Mr. Blue Sky

It's Monday and a comment on one of my posts has got me thinking. Just how many ways can you say, "the characters looked up and saw that the sky was blue?" By "characters" I mean the ones in your story, novel, screenplay, whatever.

Everyone likes to, and should, include some sort of setting, weather , atmospheric conditions to their fiction. It sets a mood, it puts things in place, on the ground (or the ocean, Mars, or deep underground with the mole people).

But sometimes I come to that point where you go, the sky is blue and big and... what the hell else can you say? I remember Chuck Palahniuk alluded to this in his book, The Fight Club. One of the characters is describing the moon, as I recall it. He says something like the moon was in the sky and blah blah blah. As if not just the writer is tired of describing but the very character who is doing the describing is bored with it. How Po-Mo can you get.

Then you read something that changes your mind. Last night I was reading Mordecai Richler's Solomon Gursky Was Here and there's a part where he talks about the sun rising and hanging in a blue sky like it was bolted there. Wow. I love that.

So maybe there's still a few ways left. Hmmm... the sun hung in the sky like someone had screwed it in? Needs work.