Master the Art of Creating Visual Atmosphere in Your Writing: Essential Tips for Writers

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One of my favorite compliments from readers goes along the lines of, "This scene/story/paragraph was written so well, I could see it in my head!"

Sight is often the first sense readers engage with, making it essential for setting the scene and establishing the mood. Effective visual descriptions transport readers into the world of your story and make it come alive. 

Use these elements to create an immersive visual setting:

Lighting

Lighting is crucial to your atmosphere. Whether the source is natural or artificial (or even absent!) light affects mood, visibility, and the way objects are perceived. 

Bright Lighting: Bright light is known for its ability to expose. Bright lights, like daylight, or walking into the afternoon sun after being in a windowless office all day, adds a sense of cheer, safety/security, freedom, and at times, evokes cleansing. In some cases, bright light is an indicator of sterilization and starkness. 

Examples: Running out of a cave into broad daylight, entering an operating room, the morning after coming to grips with a major life event

Dim Lighting: Creates shadows and obscures details, amplifying a sense of mystery and magic. It leaves room for imagination and can be described in a positive or negative manner very easily. Dim lighting adds limitations to what can be seen and brings in shadows, allowing you to mask/hide/blur the identities of things, such as a creature emerging from a den on a wooded hill. It also allows you the ability to "Create" boundaries, motion, and objects. 

Examples: a vampiric showdown in the shadow of a clock tower, flickering candlelight, shadows appearing as monsters, the soft purple haze to the summer air as carnival lights flicker on and you stroll arm in arm with your spouse.

Flickering Lights: Implies instability and unpredictability. Usually more of a negative feature, as it often pairs with something broken, old, or weak. Flickering lights can also act as a threat of impending darkness.

Example: The lantern flickered erratically as if it might go out at any moment.

Moonlight: Provides a cool, soft illumination, often associated with supernatural events. The moon is calm, mystic, distant. Moonlight is helpful for establishing the right mood for evening scenes, be it a thin sliver in the sky, intermittent between clouds, or full and round. Even its absence is noted in storytelling! Able to be quite bright or rather faint, you have a lot of play as far as descriptions go. Like sunlight, moonlight can reach into places and act as safety or escape - and make other areas all the blacker and more dangerous. 

Example: Pale moonlight filtered through a broken window. 

Shadows: allows you to hide elements you don't want your reader to care about. Used with a light source, shadows can direct your reader's attention to exactly where you want it to go. Shadows can have a life of their own. They can move or dance, be playful and mischievous, or can appear flat and stationary. Shadows can make something feel more serious or stern, such as the expression on a sculpture. Shadows can make you feel cozy as you cuddle up by the fire, or relaxing - it's all up to you.

Examples: A picnic in the shade of an old oak tree, the shadows of birds flitting overhead, that pile of unfolded laundry you dumped on your desk chair and forgot about until you went to pee at 3AM.

Deep Shadows: Obscures entire areas of your scene, leaving its contents to the reader's imagination. Deep shadows activate one of the most primal fears: fear of the unknown. Deep shadows make things scarier, darker, larger, brimming with almost infinite possibilities, in the right setting. The light, and everything it symbolizes, never reaches here. 

Example: Staring into the mouth of the cave.

Textures and Colors

Describing textures and colors helps paint a vivid picture and can evoke specific emotions. Texture is traditionally a "touch" element, but I wanted to highlight it here under visual atmosphere because your characters can visualize/describe texture without feeling it.

Textures: Textures draw a second sense into your setting. Your character doesn't need to run over and hug the alligator to get a sense of its scales to set the mood for the huntsman's Florida lodge. Seeing a wall of furs, or a plush pink coat or a distinct velvet wallpaper can really help to sell the mood of the scene, a character's personality, etc.  Rough, decayed, or unusual textures can enhance a sense of age and neglect. Soft textures add fragility or femininity - there's a lot to explore, and a lot of ways to show texture. 

Example: The walls were covered in peeling, moldy wallpaper, the once-vibrant patterns now faded and obscured by grime. 

Colors: colors are an easy visual enhancer — scan through your latest chapter and see how often you bring color in. It's very easy to have too much color and not enough "other" as far as visual description goes (sometimes we get wrapped up in the colors of things and less about what makes a thing worth describing - for example, I've read stories where characters are described by hair color, eye color, skin color, then the room is described as the color of paint, and the color car outside, and the sky is blue and the clouds are white...and the writer forgets to draw in other visual details). 

Sometimes, there's not enough color, or the highlighting of color at one specific point can really make a reader instantly picture something.

In the right scene, any color could mean anything, so think carefully of why you're using color and what meaning you're trying to evoke with it. Is it utility (the MC has brown hair; I need to just say it and move on)? Are you indicating something? (The most beautiful woman MC has ever seen in their life needs a specific shade of brown to do her justice and reinforce the idea that MC think she's special) Are you highlighting something in a fast, vivid visual? (Blood spray on a wedding dress) Do you need to set the tone? (MC is depressed and the sky is overcast)

Environmental Conditions: 

Weather is gonna weather. Even if MC isn't outside, there's probably  a reason (in part: environment) that the structure they're contained in is built the way it is. Depending on what species your character is, environmental conditions might even influence the design of your character, or the condition they're in!

Weather

Weather influences a character's attire, their ability to move safely, their physical strength, sometimes even what they have available to eat. Weather, when noted, is often a threat, hides a threat, or symbolizes a growing threat. It can also be used to reinforce whatever the mood is, be it a melancholy rain, a cleansing rain, or a charming summer twilight.

Fog: Creates a sense of mystery and hides details.

Example: A thick fog had rolled in, reducing visibility to mere feet.

Rain: Adds a dynamic/moving element, sounds, and can obscure vision.

Example: Rain poured down in sheets, blurring the world outside the window and creating a rhythmic drumming on the tin roof.

Snow: Can be both beautiful and deadly, and "cleans the slate" so you can add contract, or bury detail to keep reader focus where you want it.

Example: Snow blanketed the ground, its pristine surface marred only by a set of footprints leading off into the woods.

Temperature: Hot, cold, and even neutral temperatures can influence what your characters are wearing, and provide you with a jumping off point to describe if you're short on detail or need to help your readers believe MC is really on a super secret mission into the heart of the desert. It's hot - what are they wearing? Is the temp doing something to the environment, like steaming the pavement hit by the sprinkler? Is temperature acting as an obstacle or enhancer? Is the temperature doing anything to the character?

Example: Sweating through a shirt

Perspective and Movement

How your characters perceive and move through the setting can enhance the visual experience.

Limited Visibility: Characters straining to see can heighten tension.

Example: Was that a dog sitting on the bench at this hour, or had some absent-minded child forgotten their backpack? 

Character's Perspective: Your character being a veteran warrior or newbie, or tall or quite small or any number of physical or mental differences can influence what you describe, what the character pays attention to, the way they move through the setting, and even the adjectives they use to describe the visuals.

Example: There's a cat on a brick garden wall. How does your MC describe it? How would your antagonist describe it?

Character Interacts with the Environment: I see this one in a lot of inexperienced writing - the character doesn't, or rarely, interacts with their environment. These stories tend to describe a room, then have a character walk into the room and only talk, or only interact with another character. These are the stories that feel more like the characters are on stage putting on a play, vs the immersive experience that makes the reader feel like they're, well, really there.

A character changing, moving through, or influencing their environment is one of the best ways to draw a reader into the story. 

Examples: As he eased down the hallway, his flashlight revealed cobwebs and dust motes. The woman walked with her eyes down, stopping now and then to pull a smooth, flat pebble into her palm which she would, after a moment, send skipping across the pond's surface.

Detail-Rich Sentences

Well-placed detail work wonders. The above elements should give you some ideas on what you can detail to achieve your visual atmosphere, but here's a few extra tips to apply to those elements. Remember, don't try to use all the tips at the same time. Balance is key. Use what the story needs in the moment.

String together a couple sentences: call attention to the atmosphere by taking a sentence or three to describe it. Most writers do this naturally, but if you feel like a visual atmosphere isn't working, investigate those sentences or create a couple new ones.

Example: The graveyard was overgrown with weeds. Tombstones leaned at odd angles, their inscriptions worn away by time. An ancient oak tree decayed at its the center, its skeletal branches gnarled and mossy.

Specific Objects: Highlight objects that are significant or particularly inviting for the mood, accentuate the atmosphere or serve the story. If your reader could only remember one thing in the scene, what would it be?

Setting in motion: Static descriptions are all well and good, but sometimes it helps to have the character in motion in the environment, and/or the environment in motion.

Example: A bird flying overhead, waves lapping at the protagonist's toes, etc.

Add an additional sense: See the ocean. Hear the ocean. Taste the salt in the air.

Research what you don't know: Never been to an ocean before? Do a little research!

Revise & Layer: Don't worry about getting all the detail down (or right) in the first draft. You can always go back and revise & layer in the detail.

In Summary

By focusing on lighting, textures, colors, shadows, detailed visuals, environmental conditions, and the perspective and movement of characters, you can create a visually rich and atmospheric setting that immerses readers.

The tips above will help you frame the visual atmosphere of your story or edit your details with a fresh eye, but remember, the words and phrases you use, how many you use, and where you chose to place visual elements, also contribute to atmosphere. If you feel as though you've touched on all the elements above and something isn't working, you might need to consider reviewing these other options.