“Mood depends on surroundings: think of being in a bus terminal waiting room or a lakeside cottage.”16 So if you go to great pains to describe the scenery—be it a room, a setting, an elaborate meal, or what your protagonist is wearing—you’d better actually be communicating something else. The description of a room should reveal something about the person who lives in it or hint at the whereabouts of the missing diamond or tell us something crucial about the zeitgeist of the community in which the story unfolds—or better yet, all three.
