Your gateway to endless inspiration
It wasn't until high school that I began seeing the world as a story to be written. It was a survival tactic, I think, for covid. That and a general habit created by my near-constant writing.
To that extent, it wasn't until post-lockdown that I realized how fucking cool fog is. And since it's foggy today, I'm going to talk about it.
I think that fog is only cool as a visual medium. Book descriptions don't do it justice. "A bank of fog rolls in" "tendrils of fog reach through the trees" yeah but what does that LOOK like?
It looks like a digital artist was drawing clouds behind a mountain and misplaced a layer. It looks like a cloud bisecting the landscape. The tops of the trees look like an island rising out of a flat calm, gray sea while the bottom half of it, the bushes and the houses and the roads, looks like an unfinished painting. If two people were to stand down the road and hold a flashlight, it would be a damn good impression of a car.
And I think a lot of authors forget to describe how fucking damp everything is. There's always this impending sense of rain. Nothing is dry except maybe your clothes, and odds are they're not gonna stay dry for long. Your socks and shoes are toast the moment you stray from a paved road. Hope you like wet socks.
Fog doesn't work like the poison mist in the hunger games. You don't walk into a wall of fog unless some outside force has confined the fog to a specific area. It's a gradual claustrophobia, a slow loss of sight.
It's also usually still when the fog is thick. Otherwise, the wind would blow it away, right? But unless a monsoon is following the fog, there's not quite that eerie "calm before the storm" stillness. It has a different vibe to it.
But you can't say all that without interrupting the flow of the story, so people tend to stick to the simpler descriptions.