extraordinary outline for your book in four weeks or less.
So we’ve got a new sign up URL, so head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan-intensive and you can get signed up now.
Today on the podcast, I want to talk a little bit about tone, which is something I haven’t actually taught specifically as its own course or taught on a webinar or spoke at length to before, so I want to jam on this idea of tone and pathetic fallacy and really get my head wrapped around my approach to these things.
At the end of the day, tone is really about choosing a specific mood or feeling for a scene, and then leaning into that mood or feeling. How do we do that? How do we convey a mood, a feeling, a tone to a scene? Well, we do it through word choice, through choosing specific words that are going to be employed to evoke specific emotional responses in the reader.
Now I know that sounds kind of like theoretical or vague or something, so let’s just look at a really simple clear example of the types of choices you need to make as an author when you are writing a scene.
Perhaps you’re talking about a sunny day, you could write:
The sun blazed down upon them.
Or you could write:
The sun glowed warm in the sky above.
Both of these sentences are describing a sunny day, but one has connotations of negativity, and one has connotations of positivity.
A word like a “blaze” has a strength to it, a violence to it. The “blazing sun” is not all that comforting.
Also, we’re choosing to describe the way the sun is positioned, and often there are some strange binaries associated with words. We often associate down with negative and up with positive in the same way we often associate dark with evil and light with good. Obviously, these are just sort of strange cultural connotations, but the fact that we’re saying the sun blazed down, those words blazed and down have a certain connotation of negativity to them.
Whereas the say the sun “glowed warm” in the sky “above.” The sun is above; it’s not pressing down on us; it’s up above us, giving us a sense of airiness and positivity of rising up. And rather than saying blazing, we’re saying words like, glowed warm; there’s comfort to it, there’s positivity to it.
This is just a really simple binary example, but in every sentence you write, you’re making these kinds of word choice decisions, and they’re all going to impact the emotional impact and the tone of the scene.
Now, what this requires, what this strategic decision making requires, is to understand that a scene is about more than just the plot. A lot of the time, I read client scenes, and it’s just moving the story forward. It’s something that needs to happen. It’s the next domino that needs to fall so that the story can unfold, but a scene is not effective when it’s just stuff happening. A scene needs to be about something. I always recommend my clients think about their scenes as their own little short story. And each little short story needs to be about something and about something more than just things happening. It needs to be about a theme, about an emotion.
And so if you’re writing a scene, and it’s a sunny day, and this is a scene where things are going wrong, where the tone of the scene is perhaps negative, then you’re going to choose to use a sentence like the Sun Blaze down upon them. But if it’s a happy scene, if things are going well for the character, well, maybe ‘the sun glowed warm in the sky’ is the sentence that you’re going to choose.
Okay, so the tone of your scene is tied into the specific word choices that you make. Those word choices that you make are determined on the emotional valiance of the scene that you’re writing.
One of the easiest ways to control tone or mood in a scene is through the literary technique called pathetic fallacy.
You might be familiar with pathetic fallacy. It’s something we talked about in high school, at least back when I was in high school, but it’s also a very confusing term because “pathetic” and “fallacy” are both being used in a way that we don’t associate their normal meaning.
When we’re talking about the literary technique of pathetic fallacy, the word pathetic is not being used in its usual meaning of something pitiful or something deserving of pity This is rather drawing on its, I believe, Latin root for pathos, which really means emotion or the suffering of a character, the pathos of a character. So, when you hear pathetic, don’t think pitiful, think emotional.
And when you hear the term fallacy in this context, it’s not communicating a mistake, it’s not saying that something is wrong. In this case, it’s meant to imply a deviation from the realistic or a deviation from the literal.
And so what pathetic fallacy really means is “emotional or empathetic metaphor.”
A kind of technical definition of it is that pathetic fallacy is literary technique where you’re attributing human emotions and characteristics to inanimate objects, nature, or animals. But the way I was taught it in high school, and the way I always think about it, is just simply saying that the weather of the scene is reflecting the mood of the scene.
Okay? So we’re going from this kind of technical-sounding definition of pathetic fallacy imparting the characteristics of emotion to inanimate object, blah, blah, blah, blah to, the end of the day, pathetic fallacy is just about ensuring that the environment, the literal weather of the scene, is appropriate or is reflecting the emotions of the story that you’re telling.
I often reference pathetic fallacy in the context of the all-is-lost moment. The all-is-lost moment is that special moment 75% of the way through your story when you’re about to transition into the final act of your book, and everything goes wrong for your character. They’re as far away from their story goal as they can get, they’ve lost confidence in themselves, they’ve separated them from themselves or been separated from their team and friends. It’s that moment leading into that dark night of the soul. It’s the low moment for our character in our story.
You always know you’re at the all-is-lost moment in a movie if suddenly, there’s like some sad acoustic music playing and your character is looking out a rainy window, maybe crying, maybe while eating ice cream right from the container. That’s the all is lost moment. And that’s also pathetic fallacy. The rain outside the window reflects the tears and the sadness of the character at that moment.
So that’s how you can use descriptions of the weather in your book to help emphasize the mood of a scene. We see this happening a lot in classic literature, and probably in most books.
What comes to mind for me is The Great Gatsby. It’s obviously a great example since most people have read it and it happens to be one of the best books ever written. In The Great Gatsby, when Tom and Gatsby have this big confrontation, and then I think eventually, Gatsby has a stand outside of Daisy’s house, I think, there’s this violent thunderstorm going on. And, of course, that thunderstorm represents the intensity of the conflict going on in that Gatsby is trying to steal Tom’s wife. It’s certainly a kind of chaotic conflict that’s represented in the rain in that story.
Now that I think of it in, at least in Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby film, I’m almost certain when Daisy first sees Gatsby coming back into her life, e comes in out of the rain as well. That’s maybe representing Gatsby has been out in the rain, and now he’s coming inside, he’s coming back to his love Daisy.
So, the weather, mood, and tone all interact in Gatsby.
Another great piece of historical literature . . . I think three or four times, and I can just never get into it. I feel like I should be able to appreciate it but I just don’t. Maybe someday, maybe, you know, every decade I give it a shot, so maybe in my 50s I’ll finally like it. Of course, I’m referring to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
Of course, in Weathering Heights, things are always bleak and dreary and rainy and gray, and the landscape is empty, and all of this kind of like depressing weather in that book, obviously reflects the relationships and the emotions and the sadness and the tragedy of that story. Heathcliff is always grumpy and dark, kind of like a grumpy, dark cloud hanging over the house of Wuthering Heights. So again, there is that really clear pathetic fallacy going on. It’s a grumpy, emotionally sad, dreary, and dark story and so we get emotionally sad, dreary, dark, bleak weather throughout the book.
The Grapes of Wrath is another masterpiece where we see the Joad family on this journey to try to get to California to escape the Dust Bowl and the droughts and whatnot that were happening during the Great Depression. These droughts, in their lack of water, reflect the economic situation of these characters. In the same way that the environment is lacking rain and water, their lives are lacking income, jobs, and food. And so there’s another example of some great literature ensuring that the weather and the environment that the characters are going through tie in very nicely to the story and the theme and the tone that Steinbach is trying to achieve.
And again, we can go back to rain. The climax of that book does take place in a rainstorm, and it’s a pretty sad ending to that book. And so the fact that it takes place in the rain . . . in fact, I think it’s not even a rainstorm. I believe it’s a flood, right? It’s a flood of tears that comes at the end of that book. But there’s also a hint of hope as well. Perhaps some of that rain also brings with it a little bit of hope after all the dust and drought of the Dust Bowl.
Speaking of rain again, I just watched a great Canadian film: Infinity Pool. If you like art horror like I do, you will love that movie. It’s a movie where a character goes to a resort—you would think it’s like a Caribbean vacation, except everything’s always kind of dull and slightly off-looking and not quite as beautiful or as tropical as it should be. And once again, it’s another movie that ends in a tsunami, that ends with a character standing, or sitting in this case, in the rain.
Always associating rain with sadness or despair, of course, can get repetitive. It tends to work: sunny, happy environment and weather for sunny, happy scenes do tend to work, and dark, dreary things for dark, dreary scenes do tend to work. But there are also opportunities to play against type. Often, this is really easy to spot in film and TV because it’s so visual. But, of course, there are literary examples of this as well.
But just as I was prepping for this podcast, something that came to mind immediately was Midsommar, the fantastic art horror movie. It is a horror movie set entirely in a bright, sunny environment. It’s even got “midsummer” in the title. It’s evoking the middle of summer, this rosy shiny thing, and yet it’s an absolutely horrific tale.
So there’s a great example of a filmmaker playing against type. We are used to dark dreary horror movies, and we’re also used to very claustrophobic urban horror movies. And he goes and creates a horror movie set in a bright, sunny environment and also big, wide-open environmental spaces. In doing so it really distinguishes itself from a lot of other horror. It feels so unique and feels so different because it’s bright and sunny. And, of course, there’s an amazing dissidence that comes from these horrible things taking place in this bright, sunny environment.
An opposite example of that happens in The Office. When the character Jim finally proposes the Pam. I think it’s been three or four seasons of their love story, and when he finally proposes marriage to her it doesn’t happen in some beautiful sunny place. It doesn’t happen in some gorgeous environment. What happens is she’s away at university, and he’s back home working at the crappy paper company. He asks to meet up with her, and they meet up at this crappy gas station on the side of the highway, and it’s absolutely pouring rain. It is kind of the least romantic environment you could expect. But then what happens is that she thinks he’s just meeting her there to touch base, but he drops down on his knee, and he says, “I just can’t wait.” The environment, this crappy gas station, this terrible weather, in this case, the fact that he’s proposing in this environment that doesn’t support the romance, I think it speaks to his unstoppable love for her. He’s like, “I cannot wait. I’m not going to wait for the perfect day. I’m not going to wait for the perfect environment. I love you. And I’m going to ask you to marry me right here in front of some gas station in the rain.” It’s another example of playing against the pathetic fallacy where the environment is actually the opposite of the theme or the tone of the scene. And in doing so, the scene plays against it but plays against it wonderfully.
I didn’t record this podcast because I wanted you to always make your sad scenes rainy or always make your happy scenes Sunny. Rather, I wanted you to be conscious of the weather and, more importantly, the words that you choose to describe the weather or to describe anything in your scene.
As we talked about at the beginning, pathetic fallacy might be most obviously recognized in weather, but you can also use inanimate objects, you can use animals, you can use all sorts of things to convey a theme or a tone via word choice to help emphasize the emotional feeling of the scene and to evoke an emotional response in our readers, which is what we are always trying to do.
All right, if you enjoy this little craft discussion, I’m sure you would love Story Plan Intensive. I’m recording this at the end of January, it’s going to go live in early February, which means you have just a couple of weeks to get signed up. Now is the time to do it.
Thank you so much for tuning in. Hey, hit that subscribe button, and if you’re enjoying this podcast, I’d love to hear from you. Hit me up at kevin@kevintjohns.com, shoot me an email, and I’ll give you a shout-out on the show, just like I did with Valerie at the beginning of this episode. It is a lonely art form, the podcast, and I’d love to hear from you on the other end of things, how you’re hearing things and what you’re taking from the podcast. Let me know.
That is it for this episode. I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
–The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. That means if you purchase a book using that link, I will be paid a small portion of that purchase. Thank you for your support!–
