Novel openings with weather

[John Bailey]

I was on a panel for a local book prize last year and the winner of the
fiction section was a novel that abused the weather rule so much I was
flabbergasted. The weather was literally a reflection of how any character
was feeling at the time, and not ironically or knowingly so. At one point
someone has a dramatic realisation and the incessant rain suddenly stops
outside as they ponder its ramifications. Then someone says something dark
and it starts pissing down again.
Also I think five of the seven category winners included a variation of
"somewhere in the distance, a dog barked."

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 1:53 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> No one has mentioned:
> “It was a dark and stormy night …”
> From Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford -  (1830)
>
>
> "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been
> wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning;
> but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early)
> the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a
> rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of
> the question.”
> Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
>
> I believe Ruskin called it the “pathetic fallacy” or something - not
> because it was pathetic as we understand the  term,  but because the
> weather use used to set an emotional tone -  empathetic/sympathetic/
> pathetic.
>
> Becky
>
>
>
>
> > On Mar 28, 2017, at 1:18 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Perhaps only a few geniuses, one of them Pynchon, could open a story,
> Entropy, with an epigraph about weather---
> > Miller from Tropic of Cancer--check it out--- and end the story with
> weather (or the lack of it, so to speak).
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 8:46 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > "The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could
> feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a
> minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless,
> temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an
> end."
> >
> > Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections.
> >
> > That's more like it. Thrown snowballs that carry hats into the wind and
> star sides of cousins – I wouldn't call that opening with weather.
> >
> > 2017-03-28 8:24 GMT+02:00 Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>:
> >
> > "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of the
> > Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off
> > Delaware, --- (...)."
> >
> > Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon
> >
> >
> >  > ... Elmore Leonard, who was a very successful novelist, had said,
> > "Never open a book with weather." This is also advice found in a lot of
> > writing guides ... <
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> >
> >
>
> "One ought not to allow oneself the luxury of losing one’s head."
> —Vita Sackville-West
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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