It is now officially Spring 2022. In my part of the world, it still doesn’t feel like it. I envy friends in England who have posted pictures of gardens full of colour, from gorgeous golden daffodils to blue grape hyacinths and multi-coloured primulas. I wonder how many authors use not just the weather the seasons in creating their settings.
April has a hopeful sense of the summer to come, but Charles Dickens writes: Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade, which speaks to the duality in this more than any other season of the year.
Writers look for ways to enhance the drama in their plots and the nuances of their characters, either physically or metaphorically. Just as we sometimes use the weather to create a mood or direct the way a scene goes, we can use the seasons in both our settings and in our characters’ perspectives.
I have certainly used the seasons in my books. My character, Emmaline, is abducted on a perfect September afternoon in my first Regency romance. By the time she is rescued and returns home, it is a whole month later, and the trees in the estate park have already turned colour.
In the second Regency, a lot of the book takes place at sea and in Jamaica, but Juliana calculates that she left England in January, and it’s now September. The seasons are not plot lines in either book, but more indicate the timeline.
In One for the Money, Janet Evanovich uses the season to describe Stephanie Plum’s New Jersey ‘hood: During summer months, the air sat still and gauzy, leaden with humidity, saturated with hydrocarbons. It shimmered over hot cement and melted road tar.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling writes of fall: Autumn seemed to arrive early that year. The morning of the first of September was crisp and golden as an apple.
In the movie The Winter Guest, set in northern Scotland, the husband of Emma Thompson’s character Frances dies suddenly, leaving Frances distraught. Her mother (in real life and in the movie), played by Phyllida Law, comes to stay with her. The film opens with a shot of the mother walking across frozen fields and with the camera later panning across a frozen sea. Set in any other season but winter, I’m not sure that Frances’ grief would have seemed so soul-deep. The bleakness of the setting seemed to represent the bleakness in her soul and vice versa.
Just as light and shade, time of day, rain or sunshine
influence the moods we try to create for our characters, so can the season lead
our readers through the seasons of our stories.
Victoria Chatham
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