Perhaps because I grew up in the intense heat of Central California and ended up living in the bleak cold of Minnesota—with numerous stops in between—I am a bit obsessed with weather. All winter and into the spring, I post to Facebook updates like, “It’s 15 below for the 3rd day in a row!” “There are still icebergs on Lake Superior!” and “It’s May and it’s still snowing!!!” I pretend my friends in more mild climates are saying to themselves, “15 below! She’s so brave!” when they are no doubt actually saying, “Her life must be really boring if all she has to post is the temperature.”
My fascination with weather goes beyond real life into the creative world. I often find myself focusing on authors’ use of weather, and I think about weather a lot in my own writing. As Harvey Chapman writes on Novel Writing Help, the weather is important in creative work because it is part of setting, it affects plots, and it carries great symbolic weight. “Remember to get the weather in your god damned book,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to John Dos Passos in 1932. “Weather is important.” I tell my students the same thing.
With all this interest in the use of weather, you might think I’d have a nice, neat list of do’s and don’t’s with respect to weather description in creative writing. But I actually have only one thing to say about it, one thing that stands out to me when I’m reading and writing: When you describe the weather, make it about character.
Over the years, I’ve collected examples that I believe show brilliant and original uses of weather in stories and essays. There is only one thing they have in common: They all use weather to vividly show something about a character’s mental state. In each example, the author isn’t just describing rain or snow or sunlight; physical comfort or discomfort; what the character is seeing or wearing. They are using weather to reveal moods, memories, impressions, emotions, epiphanies, and awarenesses.
So, rather than a list of things to try when you write about weather, here are six examples to read, study, learn from—and simply enjoy.
From “Banshee” by Ray Bradbury:
“It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight. It was, as they said, banshee weather.”
From “A Wild Night in Galway” by Ray Bradbury:
“We were far out at the tip of Ireland, in Galway, where the weather strikes from its bleak quarter in the Atlantic with sheets of rain and gusts of cold and still more sheets of rain. You go to bed sad and wake in the middle of the night thinking you heard someone cry, thinking you yourself were weeping, and feel your face and find it dry. Then you look at the window and turn over, sadder still, and fumble about for your dripping sleep and try to get it back on.”
From Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
“A fine column of mist rose near the river, thick enough to look like smoke from a fire, and for a moment she felt as if she were no longer alone, as if something were warning her to stay away.”
From Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams:
“It is snowing at Bear River in May. I can only drive out three miles west of Brigham City. The lake stops me. Before the flood, it was a fifteen mile trip. The waves of Great Salt Lake are lapping just below where my car door opens. Gray sky. Gray water. I have the sense that I am suspended in the middle of the lake with pelicans, coots, and grebes.”
From The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion:
“Several years ago, walking east on Fifty-seventh Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues on a bright fall day, I had what I believed at the time to be an apprehension of death. It was an effect of light: quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves falling (but from what? were there even trees on West Fifty-seventh Street?). A shower of gold, spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright… There was no doubt in my mind that what I had seen was death.”
From The Shipping News by Annie Proulx:
“His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled.”
Do you have examples of weather descriptions that strike you as particularly beautiful, powerful, or apt? Ones that add more than just to the setting? Or do you know of any that just don’t work for you? Share them here!
And for more about writing the weather, check out these posts on www.fmwriters.com and www.writing-world.com.
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