Everything's a Writing Prompt Part 11: The Weather
One of the great things about working remotely is that, when the weather is nice, I can spend my workday outside instead of cooped up in my office. My usual routine is to start on my back patio then venture in the afternoons to a coffee shop or park—or at least, that was the pattern the last couple of years, when Pittsburgh was spoiled by fairly dry summers. This year, it's been a rare day that's gone by without any kind of rain, and I've found my plans interrupted by the weather on an obnoxiously frequent basis.
Which got me thinking: If I'm annoyed by the unpredictability of weather, that's something I could use to annoy my characters, too. The weather is one of those pervasive background elements that I think I too often neglect in my stories, which is to my detriment because it can be a very useful tool. It can be a plot driver, a tone builder, or a way to show the passage of time and ground the reader in both the where and the when of a story. So I wrote myself a couple of weather-based prompt exercises to start me thinking about better ways to use it, and I figured I might as well share them in case they're helpful for other folks, too. (If you want to check out past writing prompt posts, you can see the full list of them here).
Exercise 1: Change of plans.
This exercise is designed to play with weather as a source of tension to drive or enhance plot movement. To start, establish a character who is doing something in an outdoor space. This could be a nature-adjacent space like a park or the beach, but doesn't have to be—maybe they're just walking from the office to their subway stop, or they're a roadworker or pipefitter out on the job.
Next, give them a conflict-in-progress. This could be internal (that office worker is still steaming over her coworker taking full credit for their joint project) or external (the office worker bumps into someone and they give her shit about it). With that in place, here are the prompt's steps:
Set a timer for 5 minutes and freewrite a scene that opens in the middle of that conflict-in-progress. During this scene, make sure to also establish some basics of the setting, like where it's located, the time of year, and some select sensory details of what the characters see, hear, feel, and smell around them.
When the timer goes off, stop writing and read back over the world you've established so far. If you've described the weather already, jot down a summary in the style of a brief weather report (77 and partly cloudy? Mid-50s with a light drizzle?).
Brainstorm 3-5 ways that the weather could suddenly shift. How would each of those impact the setting and characters? What potential problems could each one cause?
Pick the weather interruption that either feels like it makes the most sense for the story you've started, or would cause the most disruption and conflict. Then, set your timer for another 5 minutes and interject this sudden weather shift in the exact place you left off, then continue with the scene, aiming to both address the ongoing conflict and how the sudden weather shift affects the characters.
Exercise 2: Mood adjustment.
Writers do need to be careful using weather to express emotions. Some of the obvious associations have become cliche—the dark and stormy night, depression as a rainy day, sunshine to show happiness, etc. With that caveat, how the weather is described can still be a useful way to build the atmosphere, tone, and mood of a piece, as long as you're careful to keep your descriptions fresh and stay conscious of phrases that are predictable or overused.
Here's a prompt to practice using weather to set or express a mood. It starts as most prompts do: Pick a character and plop them down into a setting. Jot down a couple quick brainstorm-style notes about who they are, where they are, and what they're doing there.
Now, write a brief scene of this character describing their setting. In the course of this description, make sure to include 2 things:
Some commentary on the weather.
Insight into the character's current emotional state.
Don't go on for too long, yet—just around a page or so is probably ideal. Once you've written that initial description, think about what weather would be the opposite of what you currently have in the scene. If it's a sunny summer day, make it the middle of a blizzard; if it's raining in the first version, maybe now they're in the middle of a drought.
Write a second version of the description with this new weather. How does that change the way the character thinks about and describes their surroundings? What impact does the change have on the tone and atmosphere of the scene? Once you've finished writing the second scene, compare it to the first. Which one do you like better? Which one feels like it has more energy or story potential?
Exercise 3: Some weather we're having.
It makes sense that the weather is a default small talk topic. It's non-offensive, affects everybody fairly equally, and changes often enough it’s not completely ridiculous to share updates or speculate. Since it’s so mundane, conversations about the weather usually aren’t interesting enough you’d want to include them in a story. That is, unless you add layers. Because the weather is such a bland, common topic, it can be a useful surface-level cover when you want your characters to talk about something potentially melodramatic in a more slant, nuanced way.
This exercise is designed to practice weaving in this kind of subtext. Here's how it works:
Pick two characters who are in conflict. Briefly establish their relationship, the source of their disagreement, and why each character feels the way they do about the issue in question.
Pick a setting where these two characters are forced to interact. How does each of them feel about the conflict? Is one ready to forgive but the other is still angry? Or maybe they both feel bad but don't know how to apologize, or they hate each other's guts and can't wait for this conversation to be over. Summarize each character's emotional state.
Brainstorm some weather terms or phenomena that could be used as a metaphor for each character's emotional state.
Write a scene where these two characters are making awkward small talk about the weather in the setting you picked, where they're forced to interact. Try to use the way they talk about the weather to convey their conflict, and how each party feels about it, without directly stating it.
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