Under the weather

As I write this early on Saturday morning in the Southern UK, a weather front containing intense rain is forecast to pass over us.  It'll take all day to clear, the weather people tell us.  

My heart sank when I heard that.  Rain is my least favourite weather to go out in.  And that got me thinking about how characters to react to weather.  Taking  yesterday's observation exercise on further, note what people are wearing today, and whether it is appropriate for your climate and weather.

Working out how weather and climate affects your characters and their actions can give added depth to your stories.  They were challenges for me in the Panthera books.  In Death Spiral, most of the planet-bound scenes took place in savannah climates.  I haven't been fortunate enough to visit Africa yet, so my knowledge of savannahs is limited to TV programmes. I had to research the climate and work out how my characters would respond to it.

In Death Song, a lot of the action is set in rainforest.  This again isn't a place I've been able to visit, and I had to do more research to get a sense of what living there is like.  I know I haven't got enough awareness of the climate into my first draft, and this is one of the things I must fix on the next edit.

Ren and Nic are outdoor people and cope with changing climates well, but Bryn is a geek more often found behind a desk in an air-conditioned environment.  And Pan has no real knowledge of of weather at all, giving me the challenge of trying to describe his reactions to it from the point of view of an innocent.  

In Eyemind I have a scene between a group of Intel operatives where three of them are finding the heat difficult to deal with and the fourth alien member of the team is revelling in it.  They come from vastly different climates and this is affecting the way they work together.

Showing your characters' reactions to the weather enhances your story and your characters.  But please don't start your story with "It was a dark and stormy night."