Let’s talk about the weather. I know, I know. The weather is what you talk about when you can’t think of anything else to discuss.
Person A: “Hot enough for you?”
Person B: “Yeah. That was some storm last night, wasn’t it?”
Person C: “Did you notice how that heat wave that moved in this morning totally foreshadowed Rhonda’s withering dressing-down of Sandra in the board meeting?”
Wait. What?
Person C is obviously a writer.
Weather, that utterly mundane and pervasive aspect of our world, can play an interesting role in our stories. As with every writing tool we deploy, weather can be employed to do double duty in our scenes.
In addition to just being a generic backdrop telling us whether our protagonist must remember to grab their raincoat on the way out the door, weather can:
- Take center stage in a story: For example, in The Perfect Storm, the “storm of the century” forces an epic man-versus-nature tale.
- Foreshadow upcoming conflict: Imagine seeing the first flakes of snow begin to fall while our hero is on a hike, miles from the trailhead.
- Add pressure to an already difficult scene: In Tony Hillerman’s mystery novel People of Darkness, when Jim Chee and his girlfriend are stranded and must spend the night in the desert, a blizzard drives them into a burial hole with a dead man’s bones. Yeah, that probably won’t turn up the emotional stress at all, right?
- Mirror the emotions of a scene: We’ve all seen movies where the protagonist has just been dumped or fired, and as they walk home in despair thinking things can’t get any worse, the skies open up and rain pours down, soaking them to their miserable bones. Harry Potter stories have several sad scenes where dark, gloomy rain matches the characters’ emotional tears.
- Highlight the emotion in an ironic or contrasting way: Think pouring rain on a happy moment (like in Singing in the Rain), bright sunshine and chirping birds during a tragic death scene, or that time-stopping moment as two people meet each other’s eyes and go perfectly still while fierce winds whip everything around them into motion.
- Force characters into each other’s orbit: Picture two strangers rushing beneath a café’s awning as the rain begins, only to discover sparks between them—or perhaps a murderous opportunity. Gilligan’s Island is a classic example of a group of people who never would have formed a bond if it hadn’t been for that storm during their three-hour tour.
- Add urgency to the conflict: An EMT first responder already has their hands full trying to rescue someone trapped under a collapsed house, but the scene becomes much more terrifying when a tornado siren begins to wail.
You can overdo it with weather in your scenes, of course, especially if it’s mirroring the scene’s emotion or conflict too closely. It’s sometimes too easy to use a looming thunderstorm to show the heroine’s increasing sense of danger. Going counter to the obvious can be more effective in some situations, letting you toy with readers’ expectations and helping you ratchet up the sense of wrongness, perhaps.
However you use weather in your stories, don’t let it slip through the scene without accomplishing something meaningful. Whether it’s heating up the sexual tension or chilling your protagonist’s blood, don’t let weather be just a mundane thing your characters talk about when they can’t think of anything else to say.
[Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash]