7 Day Story Writing Challenges: A Brief Guide to Writing Disaster Fiction

Sep 16

This guide is all about disaster fiction. What it is, tips for writing it, and a list of disaster stories you can read online for free. We also discuss the difficulties, limitations, and pitfalls of writing in this genre. This guide is a must-read for anyone assigned disaster fiction in a 7 Day Story Writing Challenge, or for anyone wanting to explore new or unfamiliar literary genres!

Looking for more writing competitions to enter? Check out our ‘Big List of International Writing Competitions’.

What is Disaster Fiction?

For the purposes of our 7 Day Story Writing Challenges, we’re defining disaster fiction as a story in which some kind of existential threat forms the primary plot devise. We believe that in disaster fiction, your character or characters survival should probably be one of the main conflicts of the story. We also believe that for a story to be disaster fiction, the threat cannot be human in nature, although a person could have been the ultimate cause. For example, your existential threat could be a burning building started by a murderous arsonist, but not a serial killer stalking your protagonist with a gun.

Difficulties, Limitations and Pitfalls of This Genre

For this one, we have a feeling we might get a lot of stories that begin by introducing a character and starting the story at some point in their life before the disaster strikes. Remember, you only have 2,000 words. We also think people might be tempted to come up with an action movie plot. Plot is important in disaster fiction because it’s really the plot that determines this genre. But plot is still only one part of any story. Be careful not to to attempt a novel-sized plot in a 2,000 word short story. The plot of Jack London’s short story ‘To Light a Fire’ can be expressed in just a few words. A man goes out into the wilderness. His fire goes out and he cannot relight it. Man freezes to death. If you need a paragraph to summarise your story, you’ve probably chosen the wrong kind of plot for a 2,000 word piece of short fiction. Stories with too much plot tend to have too much exposition and use telling much more than showing. Exposition and telling help to move the narrative along. If you have an overly complicated plot, you’ll need to rely heavily on exposition and telling to make sure you finish the story in 2,000 words or fewer. You also might end up with a story that is all plot and have no time or space for character development, description, sensory details, or exploration of the themes. Of course, it’s up to you how much of these other things you include and how many words you devote to each one. Certainly each writer must find their own style, but a story that is only plot will have a very hard time winning a writing competition.

Top Tips for This Genre

Because you only have 2,000 words for this story, we’d probably suggest beginning as close to end as possible. You could start your story right in the middle of the disaster, or even after the event itself if your disaster is something like a flood, earthquake, or tsunami. Don’t feel pressure to write a story full of action if you don’t want to. Writing action scenes is a bit like writing dialogue or descriptions. Some writers love it and are good at it, some writers avoid it. Just because you’re writing a disaster story doesn’t mean you have to include a lot of action. Besides the actual theme of the challenge, you’ll probably want to explore survival as another theme. How do different people react to danger and threat? Does it bring out the best in people or the worst? How does our inherent will to survive manifest itself? How do people behave if they think they’re about to die? Is the desire to survive our most dominant instinct or does love and sacrifice still have a place in these moments? These are the kinds of things you’ll probably want to explore in your story.