Don’t Open with a Weather Report

“It was a dark and stormy night…”

How many of you out there have writing teachers, coaches, mentors, whatever, who admonish you against starting your Great American Novel with a weather report? Yeah, me, too. And I think they’re probably right.

But weather certainly has a place in our world and in our work.

I grew up in Oklahoma and learned early-on that watching the weather can be a matter of life and death.

For a while, I lived on the edge of a vast wheat field and was privileged to watch combat between man and weather. Combines clanked and roared their way back and forth across ripe wheat trying to get the crop in before the weather hit. In this case, the weather was rain and hail bearing down on the men and their machines. And threatening their livelihood.

Storms on the prairie (and, for that matter, on the Gulf of Mexico) may not always be big enough to have a name, but they have a face, a front edge that you can see for miles.  

Here on Colorado’s Front Range, the weather is seldom intense. From my chair at the computer, I cannot see the glorious Rocky Mountains because of The Foot Hills. They block my view. But far from resenting their intrusion, I love them.

They teach me about the weather here. When the morning light shows them clear and bold, I’ll have yet another of the many sunny days. A wave cloud can mean a dreary day, because it usually spreads toward Denver out on the prairie to our east and blocks the sunshine until that short, amazing time when the sun blazes from below the cloud before sinking behind the hills.

And on days like today, when the foot hills are shrouded in roiling blue-gray, I know the weather is very close. There is no face, no edge to see, just the knowledge that it, whatever it is, is very near and very soon.

Like the dark moors of the Brontë sisters and Arthur Conan Doyle’s London fog. And that saddest of rains in A Farewell to Arms. It is coming.

So, unless you have a damn good reason to, don’t open your story with a weather report. But, if it helps you tell your story, use it.