Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing

EP 260 - Mood, Atmosphere, and Worldbuilding with Joshua Essoe

Jul 28, 2022

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Mark interviews editor Joshua Essoe about the elements of atmosphere, mood, and world-building.

Prior to the main segment, Mark shares a personal update, comments from recent episodes, and a word about this episode's sponsor.

You can learn more about how you can get your work distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway.

In their conversation, Mark and Joshua talk about:

How Joshua got into being an editor twelve years ago
The limitation of only being able to work 1:1 with so many clients at a time and how that led to Joshua deciding to release books (Essoe's Guides to Writing) to assist writers with some of his knowledge/experience
The way Joshua divides up a typical day of work, which involves a lot of burning the midnight oil
Joshua's unique way of combining two subjects into a single double-sided flip book as a special Kickstarter exclusive project
The first flip book - Action Sequences / Sex Scenes
The second flip book - Worldbuilding / Mood & Atmosphere
The problem with trying to release a flip-book format in the traditional print book market. (Where does the bar code that's supposed to be on the "back" of the book go?)
Original artwork from James A. Owen that is part of these books, and this special Kickstarter project
The 6 major areas where writers usually have issues in Worldbuilding, including Info-dumping, which is also broken down into 6 types:
- world-building info dump
- the back-story info dump
- the technical info dump
- dialogue info dump
- thought info dump
- emotion info dump
How Kevin J. Anderson does a great job of setting up his world in the first several pages of the Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. novels
Three big things that you need to do in your world-building: broadening it, deepening it, and involving it
How writers need to shackle their impulse to share too many details about their world all at once to readers
A discussion of Tolkien's world-building, which involved a combination of intriguing teaser moments, but also some longer segments of info-dumping
What are we talking about when we're talking about Mood and Atmosphere?
How there aren't that many books in existence on the topic of mood and atmosphere
The way that every aspect of your writing that can contribute to mood
How atmosphere is a part of mood, but is a big enough element that it can be understood and explored on its own
An excellent example of atmosphere from A Wrinkle in Time
How you want to be purposeful when creating and sharing mood in your writing
Some of the rewards that are going to be available in Joshua's Kickstarter
And more...

After the interview, Mark reflects on a couple of things from the discussion.

Links of Interest:

The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0