Tag: winter

By: Dixie Evatt

It might just be the Texas temperatures that have been rocking from the 20s to the 80s since the first of the new year. Or maybe it’s the ominous news reports about melting ice caps or the drought conditions paired with hurricane-force winds that helped fuel the Los Angeles wildfires. Whatever the case, I find my mind traveling again and again to thoughts of weather and the influence it has on stories, both fictional and real. 

As writers we’ve inherited wise advice about incorporating weather into our stories. For instance, Number One in Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules for Good Writing is “never open a book with weather.” While that advice is close to dogma, it has been debated (see: Jo-Anne Richards bit.ly/41a4oCk and Roz Morris bit.ly/3WUcAEk

Richards, an internationally published novelist, says of the admonition to avoid opening your novel with weather isn’t an iron-clad rule. It’s a prompt to the writer to if the story is stronger by opening with a paragraph where you find people doing something. That doesn’t mean a weather opening never works. She gives this example of an opening from Maggie O’Farrell’s “The Hand that First Held Mine.”

Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.

Morris, a former ghost writer who writes the “Nail Your Novel” blog, offers an example of a weather opening that she likes because it is intensely descriptive and the storyteller lures in the reader. Her sample story opening is from “The Rapture” by Liz Jensen.

That summer, the summer all the rules began to change, June seemed to last for a thousand years. The temperatures were merciless …It was heat to die in, to go nuts in or to spawn. Old folk collapsed, dogs were cooked alive in cars…The sky pressed down like a furnace lid, shrinking the subsoil, cracking concrete, killing shrubs from the roots up…

Although the advice about beginning a story with weather can be debated, there’s also the middle and end of the story to consider. Susanne Bennett, a German-American writer, identified seven ways writers can use weather to tell their story in her 2022 post on “Writers Write”: conversation starter; backdrop; sensual experience; foreshadowing; sense of conflict; motif; and acting force. In fact, she advised, the weather can stand as the last word (where it is almost another character).  bit.ly/4hSBBYq

Bennett also reminds us that the old saw about showing not telling is likewise true for weather. For example, she edited the sentence, “On a sunny day, Jane went to the public library” to read “A T-shirt is enough,” Jane thought, glad to put her cardigan aside… Who needed extra baggage on a day like this?”

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is chock full of weather references, many illustrating Bennett’s points. One researcher counted 111 separate weather references, from heat, to wind to sun to rain, most of which can be linked to mood or passion in the story.

Weather can also emerge out of the obscurity of background symbolism to overtly influence action. There’s an oft-cited example of one snow scene in “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger when Holden Caufield makes a snowball but is so conflicted he is unable to throw it. Would Agatha Christie’s closed-room mystery “And Then There Were None” even have been possible if a ferocious storm hadn’t trapped the ten victims on an isolated island off the Devon coast? Or, how about the necessity of a crop-killing drought to cause the Joad family to pick up stakes and abandon their home in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”?

Weather might incite action or prevent it. My book club recently read “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf and one of the most memorable refrains is about weather. In the story, the family plans, again and again, to visit the lighthouse the next day but only if the weather is “fine.” It almost never seems to be. 

Would the passionate and cruel relationships in “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë feel the same without a violent storm “rattling over the Heights in full fury,” taking down tree limbs in its wake? Wuthering, after all, means tumultuous storms.

Sometimes weather carries double duty, carrying both mood and action, as in “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne; “Misery” by Stephen King; and “Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard. When the long-suffering Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter” removes her cap and then the scarlet letter she is awash in sunlight. 

In “Transit of Venus” you just know Ted Tice is going to have a rough go of it when he arrives, soaked through. “He looked up from his wet shoes and his wet smell and his orange blotch of cheap luggage. And she looked down, high and dry.”

Not unlike Annie Wilkes the weather is unsettling and unpredictable in “Misery.” As the weather changes, she changes, leading Paul Sheldon, the author she holds captive, to conclude, “I am in trouble here. This woman is not right.”

There are so many other memorable weather scenes in literature that Pulitzer Prize winning writer Kathryn Schultz pulled from her almanac of examples in a 2015 article in “New Yorker” magazine. bit.ly/3WVj0D9

And, finally the 2024 Academy-Award nominated movie “The Room Next Door,” brings together all of the advice about injecting weather into a story. We see its use to create mood, develop characters and foreshadow events when the dying Martha (played by Tilda Swinton) recites parts of James Joyce’s “The Dead” to her friend Ingrid (played by Julianne Moore).

It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight..His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Dixie Evatt (DLS Evatt)

A former political reporter in Austin, Dixie also taught writing at Syracuse University. When she teamed up with Sue Cleveland to write fiction, they sold a screenplay to a Hollywood producer. Although the movie was never made, the seed money financed ThirtyNineStars, their publishing company. Through it they published two award-winning thrillers (Shrouded and Digging up the Dead) under the pen name, Meredith Lee. In 2021 Dixie launched a solo mystery (Bloodlines & Fencelines) that Kirkus described as, “A twisty whodunit that’s crafted with care and saturated with down-home Southern charm.” She is working on a prequel (Gravel Roads & Shallow Graves) set to launch in 2025. www.dlsevatt.com