From Writer Unboxed:
I love survival stories. Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica, Uruguayan soccer players in the Andes, plane crash survivors in New Guinea—I’ve read and loved them all. (The books about those stories are Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, Alive, by Piers Paul Read, and Lost in Shangri-La, by Mitchell Zuckoff.) Aside from the fact that survival stories are the best possible thing to read when you’re sick (so you have a cold? It’s not scurvy! And you’re not trapped inside a tent in gale force winds where it’s 30 below and there’s nothing to eat but seal blubber!), they’re also a wonderful window into character and how people respond in extreme circumstances. And since the best novels are about ordinary characters running up against unexpected obstacles, be they icebergs or aliens or a husband’s surprise announcement that he wants a divorce, survival stories are a good road map for how to draw believable characters.
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Putting people in strange settings gives them a chance to grow. When a bunch of 19-year-old soccer players found themselves alone in the Andes with little food, shelter, or means to melt snow for water, some curled up and waited to die and some immediately started searching for ways to get help. And the “natural leaders” weren’t necessarily the ones who took charge in this bizarre and unexpected setting. What will your characters do if they find themselves in a different world?
Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed