In an age when global warming and terrorist threats are so common as to become mundane, it is not surprising that we are increasingly obsessed with disasters. They permeate our science-fiction writing and films: from 2004’s “The Day After Tomorrow” (global warming triggers a massive ice age - how’s that for irony?) to this year’s “The Happening” and beyond. If you want to construct your own “perfect storm,” here are a few basics you should know.

Creating the Perfect Storm

Whether you’re dealing with fire or water, neurotoxins or bacteria, a balance between realism and the fantastic is the key to creating a captivating disaster. A perfect storm can be large or small, localized or world-wide, but it should be (or at least feel) possible - a disaster caused by, say, mass hypnosis by pets given superpowers through catnip would be dismissed by an audience as nonsense or even comedy. At the same time, your disaster should not be predictable. A hurricane by itself is not interesting enough to capture reader or viewer attention because they will already know what to expect. Suspense is crucial.

Information about the exact nature of the disaster should be dispensed conservatively, giving the audience enough to keep them interested and allow them to follow the story without taking away their uncertainty about what will happen next. It’s fine for things to become increasingly dire for the characters in the middle of the disaster (as that category 1 hurricane becomes the size of the continental United States), but they should never be so bad that escape seems impossible. Audiences want your characters to survive because they can picture themselves and their friends in the same situation. They will be unlikely to fully engage with characters they see as “doomed” (this is one of the reasons why having your main character die at the beginning of a novel or film and then doing a flashback of the circumstances that killed them is generally unwise). And speaking of characters…

Disasters: the Human Side

People react very predictably in disasters, yet these reactions are often portrayed inaccurately in movies and books. Most experts agree that men and women in the middle of disasters go through three distinct phases in what is referred to as the “survival arc”: denial, deliberation, and the decisive moment.

In the denial phase, people’s reactions slow. They try to continue with their routines and may show an unusual dedication to procedure as they attempt to cling to normalcy. People in a crashed airplane, for example, may try to find and carry off their stowed luggage. Most of the time, victims remain calm. The riot scenes that are a common fixture of disaster movies and books are unlikely to occur. When fear kicks in, people proceed to the deliberation phase. This is when many of them will begin to panic. Surges of adrenaline can make simple tasks like buckling a life jacket more difficult. Tunnel vision leads to increased focus on details over the “whole picture,” and people may lose their ability to reason. Finally, they reach the decisive moment. Victims of a disaster often become immobilized during this phase - conscious, but paralyzed and unable to move or react. Those who are more self-confident or independent are more likely to be able to make decisions that will increase their odds of survival.

To learn more about the human side of disasters, visit this link. Then rent “Airplane!,” my favorite (spoof of a) disaster movie.