For the first eight days of 2014, I never ventured outside except to retrieve the newspaper and mail at the end of my driveway. As I communicated with family and friends outside of the Chicago area where I live, I described the weather and landscape here like the winter scenes in Dr. Zhivago: vast glazed white, with crystal sparkles thrown into the air by gusts of wind; twigs and branches encased in thin sheaths of clear ice; magnificent, silent, deadly. This was the most extreme reach of a snow-filled, deep-frozen winter.

Garrison Keillor once noted, “Bad things don’t happen to writers; it’s all material.” In that spirit, I started thinking about the role severe weather has played in books. Pick any season and, somewhere in the world, you’ll find the potential for a major weather events. It inspires writers of fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, adult and children’s literature.

Anyone familiar with Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic Gothic novel, Wuthering Heights, knows that dramatic shifts in weather intensify the mystery, mysticism and menace of the Yorkshire moors, which are the backdrop for the story’s themes of passion and jealousy. The storms always signal pending tragedy for doomed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff.

Ernest Hemingway challenged the standard symbolism of weather in his 1929 war novel, A Farewell to Arms. In the war experience, snow typically symbolizes death while rain represents life and growth; Hemingway flips these symbols in his World War I story. In one chapter, snow ends battle; in another, it provides a peaceful backdrop for two lovers. Autumn rain leaves the country bare, brown, muddy, and sets the stage for an outbreak of deadly cholera.

Severe weather can be a device to move a plot forward, almost taking on the role of a character. In Rick Moody’s 1994 tragicomic family novel, The Ice Storm, a series of vignettes about two families falling apart in upscale suburban Connecticut, comes to its jarring climax and resolution during a 24-hour period during-and-after an unexpected major ice storm.

Of course, extreme weather can also come at the other end of the spectrum.

Ian McEwan’s 1978 debut novel, The Cement Garden, uses torturous summer heat (inspired by the 1976 extreme heat wave in Europe that gave him a “sense of changed rules”) to create a key plot element. The story is as uncomfortable as the weather becomes. Interestingly, the characters seem frozen by life circumstances but are eventually undone by the oppressive heat.

Hurricanes, tornadoes and typhoons, real and imagined, have played starring roles in literature.

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, commonly referred to as The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is considered by many as giving birth to realistic fiction as a literary genre. The plot is littered with ships wrecked at sea by storms. Perhaps the most famous tornado in literature is the one that transports Dorothy Gale to Oz in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. These are two examples of great literature, enjoyed by adults and children, which use extreme weather as a major plot device.

Winter isn’t over by a long shot. Some of us may find ourselves severely challenged by nature. Perhaps it will inspire the next great work of literature. It’s all material.