Let's forget the technical terms and concentrate on the how-to-do-it part. I'm sure I'll infuriate the grammarians among us by misusing terms, but communication is more important than precision sometimes.

To do this, I'm going to have to do something I loathe, which is to use my own writing as an example. Mostly because I don't feel qualified to tear anyone else's stuff apart the way I feel free to diss my own writing. I'll probably take advantage of a few other writers here and there and talk about their very different styles as well, but only to praise, because their stuff is so much better than mine.

My 'style' is to write short, dialogue-filled, PWP-type stories. No matter how I long to write angst and deeply emotional, action-filled novels, that's not me. My stuff is silly. That's my style.

The 'voice' I choose to use is minimalist. There is minimal "intervention" or "interference" by the "authorial voice" in each story. I write the physical action and the dialogue, and give the reader minimal interpretation. It's up to the reader to put their own emotional slant on what's happening. I'll give indications of what I think the characters are feeling, but I don't lock it down.

It's a fairly lazy way to write, but also one in which each word carries a lot of weight because there aren't a lot of extra words in the stories. If I wrote more expansively, included a lot of detail about mood, ambience, and setting, then each word would carry correspondingly less weight because there would be a lot of words helping to guide the story toward its conclusion. I've been known to brood for an hour over how to convey suspicion without resort to the cheap, "he said suspiciously" route. (I've moaned about excess adverb usage elsewhere on this page and with some expertise, since I tend to overuse adverbs myself.)

Enough of me. What I'm trying to do here is get you to write the kinds of stories I like to read, and certainly not the kind I write. They aren't at all the same thing. Here are two marvelous examples of writers who not only have their own distinctive voices, but who offer us stories with very powerful moods, as well.

(Note to self: write to these folks and make sure it's okay to cull examples from their fine work.)

From torch's marvelous story, Russian Roulette:

The wallpaper was white, cream and gold in broad flowered stripes, the effect only slightly marred by signs of a flood that had warped the lowest foot and a half of the walls and left everything tinted a sickly green. Thick white velvet curtains that had been pulled closed over the tall lead-framed window suffered from the same problem. Both curtains and wallpaper were old and something about their glorious decay touched Mulder's heart. He took a step closer and the floor creaked under his feet, what had once been gleaming parquet gone dull and cracked with age and water.

Paintings still hung on the walls; dark landscapes, still lives with gleaming skulls and many-petaled, insect-strewn flowers, narrow icons with black-haired madonnas whose soft eyes seemed resigned to this fall from grace and elegance. "This stuff should be in a museum."

In two paragraphs, she's done what I couldn't have done in ten pages. The luscious use of color to open the description, slightly warped by the "sickly" green that follows. The image of "thick white velvet" followed by "glorious decay." The intertwined visions of life and death with madonnas and skulls sharing the same space. It's a marvelous introduction to a sensuous but twisted world. Superficially, things are seductive and comfortable but just beneath the surface, everything is disintegrating. She uses this 'mood' to show us how the barriers between Mulder and Krycek disintegrate in this unusual setting. It's a world where Krycek is at home...but at home in a very dysfunctional and dangerous way. A world where Mulder is out of his depth and forced to cling to his worst enemy in order to survive.

In my next life, I want to write like torch. In her story, there are words that aren't absolutely required to make her effect, her style isn't minimalist. And yet, each word piles image on top of image to heighten the mood she's creating. The extra words aren't 'necessary' and yet they do each serve a purpose. Her stories tend to be full of this kind of textured, layered mood. It's her 'style' and she does it marvelously.

Now, DB Kate's One Dark Game:

I've never denied the darkness of this game.

With its shades of grey, and unmarked boundaries of desire, anger and fear, I can't argue that half of the intrigue behind it isn't just an extension of my own needs and an endless range of shared terrors.

But, now, when Mulder's like this, bound and helpless beneath me, his eyes huge and lips trembling, it's easy to forget such things.

We started this game some time ago, in a casual way, with a pair of handcuffs and a few jokes about lost keys and Stephen King novels. It wasn't serious then and was never meant to become so, until we continued it, compulsively, sometimes late into the night, or straight through endless weekends, lost in a haze of struggling and roles and that one, single dark game.

The focus on one character's internal thoughts and emotions. Rather than implying the emotion, this author supplies it for us. Images of fear, anger, helplessness...this story has a definite and very powerful mood because of the emotionally intense word choices the author has made. The style, as an internal monologue, is much sparser than the example I quoted from torch's story, but it's just as effective.

If I can't be torch in my next life, I want to write like Kate. Her style is intensely emotional, she's much less involved with physical surroundings than she is with what is happening inside of her characters. Her stories don't suffer from a lack of physical placement, from a lack of the kind of physical detail that torch uses, because Kate supplies such a richly textured emotional landscape for the story. Her 'style' tends to be this way in a lot of her stories. Intensely emotionally satisfying...appealing right to our "guts" with semantically loaded words.

Where was I going with all of this before I got sidetracked by looking up these examples? Ahhh...I was leaving 'voice' which I don't know much about, in order to discuss 'mood' which I love.

The two fanfic examples I chose above both have moods. Rather dark ones. Partly because most of XF tends to be a rather dark fandom. Partly because, and this is no slur on those two fine authors, dark moods are easier to create and sustain. Emotionally, negative words have much more powerful semantic content than positive words. (If you doubt this, think how much more well-known and quoted Dante's Inferno is than his companion work, Paradisio.)

Try writing a paragraph with a positive slant as powerful as the negative one in torch's example. In fact, all apologies to torch, let's re-write her paragraphs, trying for "upbeat."

The wallpaper danced with swirls of white, cream and gold in broad flowery stripes. The color was accented by signs of a flood that had soaked a decorative strip across the lower part of the walls and left that space tinted a rich, earthy green. Thick white velvet curtains were half-pulled across the tall, lead-framed window. Brilliant sunlight streamed through them, brightening the color and showing dust motes waltzing through the air. Both curtains and wallpaper were old, carefully preserved relics of a more-leisured day, and something about their glorious opulence touched Mulder's heart. He took a step closer and the floor gave slightly under his feet, once gleaming parquet now softened by age and water.

Exactly the right paintings still hung on the walls; warm landscapes peopled with smiling figures and the grace of butterflies in empty meadows, rich, antique icons with black-haired madonnas whose soft eyes seemed proud of surviving in a world that slowly declined from grace and elegance. "This stuff should be in a museum."

As you should easily be able to see, the description is now...just description. There's little about it that tells us what the mood of the story is supposed to be. It's just...a room, still decorated with the gaudy furnishings of a more decadent time but there's no real sense of purpose to it...no feeling that the decorations are a reflection of what's going to happen in the story the way there was in torch's original paragraphs. It's hard to set a mood that's textured and yet upbeat.

I'm not saying that it can't be done, and with all apologies to torch, I'm not saying she can't do it. What I want you to realize from the above example is that these moods are set by contrasts. (Pause while you re-read) In order to make the reader feel, you have to give them something to compare to. Torch gives us a gloriously elegant setting, contrasting the lush furnishings with the twisted signs of decay.

In Kate's example, it's the juxtaposition of desire to fear to jokes to struggling that makes her mood work. Her contrasts are in emotion, not in setting.

Contrast is key.