Why sunny weather is so bad if you want to write blog posts
I’ve figured out what the magic ingredient is that’s allowed Britain and Ireland to produce so many great writers – rain.
I’m only an online copywriter so I haven’t had time to work on any novels, but during the glorious weather we enjoyed over spring, I ignored my own advice to clients and didn’t even posted anything on my own blog for ages. I put this down to a number of reasons/excuses:
- I’ve been busy writing other people’s blogs,
- It’s true what they say about a cobbler’s children going unshod.
- Sunny weather.
And the most deadly of these is sunny weather.
I’ll do anything but write a blog post…
Instead of bashing out 400 words for a customer, I always think of something that needs doing in the garden, or some alfresco networking event I should attend in one of my many ‘conference rooms’ in downtown Petersfield.
Writing is generally an indoor activity, which is why I like it (my favourite sport is darts), so while the sun was out, I got behind in my own homework.
On the other hand, there’s nothing like a dark sky and freezing sleet to encourage me back indoors to start typing.
Thank God the heavens opened up last month across Hampshire. I’ve been driven indoors and there’s nothing like the comfortable feeling of being warm and dry, with a cup of tea on the desk, to focus the mind on writing.
The good news is I’ve cranked out a steady stream of work and now I’ve even got round to writing for myself.
It’s not just me…
I reckon that damp days staring through a rain-splashed window also motivated ‘proper writers’ like what was William Shakespeare – “The rain, it raineth every day”, or Robert Burns – “The wintry west extends his blast, And hail and rain does blaw.”
And would James Joyce have written his poem “Rain has fallen all the day,” if Ireland’s beaches had been hit by a heatwave?
And yet Australia has nice weather … I’m just saying.
What to do if the summer really arrives.
I’ve come up with a few tactics for when the weather finally cheers up, in order to beat the ‘writer’s sun block’:
- Set up a desk in my bathroom and run the shower cold,
- Cover my office window with black sugar paper and get one of the kids to stand outside the door pouring rice on to an oven tray,
- Move to the Lake District.
However, I leave the last word on weather to Oscar Wilde when it comes to blogging about rain:
“Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
