We’ve written a lot about what makes emotional scenes hit home, especially tragic ones. We had a whole series on it this summer, and both Sophia and I have individually written about techniques you can use to make character deaths hit home.
But there’s one concept we haven’t had the chance to explore yet, and it’s one that Stranger Things (especially in its first season) did particularly well. So as the series finally comes to its close at the end of this year, I invite you to look back with me to its first season and investigate some of the first few scenes that made the show great — and especially those that gave so much impact to the disappearance of Will Byers.
Stranger Things
In 1983, 11-year-old Will Byers disappeared from his hometown of Hawkins, Indiana, and everything changed. What used to be a typical small town becomes a hotbed for supernatural activity and mysterious disappearances. The town launches a campaign to find their missing community members, sending multiple search parties into the woods to find them. But as the days stretch on with no sign of the missing individuals, search parties begin to disperse and the town starts planning funerals.
Will’s mother, Joyce, is almost hysterical in her search to find him. She’s convinced he’s alive despite evidence to the contrary, insisting to her town that if only they keep searching eventually they’ll find him. They ignore her, and in her desperation she takes her search to radical lengths. She becomes convinced that Will is communicating with her using lights, so she tears apart her living room and arranges it so that he can use the lights to spell out messages. She slams pegs in the walls to hold up strings of Christmas lights, and then swashes the entire alphabet in messy letters under each bulb.
As the lights flicker, she feverishly scribbles messages, ignoring the ruin that was once her house. When other characters enter the house, they are immediately struck by how oppressive the environment is. Her property, her home, has become yet another sacrifice toward the goal of finding her son — no matter how disturbing her methods seem.
Using Your Environment
Tragedies don’t just bring sadness and suffering. For the people closest to them, the whole world seems to turn darker. Fictional tragedies are no exception. When your characters lose something (or someone) precious to them, they shouldn’t just endure difficult emotions. Instead their whole world should turn upside down, feeling alarmingly wrong.
One of the best ways to do that is by using your fictional environment strategically.
Joyce’s house is just one example of the ways the writers used the environment of their story to influence its tone. Almost every aspect of your setting — from its time period to its genre to its location to the weather — will influence your story’s tone and (as your plot develops and the situation changes) how hard the emotions of your story hit.
Joyce’s home doesn’t just become darker with the absence of her son, instead it turns into a skeleton of what it once was, her living room in shambles because of Will’s disappearance. The fact that she willingly created this destruction shows her desperation. She will literally irreparably damage her home, tearing her property apart if she thinks it will help it get to Will. It also shows how much pressure she’s under, how her desperation and sadness and panic is leaking out into everything — even her physical living conditions.
Part of this is because we’re seeing it all both through the eyes of Jocye and the characters around her. When the other characters walk into her newly-destroyed home, we can watch the horror and realization on their faces as we see her home with new eyes. As long as they stay in her house, their tone is subdued, their conversation emotional. We feel the weight of the environment and how much it impacts them through their expression of it.
And that’s why Will’s disappearance hit so hard.
Lots of children have disappeared to go on their adventure over the course of fiction. But very few have a disappearance that is so devastating, so real that the audience felt it as strongly as they felt the disappearance of Will Byers.
But the house isn’t the only example of this. While using your character’s home is one way to show how much a tragedy has affected them, Stranger Things also used three other big elements of their characters’ environment to affect the tone of their story.
1. Use The Weather
When Will disappears, the weather changes, too. It’s cold and cloudy, with a nervous anticipation that hangs over the characters as they search for him. That anticipation becomes almost tangible as the physical reality of the character’s environment mirrors and amplifies the already-present emotions in a scene.
Stranger Things isn’t the only show to do this, either. One of my favorite parts of Tangled has always been the moment that Rapunzel kisses Eugene and the sun bursts through the clouds and floods the tower with light. The writers used a specific change in weather to help their readers feel the impact of the scene, and it radically changed how we as viewers experience that moment in the story.
If the scene you’re writing feels off and you don’t know why, try changing the weather. You might be surprised at how much just one small shift can improve your tone.
2. Use the Setting
Stranger Thing’s setting was also chosen very intentionally. While many have recognized that 1980’s nostalgia has been a big part of the series’ appeal, there’s another reason that time period worked so well. The 80’s were an unpredictable time, with the Cold War reaching its climax (and eventual conclusion.) Much of the world was still unknown and mysterious, far less connected and informed before the proliferation of the internet. Both of those realities helped the series maintain its dangerous, unpredictable tone.
As viewers, we don’t know how each plotline, conflict, and battle is going to end. The individual conflicts facing the characters are unpredictable, mirroring the larger conflict that involved the whole world at that time. The air of mystery and the unknown nature of the world mirrors the mystery elements of the series.
Whether or not you mean to, the setting you choose for your story is going to significantly impact its tone. Medieval, Victorian, contemporary, or ancient settings all come with different aesthetics and moods that will subtly impact your tone. So choose your setting wisely, and then use it to leverage the emotions and tone of your work.
3. Use the Season
Finally, use your season strategically to impact your tone. The first season of Stranger Things takes place in November, when the weather is cold and unforgiving. The trees have lost their leaves and wintery temperatures have forced the characters to bundle up, demonstrating their reserve and distance as they wonder who to trust and who will disappear next.
By selecting a time of year that mirrors the emotion of your story, you can use yet another aspect of your environment to help the tone of your work hit home.
These aren’t the only ways that you can influence your story’s tone by manipulating your characters’ environment, but they’re some of the most prominent tools the writers of Stranger Things used to impact the audience. Never underestimate the power that each element of your story has in altering the tone of your work and influencing the emotions of each scene.
When you write with these key aspects in mind, you can use them strategically to serve the overall story. While you might not be in control of all of these elements, using even just one or two of them well can completely change the tone of your story and amplify the impact of your emotions. Don’t underestimate your characters’ environment, and instead use it as a tool to leverage the tone of both each new scene and your story as a whole.
Let us know:
What stories have you noticed use their environment to support their character’s emotional journeys? Do you plan to do that in your own WIP?
Hi! My name is Mara, and I’m a Christian artist, violinist, and blogger. I remember the day that I decided that I would learn something new about what makes a good story from every book I picked up — whether it was good, bad, or a mixture of both. I use this blog as a way of sharing some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned, and highlight which books, cartoons, and movies have taught me the most about writing an awesome story.