Writing Exercise: Weather
A recap of our Write With Me Club exercise – plus bonus material
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Elmore Leonard famously said in his rules for writing: ‘Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.’
We might not be opening a book with weather but it’s certainly a handy tool in the writer’s cabinet. In fact, you will be hard pressed to find a book, either fiction or memoir, that does not have any mention of weather.
We use it in many ways: to express a mood, a sense of foreboding, as a way of adding tension, or lightness, or of course, we simply say whether it was raining when the car she was driving swerved off the road or sunny as he was hanging out his washing. But finding original ways of describing weather can be challenging, this is why I want to introduce you to this writing exercise which I shared with White Ink members at last week’s Write With Me Club.
When I did my masters in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, I was fortunate enough to have met Professor Andrew Cowan, who taught on the MA until only recently when he retired.
He is the author of many books and among them an excellent craft book, The Art of Writing Fiction.
There are many brilliant exercises in this book, but one which is perfect for this time of year focuses on weather. I say perfect for this time of year, not because it involves weather (though this week I seem to have had all seasons where I live), but because if you still feel like settling on a writing resolution for the year ahead, this might just prove fruitful.
In this book, Andrew suggests keeping a weather diary in your notebook, and that each day when you step out of the house to go to work, or on a school run, to fetch the paper, to walk the dog, or simply go for a walk, as you do so, find one original way of describing the weather that day. This might be a word, a metaphor, a sentence or a paragraph.
Here is Andrew’s example from his diary entries:
14th February:
Snow is predicted but hasn’t yet fallen. The wind is bitterly cold and forces you along the street from behind. Getting onto a warm bus a skim of icy cold remains on the face. There’s a bed of wind-blown leaves and litter at the top of the Underground escalators. And yet, this being Glasgow, young men pass me in shirt-sleeves, a girl in a strapless dress, bare legs.
31st March:
The winds are sometimes fierce, gale force. A beer can pursues me up the street, rattling along the centre of the road as if kicked. Plastic bags are caught high in trees.
You don’t have write as much as Andrew, a couple of my entries simply read:
a watercolour-washed sky
and
a neutral paint-palette of clouds
But what you will find if you keep this up is that at the end of the year you have 365 original ways of describing the weather, which may prove very useful.
I am going to do this, as I have been promising myself I would for years, and so 2024 is the year. We could do it together?
As I said to the group, don’t give up just because you’ve gone four days without jotting anything down, just turn off your audiobook on your walk, take out your airpods, and look up to the sky. If you think about it it’s almost like a meditation, emptying your head of all other thoughts except for how to describe the weather that day.
In fact, why don’t we have a little go now… here are some pictures I’ve found for you of weather. Imagine that you are standing there, inside one of those pictures, use all of your senses (as suggested by Marc Hamer in his excellent guest author essay) – put yourself in that field in the storm and hear that loud clap of thunder that follows that flash of lightning; feel the rain breaking from those dark clouds and the wind whipping your cheeks as you stand on a promenade looking out at the sea.
Have a think of one original way of describing them – you can leave your one brilliant line in the comments if you’ll let us have a peek at it.
Now go out and do that in real life the next time you leave the house.
As White Ink members who attended our writing club have already been talked through this exercise, I’ve got a little bonus exercise and content for them below. I’d love you to stay with us for this next exercise which is one of mine (and I include what it brought up for me when I tried it), and one that helps me as a ghostwriter to help my authors recover memories…