How to Use Weather and Setting Symbolically
(Or: The Art of Letting Rain, Rot, and Sunshine Punch Your Story in the Face—So Your World Feels as Alive and Broken as Your Characters)
You want your fiction to hit harder? Stop treating weather like background wallpaper and start using it like a fist. Weather isn’t just there to make your story “realistic” or to give your characters a reason to carry umbrellas or sweat through their shirts. No—weather, when used right, is a secret character, a silent narrator, and sometimes a co-conspirator.
The same goes for setting. If your story could take place anywhere, at any time, you’re doing it wrong. The right setting seeps into your bones, stains your plot, and haunts your people.
This is your full-throated, boots-in-the-mud, sweat-in-your-eye, irreverent Rusty confession on how to turn weather and setting into your story’s darkest weapon and brightest salvation.
1. Weather Isn’t Background—It’s Story in Disguise
Let’s be brutally honest: Most amateur writers treat weather like a screen saver. “It was raining. The end.” Or “The sun came out, so everyone felt happy!” (Barf.)
But think about your own life—how many of your memories are colored by heat, cold, rain, or the smell of dust after a storm?
The best stories tattoo their weather and setting into your bloodstream.
2. Step-By-Step: How to Make Weather and Setting Work for You
A. Pick a Mood—And Then Pick a Weather
Grief isn’t always rain: Try sunlight so bright it burns.
Joy doesn’t have to be blue sky: Try wind that rips the words out of your mouth.
Dread? How about the flat, dry hush before a thunderstorm.
Lust? Maybe humidity so thick it drips down walls, or snow that demands body heat.
B. Make the Setting a Character
Give your setting wants, moods, and dangers.
What does the city demand from its people? What secrets does the house keep in its walls? Does the forest forgive, or does it smother?
C. Mirror, Contrast, or Twist
Sometimes the weather mirrors your character’s mood—rain for sorrow, sunshine for hope.
But sometimes you get more punch by contrasting: A funeral in blinding light, a first kiss in bitter cold, a murder on a calm night.
D. Use the Five Senses—Hard
Don’t just describe how things look. How does the air taste? What does the rain sound like on the metal roof at 3am? How do your boots feel, soaked and heavy with creek water?
E. Make Weather Shape Action
Let storms force decisions, heat trigger violence, fog let secrets slip, snow trap lovers or killers together.
3. Ingredient Hacks: Tricks for Weather and Setting That Actually Mean Something
Foreshadow with forecast: Storm clouds on the horizon, wind picking up—let the reader feel dread before the plot even turns.
Let weather change mid-scene: Give the world agency. Sun breaks through after a fight, cold snaps when hope dies.
Use ruins, rot, or neon to speak: What does peeling wallpaper say about a character’s sanity? What does a cracked sidewalk say about forgotten dreams?
4. Survival Strategies: Avoid the Cliché
Don’t reach for “It was a dark and stormy night”—unless you’re about to burn down the house or kill the lights literally.
Avoid the one-sentence weather update. Make it matter, or cut it.
Remember: Weather can be weapon, shield, jailer, seducer, or witness.
5. Confessions from the Trenches
The best opening I ever wrote started with sweat: a stinking heatwave that made everyone meaner, needier, and ready to snap.
My most savage breakup scene? Bright noon, pollen floating like a cruel joke.
The creepiest chapter? Fog so thick it erased the edges of every streetlamp, every face, until the world felt hollow and wrong.
6. The Final Dare: Make Your World Bleed Into the Story
If you want your reader to feel your world—really feel it—let weather and setting do more than fill space. Make them mean something.
Let a downpour wash away evidence, let a drought drive the plot, let a blizzard force your lovers to huddle (or freeze).
Because the best stories are shaped by the world,
and the best worlds
are as haunted, wild, and alive
as the people stumbling through them.