How to Use Dark & Stormy Weather to Enhance Theme

With one bound she was at the bookcase reaching for the heaviest book she could find to halt her attacker, a thesaurus of indeterminate, inconclusive, or unstipulated weight, ponderosity, or heftiness, with which she intended to pummel, lapidate or belabor her assailant’s skull, cranium or brainpan.

Stu Duval, Auckland, New Zealand (from the 2021 Bulwer Lytton Purple Prose submissions)

If you’ve ever heard of the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, otherwise known as the “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night Contest,” you know that dark and stormy weather has gotten something of a bad rap, sometimes for good reason. Historically, authors often opened their stories with some variation of “It was a dark and stormy night,” so much so that it has become something of a joke and the contest is a perfect example of that.

But that’s not to say that dark and stormy weather doesn’t still have a very important role to play in our writing. Weather is a wonderful way to say more about what is going on in our stories, in our themes and within our characters.

A few weeks ago, we talked about using fog to enhance a theme and how fog often mirrors the inner confusion of the character(s), especially at pivotal points when the author wants to point to a prior confusion that will soon dissipate in the light of truth.

Dark and stormy weather may seem similar however, it’s often used in different ways. Thus, we’re going to talk about dark and stormy weather separately.

There are a number of different ways that stormy weather has been (and can be) used in writing. Here are a few examples.

To Mirror a Stormy Plot

This one is the most straightforward. As tensions escalate in a plot, writers will often use the symbols of an oncoming storm – brooding clouds, the wind picking up ahead of a storm, darkness falling over the land – to foreshadow the brewing trouble in the story.

The same can be said of other dark and stormy elements, such as lightning. Carlos Ruiz Zafón did just this at different points in his novel, The Shadow of the Wind. For example, right around the midpoint, when Daniel and Bea’s relationship takes a very significant turn, he writes,

The storm didn’t wait until nightfall to show its teeth. The first flashes of lightning caught me by surprise shortly after taking a bus on Line 22. (p. 228)

Of course, this is no accident. Shortly after these two lines, Daniel, a young boy, meets his young love, Bea in an old abandoned house. There he loses his virginity and, though he may have had some adolescent hopes beforehand, it certainly caught him by surprise. Much like the lightning.

The lightning is a wonderful parallel to his upcoming experience. Shocking, eye-opening, electric.

To Reflect the Character’s Emotions or Character

If you like historical Gothic novels, I recommend Laura Purcell’s book, The House of Whispers. In a house on the Cornwall coast, an elderly woman sits surrounded by her extensive collection of bone china and the memories of her childhood as her father’s medical assistant. Together, they gave their lives to try to find a cure for consumption, but never succeeded.

A young girl, Hester Why who’s running from her own past, comes to the remote house to care for the elderly woman. But the more she learns about the history of the family, the more she comes to understand the truth about her own nature – a woman who needs to be needed, to the extent that she’ll destroy anyone who slights her love.

It fits that she describes the setting by the sea in such volatile and violent terms:

My stomach churns along with the waters below. One of the few consolations I had cherished before this night was that I should behold the ocean at last. I had imagined it blue, serene. What seethes beneath me is dark, frighteningly powerful: a cauldron of demons. (p. 13)

This suits Hester (or Esther, her true name) perfectly because what seethes beneath (or within) her is a dark and vindictive nature. She tries to bury her awareness of her capacity for evil in her love for gin, but eventually nothing will drown out her awareness of her true self. In the end, she makes the only truly loving, selfless choice she has remaining.

To Elucidate the Theme

Recently, we discussed Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, but what we didn’t discuss is the weather. There’s one point in the book at which McCarthy uses weather in really big way. Shortly before the climax, the Sheriff, Fate Turner, comes out of the courthouse and looks out over the town which is entirely flooded.

In a town that almost never floods, such an event stands out as a matter of Biblical proportions. Which is the point. As the sheriff and his deputy row down the street, an old-timer catches a ride with them. Along their watery route, he tells them:

Old woman told me today, said: It’s a judgment. Wages of sin and all that. I told her everbody (sic) in Sevier County would have to be rotten to the core to warrant this. She may think they are, I don’t know…” p. 164

The flood demonstrates the theme, which is stated here, very clearly. In the main character, Lester Ballard, we see an example of each child of God – a creature capable of immeasurable evil. Thus, the flood, the book’s most memorable reference to the weather, points to the greatest act of judgement against man in all of history: the Great Flood in which God destroyed most of humanity because of their evil natures.

Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Genesis 6:5 (NKJV)

The flood in McCarthy’s novel points to the very thing he is saying to readers: that humans are “rotten to the core” and deserve the same destruction.

To Point to the Supernatural

Last but not least, who can forget the lightning in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In her novel, the plot depends on lightning as the means by which Dr. Frankenstein reanimates dead tissue. But it isn’t simply a plot contrivance.

Consider the theme that she’s exploring: the terrible destruction that can occur when man plays God. The lightning then functions as an additional means by which she reminds readers of what is happening in Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments. Every time he uses lightning to try to bring the dead back to life, he is in effect attempting to be God. That element of nature is simply a symbol of the theme.

How You Can Use Dark & Stormy Weather

When I’m deciding what to use weather-wise, I begin by considering first, the theme of my book; second, the purpose of the specific scene I’m working on; and third, the state of the characters at different points in the book.

If my character’s psychological and spiritual state are dark, the weather will also be at those times when I’m pointing to such things more overtly. If he or she is about to commit an act of great violence, I bring in the storm clouds, or lightning, something that foreshadows what is coming. If the theme is one of self-destruction or vengeance, pull out all of the stops, whatever that means for your setting.

The trick is to keep from being too cliché. There’s no magic solution to that other than to seek for deep meaning (at the thematic level) and to marry the weather to that. And to be as original as possible. McCarthy’s use of a flood was both of these.

But I would also recommend reading Shirley Jackson. And it’s not because she uses much in the way of weather in her novels. Just the opposite. She understands Gothic writing so well that she manages to infuse her books with profundity, a constant stream of subtext, and a dark mood from start to finish…without any dark and stormy weather.

What I strive for in my writing is to be able to do likewise so that when I add in weather that accomplishes the types of purposes we described above, it avoids being gimmicky. The last thing I want is for my Gothic book to only read as Gothic because I’ve slapped in some dark and stormy weather.

But I still want to use weather when it fits. Because dark and stormy weather can mirror our stormy plots, make our characters’ inner darkness visible, bring our themes to life and/or point to the supernatural. That’s a lot for one trope to accomplish!

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