I've been learning how to write fiction. It's been a slow process, going on for about three years now, and after many rejections and writing about 15 stories (far more if you count all the unfinished ones) I got my first short story published published in a magazine here.
It has been an interesting learning experience so far, and I'm still learning.
One thing I've learned is the importance of mood. Mood is very important for fiction writing, and also perhaps for philosophy. It's an under-appreciated aspect of why we love some philosophical works and keep on turning back to it.
The YA novelist Maggie Stiefvater says in her online course that mood is more foundational to a story than the idea or the plot. The reader engages with the novel because she wants to feel something. When people go to the movie theater (ah remember!) they don't go to see e.g., two friends having a drunken weekend in Las Vegas, or about an asteroid about to hit the Earth and a team of scientists trying to stop it. No, we go into a movie wanting to feel a certain way. Do we want to feel excitement, are we in for some goofy fun, do we want to feel sad? That's what we're looking for in fiction.
Psychologists commonly make a distinction between emotions, which are directed and more transient (e.g., anger, disgust) and moods, which are less directed, more enduring, such as nostalgia or playfulness. I need to look more into this distinction as I'm not sure how well it holds up, but a fine-grained distinction isn't really needed for this post, I could grant that emotions also have their role, but they need to be more enduring/less directed than a momentary emotion that quickly fades. Moods are semi-persistent mental states and are influenced by many different factors. Stiefvater argues that though we write for ourselves, we also write for others, and our writing only really works if we can move our audience. Eliciting mood is an effective way to do this. We want to listen to sad music because it evokes a sense of nostalgia, wonder and peacefulness. Sometimes, we are in the mood for such things.
By allowing works of art to elicit moods in us, particularly music, we engage in a kind of cognitive scaffolding, as Joel Krueger points out. Art is experiential.
But philosophy is also experiential. Pragmatist authors such as William James, John Dewey and others have discussed the importance of mood and temperament in philosophizing. So, for example, William James discusses what makes life worthwhile is not the drive for survival, as evolutionary ethicists hold, but "the social affections, all the various forms of play, the thrilling intimations of art, the delights of philosophic contemplation...the rest of religious emotion, the joy of moral self-approbation, the charm of fancy and of wit--some or all of these are absolutely required to make the notion of mere existence tolerable" .
Some philosophical works have a very distinct mood. I will be teaching Zhuangzi next term (together with my colleague Pauline Lee) and one thing I find is that, at least in the inner chapters, there is a consistent mood of playfulness and profundity, Zhuangzi (though highly likely extensively edited and not by one author) the mystic, the sage who doesn't take himself too seriously. I think the mood is an important contributor to the work.
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