Novel openings with weather

[Becky Lindroos]

LOL! -    the “barking dog(s)”  is an old trope without meaning - (the meaninglessness is the meaning). 
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/06/somewhere_a_dog_barked.html
(many examples and very funny)

Becky 


> On Mar 28, 2017, at 8:05 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

"One ought not to allow oneself the luxury of losing one’s head."
—Vita Sackville-West 

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l