Whatever Weather

I have a problem with weather.

Oh, I don't mean the real weather. Sometimes I wish a day were nicer, or less gloomy, or less rainy, but in general such wishes are just passing thoughts that do not take up huge amounts of mental fretting.

So little mind is given that I tend to think in simplistic weather terms such as wet, cold, hot, dry, and so on. I don't dwell on shapes of clouds or hues of sunlight or ripples of water and find extended ruminations on such things boring.

This little mind carries over into my writing where I get much more excited about a dialogue between two people than how the sun warmed their skin or how the rain pattered outside their house or how the wind made eerie noises. I mean, ho hum. The sun warms, rain splatters, and wind makes noises. I don't need nor want multiple pages of a national weather broadcast to litter my fiction.

However, I am so disinterested in weather and other ubiquitous but boring to me elements of setting, I sometimes forget to include them at all. I get caught up in the back and forth words and character interaction which is what I'm most passionate about, and most skilled at, and forget details like weather, time of day, and other externals.

Not only can this manifest as poor writing which I'm trying to self-correct, it can also manifest as causing problems with the story itself. For instance, today I had a scene where a character thought back to when he saw something but wasn't sure if it were a trick of the light. It occurred to me when I was remembering it for him:  Trick of sunlight?  Of moonlight? Dusk? What kind of light?

The protagonist  had dropped a kid off home from school, left, then came back some time later where they had a conversation that I was excited about writing (as I said I get about such things). But I had only placed them in this vague and weather-less sometime later temporal space as I typed away their much more interesting to me back and forth exchange.

One of my writing goals is to improve this lacking. I will never be the kind of writer comfortable with long dissertations of atmosphere, but at the same time I don't want my characters to exist as talking heads in dimensionless space.

I don't need a hundred and one words for snow, but I probably should do a better job of solidifying in my work whether or not there is at least the one.