Plugging Readers into the Real-life Tsunami of Change
by Charlotte Mendel
Amitav Ghosh said that climate change was “a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination” and called for writers to play a greater role six years ago. So if you’re a writer who understands that we must transition away from fossil fuels this decade if we want to avoid catastrophe—then you start writing cli-fi, right? After all, writers have historically played a role in great societal change.
It’s true that Cli-Fi is a growing genre, but most stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world, which is a bit like Zelensky rousing his troops by describing the devastation a Russian victory would cause. I don’t think we need to focus on what will happen if we don’t act; our stories need to empower people to see what will happen if we do act. We need to use our art to inspire people to imagine a different future. A future which the experts tell us is attainable. So why can’t we imagine it, since it’s so attainable? Because we hear gloom-and-doom predictions every time we plug into media. People feel despair about the future, because they understand the urgency of the situation, but they don’t feel a sense of agency.
People probably didn’t feel much agency in WWII either, when Britain was under threat of a German invasion after a huge military disaster. But Churchill didn’t predict disaster, did he? He said, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the fields and in the streets. We will never surrender.” That’s what a growing tsunami of people are doing, across the globe. This is actually an exciting time to be alive, precisely because we do have agency—there has never been a time when our choices made such a difference. Where we consume, what we consume—humans are causing the problem, and therefore humans can solve it. Art can help imagine a different future.
But for some reason, our industry is not only failing to lead—we’re lagging behind the friggin’ oil companies.
Oil companies are getting so much pressure that they spend billions to show they are prioritising the energy transition. It’s a central issue for most politicians as well—a lot is happening globally at the political level. Yet even if you write a book that makes the crisis as sexy an enemy as Voldemort and fires people’s imagination with a Churchillian call to action—it is hard to find literary agents or publishers who are interested in climate fiction. They simply don’t exist—I invite you to google if you have any doubts.
And this is why I think that the publishing industry is lagging behind most businesses and most politicians—but even worse, it is lagging behind its own readers. And it’s not just our industry; the BBC wrote,
“Despite our societies being at crisis point, just 2.8% of scripted TV and films released 2016-2020 mentioned anything related to climate change, and just 0.56% mentioned it directly”.
So, epiphany! No more dystopian cli-fi, people have hard lives and they don’t want to read gloom and doom. Create gripping stories with climate heroes and villains that rouse people to think about their own behaviour. Excite readers by plugging them into the real-life tsunami of change happening globally so they get excited about being part of it. And keep publishing this new brand of rousing, utopian cli-fi! Fellow writers—we can make a difference, and we do that by writing books that make our readers feel that they can make a difference too.
Find out more about Charlotte’s books.
Charlotte Mendel is a mother, author, teacher, and a modest homestead farmer. Her first novel, Turn Us Again, won the Atlantic Book Award for First Novel, the H.R. Percy Novel Prize, and the Beacon Award for Social Justice. Her second novel, A Hero, was shortlisted for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist in the 2016 International book Awards, in the General Fiction Category. Her first YA book, Reversing Time, was published by Guernica Editions in the fall of 2021. Another literary fiction book, A Hostage, will be published by Inanna in 2023.
Solutions Spotlight
In this extract from a book featuring a climate solution, Charlotte R. Mendel shares an extract from Reversing Time about protesting as a form of activism:
“Come on, kid. It’s time to get down now.” A gigantic police officer was standing below him.
“Sorry,” Simon said. “We have to stop cutting down trees. We have to stop consuming so much. We have to do it now.”
The policeman got a ladder and climbed up to the platform. A second policeman followed him. “Come on kid, party’s over.”
“Does this look like a party to you?” Simon said, wrapping his arms more securely around the tree even as one officer took a pair of wire cutters and began to crack through the links of his chain. The other one read out his rights and told him why he was being detained, and that he could get legal advice from a lawyer.
Simon interrupted him. “Don’t you believe what the global community of scientists are telling us? We are causing the climate emergency. We need to stop. Don’t you want your kids to breathe?”
One of the policemen unwrapped the chain while the other unwrapped Simon’s arms. Simon clasped Gandhi hard with his legs.
“I’m fighting for the right to breathe for the rest of my life. I am fighting for your children.”
“You’re starting to get on my nerves, kid,” the first police officer said, and jerked Simon’s leg roughly. He gave a cry, more in surprise than anything else.
“Police brutality,” someone yelled from below. Simon peered down and saw a little crowd surrounding Gandhi’s base. Several were filming with their cameras.
The officers tried to pry him loose again, one holding Simon by his arms while the other tried to unwrap his legs. It was difficult to unwrap two legs from different directions at the same time. Simon was squirming like an eel and kicking. The officer lost patience and shoved one of Simon’s legs out so far to the side that he cried out again.
“Why don’t you taser him?” a sarcastic voice from below suggested.
“Yeah,” another voice called out. “A kid clinging to a tree should be tortured.”
A chorus of “He’s just a kid” and “Shame” rippled around the base of the tree. Simon wished his mother was there.
Learn more about non-violent civil disobedience through Extinction Rebellion.
The Good Energy Playbook
The more climate stories there are—the more diversity of storytellers and genres—the better climate stories will become. It’s not any one person’s story to tell.
Dorothy Fortenberry, writer and producer, The Handmaid’s Tale
This Playbook is for all screenwriters and creatives—those who are steeped in the climate crisis and those who are learning about it. Whether you’re writing a screenplay, outlining a pilot, or working as an EP or assistant on the twenty-third season of a show (we see you, Grey’s Anatomy), this Playbook will help you bring your climate stories to life.
This is a guide to incorporating climate into your existing projects as well as conjuring up new climate stories. You'll learn how to lift "Climate Lens™" to any element of a script, along a spectrum.
We’ve gathered expert-informed material: from the real-world adventures of climate heroes to the dark obsessions of glaciologists to climate impacts like scorpion attacks and blood snow. You’ll hear from an amazing group of climate experts, communicators, and storytellers, with pieces by climate scientist Dr. Kate Marvel, storyteller and climate poet Mary Annaïse Heglar, journalist Amy Westervelt, and many others.
You’ll also find fictional “story seeds,” intended to show glimpses of the enormous menu of potential climate stories. If they help, you are legally free to use any part of them as a jumping-off point. (Or not. Do you, friend.)