How weather mirrors mental states in key scenes of my fiction

When I sit down to write a scene of psychological collapse, my first instinct is rarely to describe the character's face or thoughts. It is to check what is happening outside the window. Rain, wind, fog, or sudden bright sun — each carries a different emotional register, and I have learned to trust weather as a narrative instrument.

For readers in Australia, where a sunny morning in Brisbane can give way to a southerly buster by afternoon, this approach feels close to home. Australian readers of Nordic Noir have often told me that the bleak skies of Stavanger remind them of a Melbourne winter or a Hobart squall. That shared recognition is something I lean into whenever I describe a turning point.

Rain as a slow descent

Rain is the workhorse of psychological fiction, and I use it the way a composer uses a minor key. In Where Monsters Dwell, the persistent drizzle over Ålesund mirrors Aske's creeping realisation that a case he has reopened is tied to his own buried past. Each drop softens the boundary between memory and the present moment.

When I want something less linear, I reach for mist or drizzle that arrives sideways. On Norway's west coast, this kind of weather is almost a character in itself. It lets me slow a scene's rhythm and give the reader permission to settle into uncertainty. Readers familiar with Geelong or Warrnambool will recognise that quiet, persistent melancholy without explanation.

Snow and the weight of silence

Snow, in my writing, is never decorative. It arrives when a character needs to be hushed. In After the Monsoon, a key scene takes place in a half-buried cabin outside Trondheim, where Aske must decide whether to confront a figure from his past. The fresh snowfall muffles every footstep, and that acoustic stillness becomes a stand-in for moral quietness.

Snow also has a practical side. It covers tracks and evidence, which is useful in crime fiction, but its deeper function is emotional. It forces characters to slow down, to breathe visible plumes, to confront the fact that they are still alive. I think of the rare alpine dusting that settles over the Snowy Mountains, where hikers report a strange hush falling over the landscape.

Storm and sudden reckoning

Storms are where I let the weather do the shouting. When Aske finally confronts a truth he has been circling for chapters, the sky often breaks open. Lightning, sideways rain, the collapse of wind into dead calm — these are my punctuation marks for revelation. In The Fourth Courier, a confrontation on a ferry across the Oslofjord is timed to a squall that strips the deck bare.

What I avoid is the Hollywood thunderbolt. Real Nordic storms build, flatten, then build again, much like the emotional cycles of those caught in them. Readers in Darwin, who know a cyclone season intimately, will understand this rhythm without translation. The storm is not a symbol of anger; it is a structure for anger.

Coastal fog and memory

Fog is my instrument for memory. The Norwegian coast is wrapped in it for months each year, and I lean heavily on that fact. In one pivotal scene, Aske returns to his childhood village and finds the harbour invisible beneath a low, milky veil. The fog becomes a metaphor for the repressed history he carries, and the disorientation in the landscape mirrors the disorientation inside his mind.

What I love about fog is its refusal to commit. It neither reveals nor conceals; it hovers. That ambiguity suits scenes where Aske cannot decide whether he is investigating or being investigated. Australian readers who have walked the Twelve Apostles at dawn, or driven through the Yarra Valley in early winter, will know exactly the light I mean.

Heat and restless minds

Heat, in a Nordic setting, can feel almost transgressive. I use it sparingly, often as a sign that something is wrong. When summer arrives unusually early, the unaccustomed warmth unsettles him in ways the cold never could. Bodies move differently, tempers shorten, and the usual discipline of restraint begins to slip. Adelaide readers, who endure forty-degree days, will recognise the way heat erodes composure.

I do not romanticise heat, because in my world it usually signals approaching danger. A character who cannot sleep in the warmth is a character whose mind is working too hard. A street shimmering under an Australian midsummer sun is a street where secrets are about to surface. Heat makes the unconscious sweat.

Melbourne's mood: lessons from a distant climate

I have spent time in Melbourne, and the city taught me things about weather that my Norwegian childhood did not. Melbourne's famous ability to deliver four seasons in a single day taught me that weather can be unreliable in a way that is itself psychologically meaningful. When the sky over St Kilda shifts from clear blue to charcoal grey in twenty minutes, the character walking through it has no choice but to be changed by it.

I brought that lesson back to the Aske novels. In one revision, I rewrote a coastal scene to include a sudden shift from drizzle to sun, and the change did more for the emotional arc than a paragraph of internal monologue. Readers from Sydney, where harbour weather can turn on a southerly within an hour, will find this unremarkable. That is the point.

A few practical habits for writing weather

Trust the regional climate of your setting. A scene in Tromsø should not feel like a scene in Tuscany.
Let the weather arrive before the character names what they feel.
Pair weather changes with scene transitions, so the sky signals what the prose is about to deliver.
Avoid using weather as a one-note symbol; it should shift alongside the character.
Use silence within weather — a held breath, a pause in wind — as a separate kind of punctuation.
When a storm ends, let the aftermath carry emotional weight, not just the storm itself.
Read your weather aloud. If it sounds like a stage direction, rewrite it as feeling.

When I think about the scenes in the Aske series that readers tell me stayed with them longest, almost all of them are scenes where the weather was doing more work than the dialogue. A ferry crossing in fog, a cabin buried in snow, a street drenched by a storm — these moments survive in memory because the sky gave them weight. Weather, in crime fiction, is rarely just weather. It is the page on which the interior life is written.

If a writer can hold that idea gently, and resist the temptation to over-explain what the rain is doing to the protagonist, the scene will trust the reader to feel it for themselves. That trust is the craft, and the choices behind it are noted in more detail on the about page of my site. The reader in Perth or Hobart does not need to be shown the metaphor; they only need to be invited into it.