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176 Part III: Painting the Picture with Description
Working with the weather
The weather is important in people’s day-to-day lives. It changes plans, forms
the basis of much small talk and affects the way people feel. The weather is
such a basic part of human consciousness that it should really form part of
every scene and story. It’s like a background atmosphere to all the action
(and sometimes dramatically takes centre stage).
I don’t mean that you need to spend a huge amount of time describing all the
details. Saying something like ‘When Shakira left the house, it was still raining’
is often sufficient, or ‘It had turned cold, and Fred went back to fetch his
coat’. Of course, the rain or the cold can influence the story in more ways
than you, the writer, first intend. Shakira’s bicycle may slip on the wet streets.
Fred may notice something is amiss when he picks up his coat. Fred’s forgetfulness,
of course, may also foreshadow him forgetting something important
later.
‘Here comes the rain again!’ Weather and mood
Undoubtedly, the weather affects people’s moods. People tend to feel happy
on bright, sunny days, and sad or depressed when it’s cold and rainy (so a
character stating that he loves the rain can be inadvertently revealing something
about his self-image). A storm brewing makes the characters feel tense,
and a howling wind makes them jittery. Severe cold can freeze people’s emotions
as well as their bodies. Extreme heat and cold can also exacerbate illness
or even kill a person.
You can also create weather in your fiction that reflects the way you want your
characters to feel.
Try out using the weather in different ways to change the mood in your story,
and affect the way your characters feel:
1. Write a scene that takes place in particular weather – a hot summer’s
afternoon, perhaps, or a gloomy winter’s evening. Make sure that the
weather reflects the mood, and see whether you can find any ways of
increasing the drama in the weather or the mood, or in both.
2. Rewrite the scene, keeping the mood the same but changing the
weather. This time, make the weather in contrast to the mood – so,
gloomy mood but gorgeous weather, or jubilant mood but dark and foreboding
skies.
Of course, the weather isn’t always extreme, and you don’t want to fall prey
to clichés when tying the weather to atmosphere. Avoid the tendency to go
for baking hot or freezing cold and the rain always coming down in torrents.