Tornado Green

[Caged Maiden]

So I was just outside writing (my favorite place to do so), and it was calm and humid and thunder rolled in the distance. I'll preface this little tale with a bit of info--this has been a hellishly wet year in Central Ohio. Rain every few days and swollen rivers and every drainage ditch full to brimming at times. It's been really wet.

So it was calm a moment ago, and then the sky changed colors and the wind started blowing, and the temperature dropped several degrees. Yes, I realize I could be writing this more poetically, as you'd find in a novel, but right now, I'm just telling. I had to come in because the misty rain started blowing in sideways and my balcony no longer protected my screen from the rain. Anyways...

It got me thinking about how we write weather.

When this happened just a moment ago, it was real. It brought back memories of the times I'd seen tornado green and how I felt. I remember the surge of energy I felt when the stark change in weather hit me before I could even see it coming. But in writing, I never portray weather like that--as in I think I'm unrealistic because I don't use weather often as a device. It's either sunny or nighttime, or raining, or muddy, or snowy...nothing really interesting.

How do you use weather to impact your stories?

EDIT: I'm making this into a challenge and will link it here for those who want to participate. If you have any questions about the challenge, post them here please, so the other thread is for entries.

http://mythicscribes.com/forums/cha...-challenge-show-me-gods-wrath.html#post211824

 

[skip.knox]

I'm saving tornado green for the right story, but I've experienced. I live in Boise Idaho, which rarely gets tornadoes. I've seen only one, and it never formed.

Boise sits in a wide desert, right up against the Sawtooth Mountains to the east and northeast. I was walking across campus one day when I noticed the clouds were doing something odd--they were forming into a circle. Long streams of clouds circling, as if I was looking down into a giant whirlpool.

Cool, thinks I.

Then that green started in the middle, and here's what's odd. I knew at once what that meant. I was immediately fearful, looking for shelter. I had never been in a tornado, never seen that coloration, never had the details explained to me about how a tornado forms.

But I knew at once. It was as if some biological memory had awakened in me, as if I were confronted by a viper. It wasn't just me recognizing that green, it was a thousand generations of ancestors who had looked up before me.

That feeling, even more than the color, has stayed with me. I'll use it somewhere.

Beyond that, I do use weather at times. There's a big battle in my WIP that happens in August. The heat plays a real and personal role in the details. And I always remember how effectively Chandler used Los Angeles rain in The Big Sleep. As with other devices, it's perilously easy to overplay the hand, but if done right it's additive, like a good soundtrack.

 

[Caged Maiden]

That's interesting, especially this bit:

I'm saving tornado green for the right story

I LOVE that!

HA! I've got no plans to ever use a tornado per se, but I loved the way I experienced weather today and it's just that sometimes when I experience something real, I ask myself, "WTF? Why haven't I used this in a story yet?"

It just brought to my attention how little I even mention the weather. Mostly, I do something like, "flurries landed in wheel tracks on the empty road" etc. I almost never bring the weather into plot.

 

[Miskatonic]

Isn't the eye of the tornado supposed to be green? Or is that just some old wives tale?

 

[Caged Maiden]

Tornado green isn't really about the eye of the tornado, it's about a weird phenomenon that happens in the environment when a tornado is imminent. The sky might be dark and the wind blowing, and then suddenly, it gets clear and the sky takes on a greenish or yellowish hue. I remember one time (in Wisconsin, where I grew up), it was like stormy and fierce one minute, and then the next, it was like a bright and peaceful day, and the sky was surreal yellowish and I could swear I heard birds chirping (though that's probably just me memory playing tricks on me). Moments earlier, people were running, taking down anything tall (we were in a field at a Renaissance Faire) and packing things away that were blowing around in the wind. Then, the weather seemed to freeze in time and two funnels began swirling in the sky above us. It was bright, and then it got all gray again and the clouds were there. Like Hera's eyes in the sky from the opening of Hercules: The Legendary Adventures.

I planned this memory into a graphic novel because it was just too awesome to not write about.