"Writing is activism. Over a decade as a published author, I’ve come to learn this. It’s subtle, and slow working, but incredibly effective."
A story consultant on Netflix’s Heartstopper (Seasons 2 & 3) and a RLF Royal Fellow, Wren is also the founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League, creator of The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook, and editor of Future Hopes: Hopeful stories in a time of climate change.
Wren is on the Society of Authors’ Sustainability Steering Committee and works as a consultant on climate storytelling for museums, production companies, major brands and publishers, with a focus on optimism and hope. They run a Queer Writers group in Coventry. Follow them on Instagram at @wrenjameswriter or find out more at their website.
Writing is activism. Over a decade as a published author, I’ve come to learn this. It’s subtle, and slow working, but incredibly effective. My book about climate magicians, Green Rising, was recently used to kickstart a discussion of climate-friendly investments in a book club for fossil fuel bankers and their families.
In Green Rising, teenagers can grow plants from their skin. They use their powers to rewild the planet and stand up to the profit-hungry corporations driving carbon emissions.
The fun adventure story hit home for the investment bankers in a way that a newspaper article wouldn’t. When we read about fictional characters and experience their emotional highs and lows for ourselves, it unlocks a higher level of empathy and compassion. Even after the book is long finished, these characters stick in our minds. We are able to imagine their feelings in a way that we can’t relate to a faceless population on the news.
For climate activism, this is incredibly important. So many of the effects of climate change feel so distant, both in time and location. It’s hard to connect that to our daily lives. Fiction can help inspire people to act – whether that’s talking to their employer about their pensions scheme’s investments in fossil fuels, or changing to an eco-friendly energy tariff.
More importantly, fiction can help us to feel hope. 62% of people say they hear much more about the negative impacts of climate change than they do about progress towards reducing climate change, resulting in a perceived Solutions Gap. If you feel like the world is doomed, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, then there’s no reason to take any action.
I expected the process of writing Green Rising to be depressing and mentally exhausting. But, in fact, immersing myself in the climate debate helped me to stop feeling anxious and helpless about our future. I could see all the things that needed to be done to fix the future.
As writers, we can engineer a future world long before it exists in real life. In the forties, creators were envisioning men on the moon long before space travel existed. That cultural drive led to so much energy being invested in the Apollo missions and our successful journey into space. Without those early science fiction stories creating a cultural desire to walk on the moon, we wouldn’t have been driven to make it happen so soon.
In the 1900s, stories about a future where women had the vote encouraged support for the suffragist movement. In fact, a group was founded in the UK in 1908 called the Women Writers Suffrage League, whose mission was to encourage writers to mention the fight for the vote in their writing. As their prospectus stated, “a body of writers working for a common cause cannot fail to influence public opinion.”
Climate writers today do the same thing for our future. By creating stories about worlds filled with climate solutions, we are changing our collective picture of the future.
The Suffrage League inspired me to set up my own group, the Climate Fiction Writers League. Our guiding principle is to spread awareness of the importance of mentioning climate change in fiction of all types, from poetry to Eastenders. In my work in the writers' room for Netflix’s Heartstopper, I was able to showcase how this can be done naturally. The character Elle tours an art college when she’s applying for sixth form. An art exhibition at the college is based around climate change, meaning several scenes take place surrounded by artistic representations of the climate crisis.
The Climate Fiction Writers League now has over 300 traditionally published authors as members, who have all written climate fiction. Through the group, we partner with climate organisations and consult with museums and production companies.
It’s especially important for children to see hopeful visions of the future world they are going to grow up in. A few years ago, I pitched to my publisher a ‘positive’ climate anthology for children. The authors were given a list of solutions believed to combat climate change most effectively, and encouraged to create stories set in the future.
I told them to use their anger and frustration to drive their writing, but not to write an angry book. Their settings aren’t always positive utopias, but they don’t represent a hopeless dystopia. We want children to read stories that convey the seriousness of the situation without making it seem futile. They need to see that climate change is solvable.
I was also very careful about where we laid the blame for the climate crisis. I didn’t want to leave our readers feeling guilty about their carbon footprints. We want to inspire people, not panic them. No one will engage with climate activism if they’re just going to be made to feel guilty about not recycling!
I wanted to encourage the writers try to show the industry, economics and political factors which are to blame. To call out the companies who have been specifically working to slow climate activism, like fossil fuels companies who spread climate science misinformation in the nineties.
Adding in these elements meant I could add teaching questions and resources that would make the stories useful in a classroom setting, leading to discussions of wider issues around the climate crisis.
Ultimately, climate change is a political topic – it has to be. It’s unavoidable. The end of world is profitable. My characters are angry they’re being told to reduce their climate footprint, that they’re being made to feel guilty about their personal pollution when industry is responsible for the vast majority of emissions.
I wanted to create a book for young people who are anti-capitalist and pro-revolution, who are changing the world at an incredible pace against the enormous weight of the existing establishment.
The best climate fiction captures the feeling of being part of an ongoing green revolution. It acknowledges that we are living in a time of unprecedented existential fear. And then shows people how to turn that fear into hope and action.
This piece was commissioned by the innaugural Norwich Book Festival 2024.
Find out more about Green Rising, which is published by Walker.
For more about The Climate Conscious Writers Handbook, see Wren's website.
