Today we are supposed to climb to a glorious 70 degrees. I’m so pleased by this it’s nearly impossible to stop talking about it. It is February after all! We’ve talked about it work, at church, in e-mails and now here, on my blog.
Which makes me wonder, if weather is such a frequent topic in life, can it be avoided in a novel? My first book mentions the weather in the opening paragraph. My second has a major drought as a significant player. I could perhaps root the weather out of the first one, but it’s key to the story in book two.
Mark Twain once claimed that he was going to write a book with no weather. “No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather. It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood. Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of delays on account of the weather. Nothing breaks up an author’s progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather. Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.”
What do you think–are we weather obsessed? Have you ever found mentions of the weather distracting in a book? Or does the weather help to set the mood?