From: julie@pascal.org   
      
   On Friday, October 3, 2014 5:07:32 PM UTC-6, William Vetter wrote:   
   > In one of those books written by somebody who has claimed to have rejected   
   50,000 manuscripts or something, that's supposed to list everything we're   
   doing wrong, I found one of them that was interesting to me.  This person   
   claimed that it is almost    
   universal to use weather as a metaphor for the mood of the fiction, and   
   authors describe the weather progressive scenes as an obligation, and this is   
   sooooo cliched, and a grounds for rejection.   
      
      
   Well... anything done *badly*...   
      
   If someone is writing by numbers, "And now I will set the scene with weather   
   that predicts the outcome of the next encounter..."  Or if the writing is   
   pretentious "mood masturbation" it might be rejected, but I would think that   
   would lead to descriptions    
   of more than the weather such as peeling paint or extreme detail about what   
   the fly is doing walking across the cupcake or what not.  (Sorry, I really   
   couldn't think of a more accurate term for what I mean).   
         
   > I don't know that this is so, but I do see this sort of thing a lot, as in   
   detective fiction where the weather is always dismal.  Or historical fiction   
   where the city is always wet and stinking and beset by a miasma.   
   >     
   > How and when do you describe weather or what do you think about it.   
      
   I think that scene setting and "mood" setting are entirely legitimate, even   
   required.  I say this having forced myself to at least skim to the end of a   
   story that had nothing.  Sure, characters told each other stuff or thought   
   stuff "The sun had been    
   shining the day he first met her"... which of course is guilty of "sun" equals   
   how he felt about meeting her that day... but you never knew if it was day or   
   night or what season it was even after someone told someone else that it was   
   January you    
   immediately forgot because no one actually traveled through the house or   
   countryside... which brings me to my other point... (My first being that not   
   *having* any description tucked between is Really Bad.)   
      
   What does your character notice?  If he's cheerful he might notice cheerful   
   things, even in the midst of wet, stinking, miasma.  Someone brooding over   
   injustice might notice some little offense in the middle of a joyful   
   celebration.   
      
   All things are tools and it's stupid not to use them or to be convinced you   
   ought not use them because someone else used them badly.   
      
   Saying "You can't use weather to indicate mood" is like saying "no more using   
   short words and sentences to heighten a sense of urgency."   
      
      
   -Julie   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)