Yahoo Image Search

Many of us remember Snoopy starting a book with ‘It was a dark and stormy’ night.  In fact, I’ve seen this get used as a ‘what not to do’ lesson.  I believe it’s that you never start with the weather, which is a guideline that I’ve seen broken many times.  Some of us might have heard that a conversation is dead once you bring up the weather too.  There really is a lot of rules that make weather out to be a terrible subject. This makes me wonder if weather is really important to stories.

For my stories, I use weather to help set the stage for what is about to happen.  I don’t depend on it alone for setting, but it is a piece of the world-building puzzle.  If I mention that there is snow then that can explain slow progress when walking, characters shivering, and…