Stormy weather
My part of Southern England has suffered the worst flooding for twenty years in the last couple of weeks. Places I've never seen flooded before have been under three feet or more of water.
It got me thinking about how the weather can be a character in its own right in our books. If you're writing an adventure story, a flood or other disaster can block your characters' route and provide some of the tests they have to overcome to reach their goal. Tolkien did that in The Lord of the Rings when his characters were stopped from crossing the mountains by bad weather and had to go through The Mines of Moria, with disastrous effects.
I've used the weather that way in my own books, in Eyemind, a series of fierce storms destroys a dam, trapping my characters half-way up a mountain trail. In Panthera : Death Spiral I use the golden light of a savannah dawn to contrast the beauty of the environment with the lifelessness off the tiny kingcat cubs Ren is examining.
In Panthera : Death Song, most of the action is set within a rainforest. I had to remember that my characters should get wet a lot, but it also meant that the dense tree canopy blocked their communications. I could use that to up the tension and my characters were isolated a long way from anywhere and looked like they were going to die there.
With Panthera : Death Plain I will be moving back onto the savannah and will be swapping the closed-in rainforest for vast, hot open spaces of grassland again.
In all these books the weather has contributed a great deal of tension to the story. And when. It's so stormy outside there's no excuse for me not settling down to get some serious writing done.
It got me thinking about how the weather can be a character in its own right in our books. If you're writing an adventure story, a flood or other disaster can block your characters' route and provide some of the tests they have to overcome to reach their goal. Tolkien did that in The Lord of the Rings when his characters were stopped from crossing the mountains by bad weather and had to go through The Mines of Moria, with disastrous effects.
I've used the weather that way in my own books, in Eyemind, a series of fierce storms destroys a dam, trapping my characters half-way up a mountain trail. In Panthera : Death Spiral I use the golden light of a savannah dawn to contrast the beauty of the environment with the lifelessness off the tiny kingcat cubs Ren is examining.
In Panthera : Death Song, most of the action is set within a rainforest. I had to remember that my characters should get wet a lot, but it also meant that the dense tree canopy blocked their communications. I could use that to up the tension and my characters were isolated a long way from anywhere and looked like they were going to die there.
With Panthera : Death Plain I will be moving back onto the savannah and will be swapping the closed-in rainforest for vast, hot open spaces of grassland again.
In all these books the weather has contributed a great deal of tension to the story. And when. It's so stormy outside there's no excuse for me not settling down to get some serious writing done.
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