The colour of your story

This morning it's a beautiful clear dawn.  As I write this the sun is just peeking above the rooftops of the houses opposite.  The sky has a watercolour wash of luminous, flowing gold down by the horizon. On top of that is a hazy layer of pink and above that turquoise blue dotted with pink clouds.

As my writing friends know, I have a thing about sunrises and sunsets, and they appear in my work often.  But I am writing about the natural world and its wildlife, so you'd expect that to be part of the colour of my stories.

All stories have a mood, and that mood can be reinforced by the colours you use in the story.  A 'dark and stormy night' would be... well dark, with a monochrome palette of black and greys, punctured occasionally by a flash of white.  But what if your characters then saw a red light shining out steadily ahead of them, wouldn't they be drawn towards it?

Which brings me to the idea of colour association.  One of the exercises I set my creative students is to pick a colour and write three things the colour reminds them of and three emotions it is associated with.  If we go back to the red light, red is associated with danger, blood, and roses.  Emotions include passion, anger, and love.

Every colour has its associations.  In the west, black is the colour we wear to funerals, in some countries they wear white.  Most authority figures wear uniforms in dark colours to reinforce their authority.  There's scope to confound the reader's expectations with this.  How about a detective dressed as a hippy?  One of my friends has used a dizzy blonde character dressed in sexy tops as a gang boss in one of her books.   

In Panthera : Death Spiral I used the golden savannah dawn to contrast with the stillness of the dead kingcat cubs Ren is investigating.  The light, the promise of the new day, contrasts strongly with Ren's sense of misgiving about these deaths.

Colouring our stories this way can reinforce the mood of the tale we want to tell, or unsettle the reader with its juxtapositions and unexpected associations.