Writing Autumn Ambiance
With fall upon us—finally!—I crave a delightful, autumnal read, and, in the last year or so, I’ve desired to write a story perfect for this time of year. There’s an idea in the works, a first chapter and some scenes I’ve started, but it can’t be the priority project while I’ve got those pirate tales to finish.
So, I’ve got nothing but time to let the brainstorming and prep work unfold, and I’ve thought a lot about how autumn is typically interpreted in two ways. Either it’s a cozy, nostalgic season, or it’s all about spooks and dark thrills. With my story idea, I want to marry the two. My inspiration is Stranger Things, in the sense that some scary, intense, supernatural stuff is going down, but it’s cushioned by the ‘80s throwback, the endearing friendships between the characters, and the underlying layer of coming-of-age.
I’m also thinking of books that have really nailed the cozy or the gothic, as they’re some of my best teachers. I’ve chosen four books to discuss on here today, but there are so many more out there. A quick google search gives you more recommended fall reading lists than you’ll know what to do with. There are also some obvious examples I could have selected, especially for the gothic category, but I didn’t want to rehash stories that have been talked to death. Dracula and The Fall of the House of Usher and Rebecca get enough attention, so I’ve got four titles that you may not see on most lists and that are great textbooks on how to write in autumnal ambiance.
We’ll begin with the cozy.
Mort by Terry Pratchett
What immediately makes this book stand out is its premise: Death, the Grim Reaper of Discworld, hires an assistant to help him with his work so he can experience humanity for himself.
If you’re familiar at all with Terry Pratchett, you’ll know fantastical, satirical, humorous stories are what take place in his Discworld, of which there are 41 primary works beginning with The Colour of Magic. Mort is, in fact, book number four, but it’s okay to read it out of order; that’s what I did, and I was able to find it a delightful little book.
Maybe it seems like a story featuring Death should not be delightful, but that’s the whole point I want us to pay attention to. The writing lesson we get here is about how to take something morbid and macabre and bring a buoyancy to it. Part of what amplifies autumn coziness is knowing there is dark and cold out in the world, yet, curled up in your comfy chair and sweater, you are safe from it. It is set apart, in some way, while being on the periphery still. We do not want to be scared or disturbed, but we know warmth better by seeing what it is not.
So, Pratchett gives us this character that’s the classic skeleton in a black robe with a scythe who has the unwelcome job of ferrying souls from the Discworld into the next. We know that image. We may fear that image, in varying degrees. But then we learn Death loves cats. We see Death get drunk and go dancing. We even see what he’s like as an employee of a regular ole job. He has, essentially, an intern and has to be in relationship—or, at least, meaningfully interact—with other characters.
Suddenly, Death is humanized. The realities and implications of his profession are temporarily set to the side, and we laugh at how he engages with the world. We are endeared by his idiosyncrasies. We start to think, “Okay, there’s more to this guy than I would have guessed.”
It seems to me, if I am to write a cozy autumn story, I have to play with some of the moodiness of the season and find a way to make my readers feel safe in it.
Pratchett has used Death, but it could be a witch who lives up the street. It could be nothing fantastical at all but a strange, old house. It could be dreary, grey skies overhead and fallen leaves skittering across a lonely, residential street. And then you, the writer, swoop in with the café your main character is walking to where they order a cup of tea, so fresh curls of steam rise off of it. You give your MC a scarf they wear every year, bringing it out from the back of their closet as soon as the morning temperature reaches a certain low. You pair your MC with another character that awakens the warm-fuzzies within them. Essentially, it’s contrast you’re looking for.
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
The other aspect of autumn coziness is nostalgia, and, for that, I simply must talk about A Month in the Country. I will never shut up about this book because it not only surprised me with how poignant and lovely it is but is a story I can’t ever get out of my head. I mentioned it in my blog post, “A Classics Calendar: Part II,” and think it’s absolutely an overlooked gem.
It’s a short tale narrated by Tom, the main character, when he’s an old man thinking back on the summer he spent in the English village of Oxgodby. He’s a Great War veteran and goes there to restore a medieval mural in the local church. Naturally, while he’s there, he gets to know the ways and the people of Oxgody, and it’s a pivotal summer for him.
The concept of nostalgia has Greek roots, going back to that man of twists and turns, Odysseus. His story is driven by his desire to return home. Even though it takes years and years, that impetus to return is what keeps him going. What his story was called is the nostoi, which means “return journey,” and it’s that word that’s paired with algos, which means “pain.” Those two together become nostalgia—painful homesickness.
What Carr reminds us with his story is that home isn’t necessarily a specific, physical location we wish to get back to; sometimes it’s a feeling or a season or a time when we felt most like ourselves or when life was particularly beautiful and full. So, we read A Month in the Country, and we cannot help but feel the yearning of Tom, as an old man, to reclaim those lost summer days. Yearning is what a nostalgic, autumn tale has.
And it can’t be the only thing the story has, otherwise that would simply be too much and unpleasant. The yearning almost needs to sneak up on readers. It needs to nip at you out of nowhere yet, once it flashes its appearance, makes total sense. It’s the way you catch a whiff of woodsmoke in the air when you step out your door on your way to work. It’s the recipe you save to kick off soup season and that first bite you take that you forgot was going to be that delicious because it tastes just how your mom and her mom and her mom before that made it.
A Month in the Country makes you believe that this story is about an ordinary man undertaking an interesting restoration project—until the end of summer comes into view. Then you realize it’s also—and, perhaps, more meaningfully—about the desire to hold onto bright and sunny things before they pass us by. Carr sums it up well when he writes, “...the first breath of autumn was in the air, a prodigal feeling, a feeling of wanting, taking, and keeping before it is too late” (83).
You, as a writer, are aiming for a touch of the bittersweet. Because autumn is lovely, yet it is fleeting. Autumn marks an end, of sorts. An end to warm days, an end of the growing season, and the start to the end of the entire year. And, if your character doesn’t yearn for either what’s already passed or what is presently passing them by, then the cozy nostalgia won’t find your readers easily.
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Let’s do a break-neck shift now to the gothic!
The Seer of Shadows by Avi
When I think gothic, I typically think historical, as the tradition of this genre was so well-established thanks to the Brontes, Frankenstein (Shelley), and Ann Radcliffe. It, of course, is not limited to historical settings, but the past—in whatever storyworld you’re writing in—does come into play.
In The Seer of Shadows, we step back to New York City in 1872 and follow a young apprentice, Horace, as he’s learning the art of photography. It’s through that medium and the photographs he takes that the story is able to engage with the supernatural, specifically a vengeful wraith.
Here our writing lesson is to ground ourselves in something entirely understandable and ordinary so that, as we introduce the absurd or seemingly unrealistic, readers can tether themselves to some kind of logic. Because this is a concern of mine: the spooky and dark threads must be believable, even if they are entirely fictional.
So, how do you do that while still having that supernatural bent?
This example shows us you simply take an already real and strange occurrence and run with it. There are people who’ve looked back at pictures they’ve taken and wondered, “Hey, what’s that shadow here to the side?” or “What are those floating dots in the background?” or whatever peculiar thing it might be that appeared in the frame. Building a story off of an eerie question means asking this follow-up: Just how might this escalate, if x is true?
If ghosts are real? If someone was following me around through the mirrors in my house? If I’m the only one who sees that black cat every day in the yard and knows it’s an omen of witchcraft?
Then, depending upon how scary you want to go, you have to provide answers that build on each other, ramp up the horror, until you reach the breaking point. You take the reader deeper and deeper with you into this dark hole of bizarre, uncanny, and frightening discoveries so the walls of the story—the supernatural threat—close in on them. Not all at once, of course, but in a measured pace so they have instances of reprieve and then moments that startle, catch them off-guard.
You only get readers to that point, though, if you help them enter into the crazy suppositions and get them to think, Okay, I’m willing to see where this goes.
Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare
Cassandra Clare is known for her world of Shadowhunters with a few different series and trilogies. Clockwork Angel is the first installment of The Infernal Devices trilogy and features Tessa, a young woman fresh to London from New York, and two Shadowhunter warriors, Will and Jem, who have to rescue her from demonic entities who believe she has powerful, supernatural abilities of her own. It’s set in the Victorian era and takes on a rather steampunk-gothic atmosphere.
And it’s that atmosphere that makes me recommend this book as an example of the gothic ambiance. There’s not a specific lesson, so to speak, but, rather, a general mood to pick up on and pick out the details of what makes that mood so effective in the story.
For the sake of time today, I’m going to quickly highlight a few of those details, the ones I think make all the difference to the story.
An air of secrecy: a characteristic of gothic literature is that there’s some obscure family connection that has to be uncovered, and so much of Tessa’s story is trying to figure out the truth about her parents, as well as how her brother is involved in the supernatural activity that keeps threatening her and the world of Shadowhunters. Secrecy lends itself to intrigue but also to wariness, putting a reader in a state of uncertainty because the main character is uncertain. That can generate anxiety and anticipation over just what is going to be revealed by the end of the book.
The old church as the Shadowhunter Institute: religious buildings are often found as settings for historical, gothic tales, and the Shadowhunters in London reside in what, to mundanes, appears as church ruins but is simply an old yet still structurally-sound church. Why this works for the broody atmosphere is because the descriptions are, naturally, of lots of stone and cold. Though there are multiple people living in the building, Tessa, as she wanders around and familiarizes herself with the space, can feel lonely and isolated.
Emotionally-charged events in the evening: the majority of the big events, in this story, take place either at dusk or sometime at night. Maybe this seems like a super basic thing to say, but nighttime is so easy to envision. Knowing that the story is set during Victorian times, too, it’s not difficult to imagine the flickering flames of street lanterns that throw shadows here and there. Being in a big city where buildings are close together, you can’t help but wonder what’s concealed lurking in an alleyway. Nighttime hides things, and, at the very least, it makes you imagine what might be hiding, even if it’s not there.
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Though I find these four books excellent reads and teachers, as always, never hesitate to turn to the stories you personally love and find effective. Is there a gothic piece you really enjoyed? Or a tale of cozy nostalgia that you can’t get out of your head? Read them again and study them. Take notes, annotate, mark down the places where you had to read faster to find out what comes next or when your heart raced from the spooky thrill of it all.
Remember to not spend all your time studying, though. I’m saying this as much for me as for you: practice the lessons these authors have for you, and have fun coming up with a story that fits the autumn vibe you have in mind. Good luck and happy writing!