Weather is the Music of My Writing

I used to write to music. I don't anymore. Not because it's particularly distracting, but because at some point it became more or less completely arbitrary. The moment that I started really getting into whatever I was writing, i.e, the moment the writing process actually really started, I tuned the music out and completely ceased paying attention to it. I could be listening to Foo Fighters, Tom Waits, Miles Davis or Public Enemy...it's not a factor.

So, I don't do it anymore (except when I'm rewriting, or editing, in which case for some reason the choice of music somehow becomes a vital part of the revision process, as in the case of the massive Eat the Dark revision, which required a completely programmed iPod with 5,000 odd songs on it, but that's another story); instead I have found an interesting correlate.

These days, I've discovered that the weather is the music of my writing.

I don't have an office anymore -- my son took it over as his bedroom -- so my "desk" tends to be wherever I'm working, a figurative location, like the foreign desk of a newspaper. The one criteria is that I need a window onto the weather. And it turns out that, although on one level I'm as oblivious to the weather as I was to music, I'm subconsciously very aware of the weather, to the point that it actually influences the work, or at least helps it along.

I think my favorite weather to write to has always been snow, which we don't get nearly enough of here in central Pennsylvania. I remember reading Misery for the first time, before the movie came out, envisioning Paul Sheldon in his corner room writing as Rocky Mountain snow fell outside like individual piano notes. Rain is also great. In fact, the more disruptive or inconvenient the weather, the better the writing tends to go. Conversely, brainless blue sky sunny days provide very little help to me...although, oddly, sweltering summer afternoons can be good, the same way that adding heat into an equation can catalyze the reaction process.

There are limits to these meteorological influences, of course. The days in Ann Arbor when I sat in a crappy off-campus apartment with shaky wiring, typing through weather-related blackouts on a manual typewriter with a candle melting across the gray torpedo of its cylinder, are obviously gone. But there's no question that, regardless of how you feel about it, the weather, like ambient noise, is always going to be there. As a writer, the only meaningful decision is how you use it.