Batten down the hatches! Get weather in your writing

It was a dark and stormy night.

Argh! Not the cliched bit of purple prose Snoopy used as the opening line every time he sat down at the typewriter!

Before you go storming off into the wind, rain or fog, know that it wasn’t the beagle but Edward Bulwer-Lytton who birthed that beginning into literature in 1830. Today, Bulwer-Lytton’s work is considered so bad that a contest for atrocious writing bears his name.

Despite all that, he got one thing right: He got the weather into his writing.

The opening line to Bulwer-Lytton’s novel “Paul Clifford” contains a whopping 57 words and would make any eighth-grade sentence diagrammer cringe. But, in addition to darkness, he also worked rain and wind into it. In fact, “a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets … rattling the rooftops,” isn’t half bad.

Weather, like any other writing element, can be mishandled, but don’t let the fear of sounding like Snoopy keep you cowering in a storm shelter (literally or figuratively).

Put some meat in your metaphor

Weather is powerful, not just in a Weather Channel kind of way but also in how we think, feel and speak. We all use weather idioms every day and pick up their meanings without even thinking about them. For instance:

• Storm (meaning a crisis)

• Calm before the storm or a storm is brewing (trouble ahead)

• Clouds on the horizon (an uncertain future)

• Hazy (confused, muddled)

• Rough seas (conflict, difficulty)

Other weather idioms can have dual meanings, such as:

• Rainbow (hope or longing)

• Fog (confusion or menacing)

• Rain (sadness or cleansing)

A rainy day can evoke images of everyone under their separate umbrellas, cut off from the rest of the world. Or those same umbrellas can bring two people together in cozy environs, such as in the songs “Bus Stop” by the Hollies or “A Fella With an Umbrella” from the musical “Easter Parade.”

It’s your world, and it’s up to you to decide how your characters will react to the weather you create for them.

So you’re one of those people

Weather takes its power from the fact that almost anyone can relate to it. How your characters relate to it can tell your readers something about them.

Take, for instance, the guy or gal who favors bright, sunshiny days. That might mean he’s got a cheerful disposition or that she’s always ready for skydiving or rock climbing. Or it could mean they’re responsible and anxious. They’ve got crops to plant or a house to paint, and they need every bit of sunshine they can grab.

The opposite, a snowy day, represents a struggle getting to work — scraping their windshield and getting slush in their shoes — for most adults. But maybe your character can’t wait to get home to build a snowman with the kids.

Many kids hear the words “snow day” and think of snowball fights and sledding. But you can turn the tables on your reader, like I did in “A Shovelful of Winter,” one of the stories in my book “Tasmanian Tigers, True Love and Other Elusive Things”:

With Dad’s words of, “Shovel the entire width of the walk,” ringing in my ears, I first cleared a path as wide as the blade of my little shovel. Then I reversed my steps. Working at right angles to my original path, I pushed a shovelful at a time off the walk and into the curb lawn. My feet began to feel numb inside my galoshes, so I stomped them up and down. My nose started to run, and I reached up to wipe it with my mitten.

Brrr! I need a cup of cocoa and a lie-down just reading that!

Menacing or mulling?

Getting the weather into your writing can be the difference between having a setting and performing on a bare stage. While some fascinating stories — such as “The Twilight Zone” episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” — have been written that way, the weather provides a distinct advantage in creating a mood.

But as Bananarama and Fun Boy Three once sang, “It ain't what you do; it's the way that you do it.” Many a fairy tale has taken place in a spooky, dimly lit forest, but Robert Frost creates a very different mood in his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Even though the setting is “between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year,” Frost writes, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” obviously a sheltering respite on his long journey.

In my upcoming novel, “Phantoms in the Field Zone,” I evoke the idiom of fog as confusing and menacing:

Sierra walked along a dark street — alone. It seemed like she’d been walking for miles. Wisps of fog danced around her ankles and masked the path ahead. The bitter wind swelled, stirring dry leaves and tossing them about. She pulled her sweater close around her.

But in “The Big Sleep,” Raymond Chandler uses fog in a more introspective way:

“Under the thinning fog, the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.”

What are you prepared to do?

A popular axiom about the weather is often attributed to Mark Twain, who used it in one of his humorous lectures but was actually quoting his friend and fellow author, Charles Dudley Warner:

“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

As a writer — whether of books, songs or just a letter to Aunt Martha — you are the master of your universe. You control the weather. Use it to your advantage.