Worldbuilding
Weather does more work in fiction when it stops being scenery and starts changing habits.
Not the storm itself, necessarily. The useful part is what follows from it. Deliveries arrive late. A wall stays damp for years. People take the longer route because the shortcut floods. Plans get cancelled often enough that nobody is surprised anymore. A place begins to teach its own rules, quietly, and everyone learns what can be ignored and what cannot.
That is usually where the world feels lived in. Not in the dramatic weather report, but in the small accommodations built around it.
Not the storm itself, necessarily. The useful part is what follows from it. Deliveries arrive late. A wall stays damp for years. People take the longer route because the shortcut floods. Plans get cancelled often enough that nobody is surprised anymore. A place begins to teach its own rules, quietly, and everyone learns what can be ignored and what cannot.
That is usually where the world feels lived in. Not in the dramatic weather report, but in the small accommodations built around it.
Weather gets overused when it’s only there to make things look dramatic. The better use is the boring one. A roof leak, a swollen door, the route nobody takes in winter because the path turns to mud. Those details do more to shape a place than any thunderclap ever does. In horror especially, inconvenience is often the real threat.