On Why It Always Rains in Literature
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| Photo by Arsonela K |
I. Opening the Sky
It begins, usually, with a drizzle. Not the kind that calls for umbrellas, but the quieter one—
the atmospheric prelude to a thought.
For writers, rain is less a meteorological event and more a dramaturgical device, an emotional filament, a mood with rhythm. It is, quite frankly, the easiest way to add texture to a sentence that otherwise might arrive dry and uninspired.
Why do we write about rain so much? Because it gives us permission. To be moody without melodrama. To be contemplative without conclusion. To allow puddles to form in the reader's chest, even if the plot hasn't yet rained on anything tangible.
Rain, you see, is the ultimate literary cheat code. Consider the usual suspects: the “pathetic fallacy” crowd.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s storm scenes aren’t just meteorological — they’re moral and mythic. In one climactic sequence, the rain becomes a chorus, a judgment, and a cleansing force all at once.
Even Kazuo Ishiguro’s restrained sadness in The Remains of the Day carries the humidity of things unsaid. With him, rain doesn't announce drama. It only quietly mirrors it.
II. Rain as a Mirror
This isn’t nostalgia alone. It’s about how rain democratizes emotion. You don’t have to be heartbroken, philosophical, or orphaned on the Yorkshire cliffs to resonate with the sound of water hitting tin. You could just be stuck in traffic. Or sipping tea. Or journaling in a café, as one does, pretending not to be pleased by the sudden weather-provided gravitas.
Rain is an unassuming co-conspirator. In literature, as in life, it arrives on tiptoe and alters everything.
Maya Angelou, whose language felt like a storm wrapped in velvet, once wrote:
“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill / of things unknown but longed for still.”
Though not about rain directly, that line feels wet — the kind of lyric that drizzles down the spine.
III. The Elemental Competition
Other elements flirt with writers too. Snow, of course, is the aesthetic cousin—pristine, quiet, far more photogenic but harder to write without veering into cliché.
Fire? Too dramatic. Either it’s Promethean or arson. Not much middle ground.
Wind has its place, usually in poems, whispering through willows or carrying longing across hills.
The sun, meanwhile, is like the golden retriever of the weather world—reliable, adored, but never quite as interesting as its gloomier sibling.
Rain, however, does what few others can. It arrives with narrative elasticity. It can be a blessing or a curse. A cinematic backdrop or a metaphor for slow unraveling. It signifies rebirth, but also ruin. It can clean a city or flood it.
It’s as morally ambiguous as any good protagonist.
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, rain is used not as background but as transformation. It comes with trauma, but it also clears the way for memory.
“It rained. He walked through the drizzle and felt it on his skin like permission.”
That sentence alone could stand as the entire thesis of rain in literature.
IV. The Writer’s Instrument
And then there’s the sound. Writers are obsessed with things that sound like other things. The “drip drip” of tension. The “patter” of thoughts. The “torrent” of memory.
It’s no accident that rain has an onomatopoeia and a rhythm. We are drawn to it like poets to ellipses.
In fact, rain is just a long ellipsis falling from the sky.
But perhaps the truest reason writers gravitate toward rain is that it requires no justification. No reader has ever questioned why a scene opens with rain. It just belongs. It stretches time. It adds atmosphere. It gives the impression of depth, even when the plot is puddle-thin.
Even Virginia Woolf, in Mrs. Dalloway, uses rain not as drama, but as stitching — it binds the day together with quiet insistence.
“The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?”
Rain doesn’t answer — it only keeps falling, as if to offer continuity where none exists.
V. My Confession, and the Forecast Ahead
I’ve written about rain, too—more times than I’d like to admit. Sometimes because the sky outside offered nothing else. Other times because I wanted to signal seriousness without saying, “Now here comes the important part.”
Rain does the talking. It knows how to linger.
Of course, not every writer uses rain well. Some wield it like a sledgehammer of emotion, turning every drop into grief. But when it’s done right—used with restraint and rhythm—it becomes less a device and more a character. The kind that doesn’t speak, but somehow still steals the scene.
So yes, we write about rain. Because in literature, as in life, some feelings arrive uninvited and stay longer than expected.
And the best we can do is offer them a coat, a cup of tea, and maybe a page or two to find their form.
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