Learning to write about climate change
I can't believe I haven't yet written about How to Start Writing the Climate, a series of four workshops run by Linda France for New Writing North. Prospective participants had to apply with a sample of their writing, and it's always a boost to be selected in that way, whether it's for an anthology or an online gathering. As I write this in mid-June we've had three of the four workshops, with another short piece to write before the final one in early July.
Since I write in various genres including sci-fi, it would be easy to see climate change as something I could (should?) tackle in a particular way. The books I've read that had it at their heart have all been sci-fi (I recommended a few a while back). It's a common theme, usually used in a dystopian way - societal breakdown due to food or water shortages, damage to infrastructure through storms or floods - and set in the future. The trouble is, we're living through it right now and it could (should) crop up in every genre except fantasy, because it is the realest of real.
I say that, but it even has a place in fantasy. My semi-rural fantasy novel set in northern England in 2018, the one that got me onto the Penguin WriteNow day in 2017, has a strong 'green' theme: pollution, fracking and ecosystem damage, as well as changing weather patterns and political responses to the climate emergency. It's still SFF though, still a niche readership (if it's ever published) and all about impending disaster - the North Sea has decided people can't be trusted with the land so she decides to reclaim it. I felt that climate change, its effects and possible mitigations, people's fears and plans relating to it, ought to crop up, however subtly, in all genres. Just like environmental considerations ought to crop up to some extent in all policy and planning. Hence my desire to attend these workshops.
The trouble is, if it is a topic with strong emotional pull - a topic where there are fears and arguments in the background - it's hard to know where to start. I also found it was hard for me not to stray into near-future SF, or into some kind of hectoring, doom-laden vein. On top of all that I'm not an expert, just a Guardian-reading citizen who's looking to live through this. All those mythical target dates (this by 2030, that by 2040, the other by 2050) should be comfortably within my lifetime, I have a stake in this. Maybe not as much as if I had children, but still…
Linda started off by acknowledging these difficulties and trying to help us through them. We had a delve into why we write at all, why we want to write about climate change, and why it's difficult. The delve included some free-writing sessions, where you write for a set time without stopping (if you get stuck you write e.g. 'I'm stuck, I can't think of anything, how annoying' etc until you break out of the rut). I've often found these useful for freeing up the mind, or rather, sneaking ideas past the self-censor, and it helped here too. I gained a tiny insight into what my personal angle might be, the motivation that could see me through. I also did a mind map which I augmented over a few days, and that gave me some bare topics but also phrases I jotted down like 'no plastic tat', 'ok if you've got good quality belongings to start with', 'it's expensive to be frugal'.
Then we talked about who the audience might be, and I faltered. There's a mix of poets and prose writers in the group but we're not talking documentary style, factual writing. Primarily we're looking to inform as we entertain, with poetry or fiction or creative non-fiction (true events written in a storytelling narrative style). I can't imagine that any reader of the sort of literary journal I might aspire to be published in will be unaware of climate change or what they can do to slow down or mitigate it. They might not be prepared to make the changes they recognise as necessary or they might not be able to afford to (I once explained to an earnest middle-class student that normal people aren't deciding between the recycled brand and the standard big-name brand that costs the same, they're deciding between the recycled brand and the value brand which costs half the price. He didn't seem to get it). But fundamentally, I'm not telling them anything they didn't know and I'm unlikely to change their behaviour. Two things, then: one, I can at least reflect reality better if I weave some thoughts on climate change in; two, I can make it specific and bring it closer to home.
While I think it is true that at some level we must all know what's going on by now, and what we can do (would like to do, are prepared to do, ought to do) about it, it still sometimes seems far away if you live in a comfortable inland area of a developed country. There's talk of droughts and sea-level rises and melting glaciers but I live in a pretty rainy part of northern England where people still laugh at southerners and their summer hosepipe bans. We've had some devastating moor fires over the last five years but it's easy to focus on people's carelessness with cigarettes or barbecues, rather than how much more likely these fires are if the moor gets drier than normal. So maybe Climate Change the big scary topic is familiar, but specific ways it's affecting northern England and its weather and wildlife will be unusual enough to make someone pause.
My next problem involves starting out on climate change and ending up on biodiversity loss, extinctions and habitat destruction. I worry that, although the two are connected, I'm straying off topic. However, if there's one thing I learnt from my repeated reading of Douglas Adams (sadly I don't seem to have learnt how to write good comic fantasy), it's the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. By which I mean, if I write with the intention of writing about climate change and how I feel about it, then if it ends up being about reduction in butterfly numbers and changes to migratory patterns that aren't all directly caused by climate change, that's ok. Feeling a connection to nature, which many people have discovered or deepened during the pandemic, makes us care more about our impact on the planet, and by extension, man-made climate change. Expect more birds and trees to crop up in my non-SF stories. And butterflies, of course.
If I've given you something to think about, you can always buy me a cuppa at https://ko-fi.com/jysaville