Come Rain or Come Shine

In a burst of energy, I’ve been doing a lot of writing this past week due to the incessant rain and gloominess in this part of the country. Waking this morning to yet another grey day, I sat at the computer with my cup of tea and turned my attention to writing the next chapter of my new book. As the words appeared on the screen, it occurred to me that the weather was becoming a part of the story. Many scenes in the last fifty pages have been as dark and dreary as the scene outside my window. Curious, I looked back on some pages written in fairer days and found them definitely more upbeat and cheerful. How much of our surroundings do we as writers put in our work? It’s a well known fact that Mary Shelley penned her famous Frankenstein story during a particularly cold and dreary summer in Geneva, weather conditions that are obvious in every page. For us contemporary writers, what do we bring to our work from our daily lives? When we have an argument with a spouse, do the characters in the story quarrel as well? Do we choose to keep them part of the story or re-work them into something different? I can’t say for certain how much of me and my family I’ve brought to my characters in the past, no doubt more than I think; but I’ll be looking a bit more closely at it in the future.