Setting the weather

During the last week we've had mornings cold enough to belong to October, a day of 26 degree heat, and thunderstorms.  This  mixture of weather all within a few days got me thinking about the weather as part of a story's setting.

During the thunderstorm I unplugged my TV and  wi-fi, which left me without access to the news or to  the Internet for a couple of hours.  I had nothing urgent to accomplish that day and could afford to go off-line for a spell.  But what if a character needed to receive a vital message that would change the fate of worlds?   What if that character never received the message due to the weather?  What if a lightning strike on a building took down half a city's power supply?

That  could be a golden opportunity for a criminal to make their move.  No power, no alarms, maybe a bad backup generator has failed and the place he or she wants to get into is effectively unguarded.  It could be the heist of the century, thanks to the weather.

Or what if one of those weird dust storms that periodically roll in over Sydney, Austraila, happened somewhere where it picked up and carried unpleasant bacteria in its winds?  Could that be the start of a pandemic?  Perhaps the people who live in that place know about it, and have to escape the dust cloud.  Then you have the basis for a classic disaster movie story.

And what about hot weather?  Maybe it's a freak occurrence (it sometimes seems that way in England).  Does it happen every seven or fourteen years?  Does a plague of insects hatch every time the heat comes?  Do the people there know they're in for a drought when the first unseasonably early sweltering hot day hits?  That would probably be a story about survival, or perhaps the characters pack up and leave.  Then it becomes a journey/quest tale.

Weather can be an antagonist preventing the hero/heroine getting what they want.  It can be a mood shaper, or it can be something for a character to study.  Whatever its role, weather is an essential part of the setting of our stories.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com