Writer's Life: Weather and Seasons

I love writing stories; long, short, sad, dramatic, funny. All sorts of stories. Novels. Novel series. I consider myself a writer since I was ten years old. 

When I write a story, there are some symbols and metaphors I use often because I think they are beautiful and they describe things better. One of these symbolic features is the weather. 

 

First, it is important to place the setting in a certain season. All have their advantages. All have beauty and dirt. 

Spring has a more positive connotation. It is the season of beginning, of new life and new starts. A sunny day in spring is quite unlikely to appear in a sad or dramatic story, but I might use it as a happy flashback. Rain can be beautiful and ugly in spring. A love story can be set on a rainy day or rather evening in spring, but it might as well end on such a day.

Summer is more extreme. It is hot and sunny or stormy and dangerous. A hot summer day fits a happy moment, relaxed times with friends or lovers, but it can also be too extreme, to hot, associated with the desert and emptiness, with dirt. Then it might be the setting for someone living all alone in rather bad conditions with little money and loads of dirt and rubbish. A storm in summer is always something dangerous because it is so extreme. Most of the time, it will be a thunder storm with lightning flashing; a hurricane maybe. Then it can be a symbol for danger, but also for change if someone gets through it and everything is different afterwards; maybe destroyed, but maybe that is good.

Autumn can also be very beautiful with the colorful leaves. It is the season of change and symbolizes that something's going to happen in the protagonists life. Sunny days in autumn are romantic. Rainy days in autumn are sad and lonely, but they can support the feeling of being at home, too. Storms in autumn are more about rain and wind,maybe hailstorms. They stand for depression, bad and sad things happening. 

Winter inhabits extreme beauty and extreme ungliness. A beautiful winter wonderland can be romantic. But dirty snow in the streets, especially in the city, symbolizes grey everyday life of a not so happy protagonist. 

 

Other associations with weather:

 

• hot sun: road trip, erotic, exhaustion
• rain: sadness, death, depression, desperation, loneliness, desperate love
• storm (hail- or thunderstorm): something's going to change, danger, something bad is going to happen, foreshadowing love/death/a certain event
• snow: silence, death, loneliness, romance and love