It’s time once again for Work In Progress Wednesday, the weekly link-up where we talk about our stories! This week’s theme is: Some Weather We’re Having!
What’s the weather like in your fictional world? Show us snippets of your best sunsets, your most temperamental thunderstorms; mood boards of your constellations or cloudy skies!
I definitely use weather to set the mood and tone for my story. There are so many ways you can use a stormy sky or sunny day or sudden influx of toaster-oven-sized-hail in a scene.
Weather can be used to reflect a character’s current mood.
Use weather as a mirror. Weather can reflect a character’s mood, whether they’re grumpy, or scattered, or raging, or indecisive. Think of how many movies set their final scenes in a gushing rainstorm or blackest night that, once the villain has been defeated, recedes so the sun can shine down once again. (Literally, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Harry’s defeat of Voldemort in Deathly Hallows all come to mind.)
Or, weather can be used as a tool, to warn the reader about what’s coming next.
Something unique I’m trying to do with my MS is that, if it’s raining during a scene, you can’t trust the conclusion the character’s coming to. Someone is lying, or they’re operating under a falsehood, or their perceptions of what’s going on are just not quite right.
The ominous rolling of thunder clouds in the distance can alert a reader that something terrible lurks on their horizon.
Weather can also provide extra details to flesh out a scene.
Stormy skies don’t always have to be symbolic or reflective of your character’s tumultuous inner state; sometimes, your characters just need to have some squelching socks they need to deal with.
Think about how many scenes in Harry Potter are accompanied by rainy, drippy conditions on the Hogwarts grounds. Harry tracking mud through the castle. His robes sodden. That Quidditch game where it rained so badly he couldn’t see through his glasses. Weather brings Hogwarts to life, and the little ways in which the pouring rain or gusting windstorms affect the characters are details that make the story tactile and vibrant.
Anyway, them’s my thoughts on using weather. Let’s get to the snippets!
Creating a fantasy world from scratch is a daunting enough undertaking, what with having to decide what it looks like, how its culture works, if the world has magic, or dragons, or sea monsters. You need a history, a timeline, a sense of logical consistency. And, unless your fantasy world is steeped in science and Atheism (which, now that I think about it, might be awesome) you’re probably going to need a religion.
