#writing cold

[tea-rose-1300]

Some tips for writing snow/ice/cold:

Snow muffles sound, if the road hasn't been plowed and a car drives down it you don't hear the car as soon. It's less so after the roads have been plowed and sidewalks shoveled.

- Walking in the snow makes some noise tho, you just have to close enough to hear it. (I have gotten jumpscared by people walking their pets while out on snowy days cause of this)

- A lot of people have snowblowers to make shoveling easier. Snowblowers are usually gas powered and super loud.

- Snow makes it way lighter out at night, since it reflects the light.

- Big puffer jackets are super warm and cozy. they are also bulky and annoying when you are inside a heated building that you can't wear them in if you don't have someplace to put them.

- Those jackets also tend to be made of a slippery fabric that make it annoying to carry a backpack over one shoulder.

- Snowboots can also be big and bulky and annoying, but super warm. Good ones will keep you from slipping on ice pretty well too

- However if the boot treads get full of snow the snow will slip on the ice and you slip too.

- You can get cleats to attach to your shoes/boots to keep from slipping.

- There are these things called draft-dodgers you can get that are a long tube of fabric filled with sand that you use to block the crack at the bottom of a door to keep drafts from coming in under the door. If you open the door while one is in front you need to be inside the house to put it back.

- When it gets super cold out (negative teens farenheit and colder) we usually put packing tape on the cracks of the doors to seal them so no drafts can come in. It's super loud when you take it off or open the door.

- even if it's warm enough to survive running from the store to the car/house to car w/o a coat you want to have a coat in the car anyways in case you get stuck or something.

- I do however like wearing gloves even when I don't wear a coat cause my hands get cold really fast.

- Some gloves are also super bulky and annoying to wear, but they are the warmest.

- You also probably want a shovel in your car in case you get snowed in/stuck.

- You need to clean snow off of your car if it's not in a garage/carport and it's super annoying. You usually use a snowbrush or broom you keep in your car with the shovel.

- When you do this the windows and windsheild are almost always iced over/fogged up and you need to run the car for a bit to get the heat working so you can use the defroster. Then it takes another 5-10 minutes for the ice to melt.

[beawriter]

Writing Cold

From a canadian

First, you need to know where and when your story is set in, to know the temperature. It can go from 0 to -15°C (23 to 5°F), which is an average winter day in Canada btw, or -30 to -40°C (-22 to -40°F), which is pretty cold.  If you go colder than that, I don’t know if you’re trying to kill your characters or something, but it’s really not a good idea. 

When you have an idea how cold it is, you can continue:

Average cold, but not freezing in two minutes (around -5 at -15°C)

- if your character is in average clothing (long pants, long-sleeved shirt, etc.) they will be fine for about 30 to 60 minutes. Their limbs will not necessarily be hurting

- if they are in clothing suited for hotter situations (dress, skirt, shorts, short-sleeved shirt, etc.) I give them thirty minutes, if not less, before their limbs start hurting. Trust me, I know. 

- if they have winter gear (snow pants, mittens, scarf, etc.) they can last multiple hours, if not a whole day 

A bit freezing (around -20 at -30 °C)

- if your character is in average clothing (long pants, long-sleeved shirt, etc.) they will last 15 minutes at best before having consequences (intense shivering, limbs hurting, etc.) (This is very precise, so I might be a bit off, since I haven’t actually tested it)

-  if they are in clothing suited for hotter situations (dress, skirt, shorts, short-sleeved shirt, etc.), it will start hurting like hell in 30 minutes tops (or less). Also, when the character steps ouside, they will feel the cold on their flesh, and it will be cold.

-  if they have winter gear (snow pants, mittens, scarf, etc.) they could survive a day outside, maybe. They’ll start feeling pretty cold in a few hours.

Hell but make it cold ( -30 to -40°C)

-  if your character is in average clothing (long pants, long-sleeved shirt, etc.) they are so screwed. No, I’m serious 1 hour, maybe less, and they will have hypothermia

- if  they are in clothing suited for hotter situations (dress, skirt, shorts, short-sleeved shirt, etc.) I am so, so sorry for them. I don’t know when the hypothermia will kick in, but it won’t take long. At first, they will be fine, for five seconds or so. I’m not sure when their limbs will hurt, but it won’t take more than very few minutes

-  if they have winter gear (snow pants, mittens, scarf, etc.) I don’t  remember exactly, but it will take 3 hours, or a few more, before the cold is unbearable, if their face isn’t screaming in agony before that

General things

- if there’s wind (probably) their eyes will tear, especially if there’s a lot of wind

- if your character is trying to protect themselves from the wind, they absolutely need something to protect themselves from the wind (a cave, or even a whole they dug in the snow) 

- if there’s snow, ice, whatever, building a fire on top of it won’t be very useful, since it won’t last very long, and the warmth provided won’t be that much

- if they enter a warm place (a shelter, house, etc.) your character will probably feel like they’re burning, and their limbs will be very sitff, especially if they were out for a long time or in a very cold weather

- cold is tiring. it takes a toll on your body, who tries to keep its warmth

- your limbs will hurt at some point, starting by the extremities (feet, hands, head) except if they are covered (even though, for example, let’s say the character has good snow boots, but is wearing jeans, which are not much good against the cold, their legs will start freezing first, although their feet might stay okay for a bit)

- clothes get cold before your skin does, so if you enter a warm place, you’ll heat up, though your clothes will slow down the process (they can stay cold for a while), so I recommend your character changes clothes, maybe take a hot shower. Jeans are the clothes that keep cold in the most.

- hypothermia:  Hypothermia is a medical emergency that occurs when your body loses heat faster than it can produce heat, causing a dangerously low body temperature. Normal body temperature is around 98.6 F (37 C). Hypothermia (hi-poe-THUR-me-uh) occurs as your body temperature falls below 95 F (35 C).

- I once have hypothermia, it was around -20/-25 C, I was in a school uniform (skirt, knee-length socks, long jacket, hat, good boots) and I waited for the school bus for about 1 hour and 30 minutes. In the bus, I kept my jacket tightly around me for all the twenty minutes of the ride. At school, where there was way more heat than in the bus, I kept shaking (my legs especially) around 1 hour to 2 hours. My teeth chattered as well, in irregular intervals and stopped randomly. I was still cold for at least 30 minutes after entering the building, even if my friends told me my body had heat up since my entrance.

- your character can forget that they are cold if they are distracted (it won’t take it all away, and they won’t magically warm up, but they won’t be thinking about it). Though the colder and longer it gets, the harder it will be for them to get distracted

- hands stay cold for a long time and are the most efficient way to know if someone is cold, or was in the cold (and I’m not talking abouut people who have cold hands naturally)

That’s all I have for the moment, feel free to add more:)

[fixyourwritinghabits]

I have trouble telling when cold writing is actually necessary and tend to just use it always. Is this just a writing style or a handicap? do I need to incorporate emotional adjectives into my first person writing? It feels like one of those things i'm not trying hard enough to overcome, but I'm not sure if I need to?

Hey! I’ve got two answers for you.

The first answer, and the main one, is no, there’s nothing inherently wrong with “cold” writing in the first person. It’s absolutely a style. Ernest Hemingway is known for his lack of adjectival writing, and many love and praise him for it.

But I think there’s more to be said here.

Here’s a piece of advice from the creative nonfiction world that ended up helping me out in all genres: when the action is hot, write cold. When the action is cold, write hot. Allow me to provide an example from Stephen King’s “Carrie”.

Miss Desjardin, their slim, nonbreasted gym teacher, stepped in, craned her neck around briefly,and slapped her hands together once, smartly. “What are you waiting for, Carrie? Doom? Bell infive minutes.” Her shorts were blinding white, her legs not too curved but striking in theirunobtrusive muscularity. A silver whistle, won in college archery competition, hung around herneck. 

The girls giggled and Carrie looked up, her eyes slow and dazed from the heat and the steady,pounding roar of the water. “Ohuh?” 

It was a strangely froggy sound, grotesquely apt, and the girls giggled again. Sue Snell hadwhipped a towel from her hair with the speed of a magician embarking on a wondrous feat andbegan to comb rapidly. Miss Desjardin made an irritated cranking gesture at Carrie and steppedout. 

Carrie turned off the shower. It died in a drip and a gurgle. 

It wasn’t until she stepped out that they all saw the blood running down her leg.

[I have to disclaim here that I find this passage problematic and male-gazey in terms of content, but it does illustrate the idea pretty well.] King spends a lot of prose on the set up here, in particular on the inconsequential details of Miss Desjardin’s appearance. The lengthy prose is musical and full of adjectives and pulls you close into the scene, drawing your gaze from the coach to Carrie’s eyes to Sue’s towel, lingering on the noises, all to evoke a feel for the room.

But when the real action happens, all that disappears. He drops the ‘hot’ evocative language, loses all the adjectives, and takes you right to the moment. The lack of couching language gives the image a shock value, clearing away all imagery of the room so that Carrie herself stands out a stark and lonesome figure. The reader is placed right in with the other locker room girls, seeing exactly what they see how they see it. Our eye is forced to concentrate on the blood. The action becomes what evokes the emotion, instead of the prose.Each author is going to have a different balance between stark language and rich prose. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work is full of imagery and adjectival prose. Amy Hempel is famous for the extreme experimental starkness of her stories, in which she leaves out every detail she possibly can while still maintaining a story. You are going to have your own unique balance.

That said, here’s a second answer. I do think it’s am important and useful exercise to write outside your strengths and tendencies, and to concentrate on one particular skill and experiment with it and exercise it. You may find it useful to take a scene you are having a hard time with, and trying to write it with the purplest prose you possibly can. The expectation here is not that the purple prose version will be great. In fact, a lot of it is liable to be pretty awful. But the experiment will exercise the muscle. Then you can set the purple scene aside and write it with your starkest prose possible. Probably this scene also won’t be exactly what you want either. Set it aside again. Hide them both and don’t look at them. Write the scene again, the best you can. I suspect you’ll find you naturally incorporate some of the best from both the other versions.

For still more practice, you could go back into each version of your scene and revise it as if it were the writing you planned to stick into your story. Revision is such an underrated skill, and practicing it will yet again get you to pay attention to when you use ‘cold’ writing and when you use ‘hot’ writing and why you’re making the choice to use it when.

Lastly, check out Geist’s 6 principles of good narrative. While it doesn’t directly answer your question, I think you may find it helpful when deciding what is working and not working in your story.