Rain in Summer: A Balm for Writers

It’s a Gothic cliché, of course, that bad weather results in good stories.

It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.

Writing in 1831, Mary Shelley documents the summer storms that forced her companions to retreat inside Villa Diodati to read by the fire, and Lord Byron’s famous proposition that they each write a ghost story of their own.

In this slightly embellished revised introduction (the original was published in 1818), Shelley describes how, after several days* cloistered against the weather, she found herself sleepless with feverish thoughts of ‘the pale student of unhallowed arts’ and the ‘hideous phantasm of a man’ that later became Victor Frankenstein and his monster, cabined together on that ‘dreary night of November’ where ‘the wind pattered dismally against the panes.’

I’ll resist the urge to talk about my favourite gothic weather here, because what I’m really interested in isn’t that the terrible weather inspired Shelley’s setting. It’s that the weather itself created the perfect conditions for the imagination to take flight.

There is something about poor weather that really fuels the writing spirit. Almost every writer I’ve spoken to seems to agree.

It’s not a coincidence that I’ve started this blog on a rainy day in July, where the plants don’t need watering and the sky is wet-blanket grey. We’ve had three days of dripping brambles and bindweed and moths flurrying out of the grass I’ve very deliberately not cut since April. The pollution has washed into the drains; I can smell the oaks in the park half a mile distant – and my nails are crescents of mud where I’ve been gardening without gloves (or a coat).

Why, in this rainy week of July – have I suddenly emerged from a period of creative incompetency? Why do I feel like a plant, rehydrated after a drought? Why am I writing – why am I gardening?

I’ve sat in an armchair to read at least twice. I’ve made notes for an essay by hand (on Tove Jansson and rocks – which I’ll aim to publish here next month), carefully highlighting the lines I’d like to use. I’ve even made soda bread. My brain – for the first time in a long period of burnout – has had some capacity for executive function.

I think I know exactly what has happened. Or at least, I have one theory - one that is applicable to my writer’s brain, and perhaps to yours, too.

In summer, the world is expansive. The city is vast and full of movement. It is noisy. The blue skies are endless – and when they’re not, they’re striped with clouds racing from the west. The drifting winds and the long days allow the mind to wander too far: to the clunk of the docks; the shouts of summer; the accumulation of traffic and smog; the neighbours strimming (never mind the hogs and frogs); all carrying on into the long evenings, where the world continues to be noisy until it’s finally too dark or too late to do anything more. There is little room for daydreaming on a day like this.

I don’t think this is a city phenomenon either. Whenever I’ve lived or worked in the countryside, I feel the same way. In part, it’s because summer is there to be experienced. It’s a time for racing through fields, spotting wildflowers or chasing the sunset to the top of a cliff. Or staying out late or rising early to see things you cannot see in winter, like nightjars and moths and bats.

But it’s also because summer, for all its beauty, is a lot. It’s a season full of life, and it’s ripe with sensory overload. The birds are shouting to their mates, scurrying and swooping and trying to find enough to feed their young. The trees quiver with flowers and pollen and seeds. Plants grow so quickly in the summer rain that every day the landscape changes. It is impossible to filter out all these details. And when the brain is full like this, it cannot wander; it cannot create.

In the opening to his BBC documentary ‘Inside Our Autistic Minds’, Chris Packham describes what it is like to walk in the woods and see everything:

I see the leaves, I can see the slightly different colours, slightly different shapes, any damage that’s been done to them. As a naturalist this is enormously beneficial – but sometimes all of this, the visual part of my world, is simply too much.

For poets and writers it is beneficial, too. Some other time, I’ll tell you about the writers I think thrive on their perception of detail (John Clare often comes top of the list). Right now, I’m thinking about how processing a surplus of detail becomes a barrier to creativity (and indeed, simple daily cognitive processes). For me, this happens most in summer.

Autumn and Winter, by contrast, are a balm for the overstimulated writer. The steady drum of rain, the rumble of thunder. A grey day can be as a weighted blanket or a thick curtain to close us off from a world that is often just has too much in it. It is no wonder that many writers long for a cabin in the wilderness, or a shed in the garden.  

When I am not writing, I like to stay out in the rain. I’ll take any opportunity to chop wood or clear brambles or fetch animals in from fields, or to crouch watching a cricket in my city garden while the rain drops down my neck. I’ve dragged summer loving friends on soggy walks to have tea beneath the yew trees and once (probably more than once) expressed a strong desire, while striding away from the car park in a downpour, to get in the marshes for a swim.

And it all makes for much better writing, in my books. (Though the caveat here is that it can affect the content: my editor has pointed out quite a few times the surplus of darkness and rain in my stories.)

Of course, winter still has its share of claustrophobia, I won’t deny that. The days are short and it is hard to feel truly exercised unless you’re working outdoors (especially if you face a stream of traffic and bright headlights whenever you venture away from the computer screen).

But there are opportunities to shut yourself away and make stories. Sometimes, these opportunities are cosy and candlelit. To dream up ideas, all you need are a few things: the darkness, a candle and the sound of rain if you’re lucky. Perhaps tea or a blanket. You don’t even need really a notebook, because your brain can do the wandering.

Back in Villa Diodati, Mary Shelley notes the sensory deprivation that can bring stories to life. In the darkness, our minds can filter surplus information and craft wonders. Sometime all it takes is turning out the light on a stormy night.

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I besaid to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.

* While the weather certainly brought about these writing circumstances, it’s important to note here that Mary Shelley did also spend several days shut away, listening to Byron et al talk a lot. I like to think that it was daydreaming combined with sheer frustration that really got her writing.