Omens

Do you use Tarot cards to guide your daily deeds? Or do you see things that happen to you as omens?  Many characters do, and a great deal of fantasy is built around things that happen after the characters see a particular sign or event.

Sailors have lots of superstitions about what to take, and not to take, to sea.  The wildness and unpredictability of the oceans has led them to build up a series of beliefs and rituals about going to sea, in an effort to tame the untameable.

How do characters use omens in your stories?  Are there folk tales about the weather that promise bounteous harvests or ruin?  Do your characters ignore the warning signs, or heed them?

What about the psychic grandmother that tells the mother of a new-born baby boy that he will be the great destroyer?  Is she raving, or has she genuinely seen an omen from the future that shows the little boy's destiny? And how do the family treat her "gift"?  Do they ridicule her, or trust what she sees? Or is the mother determined to make sure the omen the grandmother saw will never come true?

For all our fancy technology, humans are still supersticious creatures.  We operate on an intuitive level as well as an intellectual one.  If we didn't, most horror stories and films wouldn't hold up.  We'd be looking for the holes in the logic of the story.  Instead, we're gripped by a primeval terror and swept away by the narrative. 

Our long history of folk tales and fairy tales is riddled with stories of characters ignoring, or heeding, omens.  Omens are in our writing DNA, and we can still use them to great effect today.  Your characters ignore the warning at their peril!