What does an author use to create tone or mood in a story?

the detail of main plot events.

or vocabulary and diction?

Read the excerpt from the odyssey. then, his chores being all dispatched, he caught another brace of men to make his breakfast, and whisked away his great door slab to let his sheep go through—but he, behind, reset the stone as one would cap a quiver. the use of the epic simile in this excerpt readers understand that— they cyclops has eaten another bunch of odysseus men. odysseus and his men are still trapped inside the cave. the enormous stone is easily and routinely moved my the giant cyclops the cyclops takes his sheep out to pasture with him in the mornings