Creating Mood Within a Novel’s Setting by Johnnie Bernhard

Emotional impact may be created within the setting of a novel by the simple rule that environment affects people. Mood may be created through weather, typography, even the age of a building or a home. In writing ​A Good Girl, ​I often used the emotional and physical impact of a hurricane to create mood within the setting. As a life-long resident of the Gulf Coast, I am all too familiar with what a hurricane can do. As a child, my grandmother told me stories about the hurricanes that wreaked havoc in Calhoun County in South Texas. I used her stories combined with historical facts to write the following scene in Chapter Six of ​A Good Girl.

“The white head stone of Anna Grace was never meant to last, nor was the town of Indianola, Texas. The bones of the little Irish girl were washed to sea on August 20, 1886, when a 150-mph hurricane made landfall. What the howling winds did not blow away, a fifteen-foot storm surge from Matagorda Bay drowned. To ensure all traces of man were swept clean from the port city forever, a fire roared through the remaining buildings, trapping citizens in two story structures and burning them alive. The recently built school by the Sisters of Mercy of New Orleans disappeared in a frenzy of wind and water. All that remained of the town were snakes and bloated bodies hanging from broken trees.”

• ​A Good Girl, (Texas Review Press, March 2017)