by Joan
As I write this, ice taps the windows and wind batters the
chimney cap. I’ve just come in from helping my husband raise the exterior
shades on the two-story window and my fingers are still numb. A snowflake icon
shows up on my weather.com app for tomorrow (or today, as you are reading). No,
I’m not in the northeast; I’m in Dallas, where last week it was 75 degrees.
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| Maryland house, 1991 - 1999 |
For forty-five winters in Maryland, there was a particular
dread I’d feel going into November, knowing that I wouldn’t be warm again until
mid March. The jewel-toned October trees would strip naked and stand brittle
and grey. The sun would slink away earlier and earlier, sometimes not showing
up at all. I shivered constantly, no matter how many sweaters I crawled into. Some
years were worse than others, but in my memory the winter scene looks just as
it does now: temps in the teens, imminent or piled-up snow, wind that whips chill
into your bones.
Elmore Leonard said, “Never open a book with the weather.”
But what if your book features haunting, beating, relentless weather. The
problem with writing advice, particularly when it involves the word “never,” is
that there are brilliant stories that defy the rules. Beautiful prose, tension,
engaging characters; these are the elements which lure readers into a story.
Kim just reviewed Nancy Pickard’s The Virgin of Small Plains, which takes place during a deadly Kansas
blizzard. A while back, Julie reviewed Ann Weisgarber’s The Promise, set in Galveston, Texas, in
the weeks leading up to the devastating 1900 hurricane. In Weisgarber's novel, a scandalized
woman leaves Ohio to marry a widower in the south Texas town. She’s expecting a fine city house, but
instead he leads her to a sweltering, rustic home and a skittish child. Her new
husband’s housekeeper doesn’t trust her and is fiercely loyal to the memory of
his late wife, even as she harbors her own feelings for him. When the hurricane arrives, her husband goes out to help neighbors and the animals, and she is left
to protect his boy from the powerful storm that literally rips apart their house. It’s the weather that destroys everything, yet it also bonds
them.
In Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire,” weather is the story. Over the course of a day,
a man attempts to walk over thirty miles of Canada’s Yukon trail to meet his
boys by suppertime, despite an old trapper’s warnings. It’s seventy-five below
freezing, snow as far as he can see, and he’s carrying nothing more than
bacon-stuffed biscuits, nuzzled against his skin to keep from freezing. With only
his husky for company, he is oddly confident. Both his and the dog’s beards have turned into crystal muzzles from the
moisture of their warm breath. Soon the man’s cheek bones and nose are frozen,
and his hands and feet are beginning to numb. The spruce under which he
attempts to light a fire is so weighted with snow, its branches cause an avalanche. In wonderful foreshadowing by London, the man feeds the fire “with twigs the size of his finger” and “branches the size of
his wrist.”
As I write my current story, I’m looking for places to
introduce weather into an already dangerous climate: The Depression, prohibition,
divorce, poverty. Wherever you are, I hope you are safe, warm and dry, reading
or writing a book with all the right elements.
