Rain is one of the oldest tricks in storytelling.
Writers have been using it for so long that I sometimes feel the weather deserves representation.
Need sadness?
Rain.
Need tension?
More rain.
Need someone to stand beneath a streetlight and reconsider every decision they have made since childhood?
Heavy rain.
It is effective.
Perhaps too effective.
But the rain itself has never interested me as much as what happens immediately after it begins.
People change.
A city moving in ten different directions suddenly agrees on one thing.
Get out of the rain.
Strangers gather beneath awnings.
Doorways become temporary waiting rooms.
People who would normally maintain a carefully negotiated distance from one another stand shoulder to shoulder and look at the same grey street.
Nobody planned to meet.
For a few minutes, nobody leaves.
I like moments like this.
Weather interrupts intention.
The person walking quickly is forced to stop.
The person waiting for a taxi moves closer to the building.
Someone offers half an umbrella to a stranger and immediately discovers that two adults cannot comfortably share half an umbrella.
The city becomes slightly less organised.
And therefore more honest.
Rain changes sound too.
Traffic moves differently.
Footsteps disappear.
Conversations become smaller beneath umbrellas.
A railway platform in the rain is not the same place it was twenty minutes earlier.
The architecture has not changed.
The people have.
This is what interests me when I think about weather in stories.
Not atmosphere.
Behaviour.
I do not need rain to tell the reader that a character is sad.
The character can manage that perfectly well without assistance from the sky.
But I might want to know what they do when the rain begins.
Do they run?
Do they wait?
Do they offer someone shelter?
Do they keep walking as if being wet is a principle worth defending?
Small decisions again.
They seem to follow me everywhere.
Perhaps weather is useful because it asks questions without speaking.
A storm does not care about the plot.
Rain has no interest in character development.
It simply arrives.
Everyone else has to respond.
And for a writer, response is often far more interesting than intention.
So yes.
Rain changes everything.
Just rarely in the way stories claim it does.
— D. Vaen