Can I write atmosphere?

I noticed that most of my writing didn't really establish the setting very well, so I wrote something specifically focusing on that, and want your opinion on it. (Also, spot the Elbow reference that snuck in accidentally.)

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Lying on my back, the skyline looks beautiful. Everything here is, in its own strange way. The stars overhead twinkle, in colours there are no words to describe. There's a full moon, casting inexpressible, ethereal light. There's a light wind, just enough to nudge the glowing dandelion seeds of an unearthly plant through the trees. Something sings, but it's nothing like a bird, or anything else from Earth, really. It's an eerie whistle, that slides up and down the scale as... things drop into and wander out of the performance. Occasionally, some tones collide, there's a burst of noise and then everything falls silent. Then, apparently after some consideration, they start up again in perfect harmony.

Everything, even the ground beneath me, feels abstract. It feels as though I'm asleep, and any moment an alarm will go off and pull me out of this dream. If I concentrate, I can still feel me, in some odd, alien direction. I can still feel the plastic bed I'm lying on, in the dark and quiet, and hearing the occasional clang as someone walks in to something. It's very late – almost 29:00. Maybe I should go to sleep and wake up, but I don't think anybody will mind. Everyone's sleep cycles are incredibly broken as-is; sleeping twelve instead of fifteen hours won't make much difference.

A slowly spinning spiral of light fades into view. It swirls chaotically, like the waves of a turbulent river, sending out sprinkles of every colour of the – blue-shifted – rainbow, which disappear silently back into the jet black sky. I gaze in wonder for a moment, trying to remember why the sight seems so familiar. I inhale deeply, and get a dose of heavy atmosphere, and I remember.

We visited Alaska just before I left. One evening, we had set up a tent, laid back and watched the Aurora. I'd even taken my suit  ^*

off, because it was drawing all the heat away. I laid there, next to her, as she whispered to me, “It's beautiful.”
I was cold, and had misread the script. “I'm tired,” I said.
“You always look tired,” she said.
“I mean it,” I said. “Growing a leg isn't easy. We can still watch from inside, if you want.”
She wordlessly rolled over, and drags both of us back into the tent. I can tell she was annoyed that I spoiled the mood, but she also loved me, and that was enough for me right then.

She's gone now. I haven't seen her for six months, and she hasn't seen me for five years. We decided that I'd be away for so long that it wasn't worth trying to hold on to one another. People change a lot in a decade and a half. I agreed with her that we should, but that didn't stop the loneliness.

Then I realize that though I've left her twenty trillion miles away, on a pinpoint in the sky, I'm not alone. There are hundreds of people here, and almost all of them left something behind on that pale blue dot.

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What do you think? Do you get a sense of the atmosphere, and how the narrator is feeling? Have I missed something and/or screwed something up?

edited 22nd Feb '11 3:00:16 PM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Oh, very much yes.

I find that a lot of the time people overdo it with this and it gets to be rather hard to wade through.

Fractured, my Harry Potter Fic: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6655978/1/Fractured

Remember to keep things flowing. Have the description come as it may, naturally. People skim over the atmosphere if you overdo it (which I find a lot of fantasy and SF stories tend to).

Oh yes you can write atmosphere. It feels right — very dreamy, vaguely sad, and quiet quiet quiet. I like the way you went into the flashback: nice, smooth, overlapping well and not over-long, which is where I tend to fail. But most of all I like the penultimate paragraph. There's something in my eye.

Now, nitpicking, coz nothing is ever perfect.

• First paragraph is good but needs reworking. It's the sentences, I think; perhaps linking some of them together (to make them longer) could fix the rhythm? It might also be toned down a little, description-wise (or not — depends on how you write the rest of the time).
• Minor nitpick: in paragraph 3, perhaps you could just write "from the blue shifted rainbow", without dashes? Otherwise the sentence has too many sub-sections. (I realise this isn't atmosphere... sorree...)
• Penultimate paragraph (which I luuuuuurve): sentences 3 & 4 might work better if switched (or could be confusing)

And that last paragraph of all is great — makes me want to find out more. Not sure how far this is into the story, but it does a great job at setting the scene. If it was Page 1 I'd probably keep reading.

...and I'm stuck trying to edit whole scenes of padding out of my story. I hate you. *hits Yej on head with kipper*

edited 22nd Feb '11 4:47:19 PM by LongLiveHumour

I'm not sure over-description is much of a problem, because I was actually struggling to avoid having something happen, so I could avoid having to describe stuff that was there but I couldn't visualise.

Aha, dreamy is exactly what I was going for. (And the way I write normally is so beige it causes first-degree burns if left unsupervised.) And you're right that the first paragraph's rhythm is all off, but I have very little of how to fix it without rebuilding it from scratch. (And my rewrites have a tendency for something totally different to happen than in the first draft.)

And this isn't really integrated into the story proper, since I was using it more like one of the "Character [Location]" threads. Though I suppose if you want to read more, I should write more.

*dodges the kipper while singing 'Finland, Finland, Finland...!'*

edited 23rd Feb '11 3:25:29 PM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

I think you overdid the details a bit,but you definatly are capable of doing so.