Tornado facts 🌪 ✅ from a fiction writer

May 07, 2022 12:01 pm

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It's spring in Oklahoma, and that means the sky is trying to kill us. Kind of.

It's hard for me to talk about tornadoes. Not because I've been traumatized by them or because I have a ton of bad memories associated with them. It's because I've lived in Oklahoma my whole life, and I just don't give them the fear and attention they probably deserve.

So when non-Oklahomans ask about tornadoes, they want to know how scary they are. But I pretty much just shrug like a tornado is as normal as a sunny day.

To be sure, they are dangerous and deadly. They can level your entire home. And if you've never seen the particular shade of green and orange the sky turns when a tornado is rolling through, then you probably don't have a color palette you associate with the wrath of god.

But that being said, I feel it's my duty to inform you that I've lived here my whole life, and I've only taken cover from tornadoes a handful of times. Like, a don't-even-need-all-the-fingers-on-one-hand amount of times. And up until my husband and I moved into our current home, I'd never had a tornado shelter before.

(For those wondering how you take cover if you don't have a basement or shelter, you get in a closet, hallway, or bathroom with no exterior walls and pull a mattress over you. If you have kids, you put helmets on them. Oh, and growing up we had tornado drills in school. It was EXACTLY like a Cold War nuclear bomb drill. You got under your desk and put a textbook over your head.)

Anyway, I bring all this up because we've had a lot of rain and hail lately, and because one night last week, our tornado sirens went off five times and Rosie, my dog, slept through the whole thing. Also, I know a lot of people who don't live in Oklahoma tend to wonder why a lot of Oklahomans just shrug at the deadly weather.

I don't have a definitive answer for you. But I suspect it lies in storytelling.

See, you can't sustain emotion for long. That's why your favorite shows and books and movies all vary the pacing and the plot elements and the emotions they're trying to wrench from your heart.

You can't have 100% conflict all the time, or sadness, or backstory, or anything. You have to chop it up and move it all around. Every element needs to be interspersed with other stuff so that it has the maximum impact. Because if you started a story with a happy beginning, zero character arc or plot, and then ended it with happy ever after, it would suck.

Tornadoes don't know this. So they show up in spring and expect us to just cower in terror from like April until June.

But we can't. We can't sustain that fear. Instead, we hear the sirens and then head out to the front porch with a can of Coor's Light in hand to watch the show.

That, or we turn on the TV to watch the local weatherman, and we may or may not have a whole drinking game that goes with it.

In grad school, this truly terrified my roommate who was from California. She really, really hated it here.