Spectator competition winners: why you should never open a novel with the weather

In Competition No. 3317 you were invited to provide an opening to a novel that bears out Elmore Leonard’s tip to writers: ‘Never open a book with weather.’ Leonard’s other bêtes noires, outlined in his 2007 10 Rules of Writing, include prologues, exclamation marks and the modification of the word ‘said’ with an adverb. But his most important rule, he said, the one that sums up the ten was: ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’

On which note, over to your laboured, florid, banal offerings. They were a hoot to judge and earn their authors £25.

The winds perform their lucubrations, crossing the silent furze, shifting hither and thither like shadowy thieves intent on looting the moorland, lifting the vegetation leaf by leaf, prickle by vicious prickle. In the distance, the sea can be heard, though faintly, bludgeoning cliffs with breakers. Above, it’s a harbinger moon, half-hidden, throwing weak shapes, promising nothing less than total tempest, albeit in due course. Watch that soft smirr: it deceives the eye – fools the imagination – soon it will rouse itself, thickening and fattening, moaning, whistling its blustery way into a violent storm. And oh, the narcissism of the sullen clouds! Pouting like maladjusted starlets! Preening their dark edges in an already half-bombastic sky! It is on such an evening that Jim Greengrass, by profession a realtor, steps blithely out along Sixteenth Avenue with a yen to see South Pacific one more time.

Bill Greenwell

‘It’s raining.’

‘No it isn’t!’

‘Perhaps it’s going to rain.’

‘No “perhaps”. It isn’t!’

Amy stared through the window. Damien did the same. Neither was exactly right nor exactly wrong. Thickened with moisture the air both did and did not fall in droplets which did and did not coat the glass and which did and did not reach the ground. It was essence of rain, the eternal spirit of drizzle, the endless future become grey and indistinct in the immediate present.