Cli-Fi Writer's Journal
For this assignment as you read Our Final Warning, you are a creative writer preparing to write climate literature. In your Cli-fi Writer's Journal first notice and make a brief note or notes on something described in each chapter that might be relevant to your creative writing. Then, from that note, start thinking and writing about your creative writing. Experiment with some of the prompts I suggest and develop your own ideas and prompts.
This journal is not a place to be 'right,' prophetic, or original. It is a place to notice where science presses against imagination, and where imagination resists, distorts, or transforms knowledge. Given the scale and urgency of the climate crisis all of us, especially readers of Our Final Warning have a responsibility help raise and share concern. Creative writing is one of the most powerful ways to do so.
Science to Story prompts:
From process to moment: Identify a scientific process described in the chapter (e.g., ocean acidification, permafrost thaw, heat waves) and write a paragraph describing the first moment when an ordinary person would notice this change, without naming the science.
Scale Shift: The chapters describe transitions at large scale, regions, long time frames. Choose one detail and shrink it to a smaller scale such as a human body, a back yard, a single afternoon. What does climate change look like / feel like at that scale?
Before / After / During: Write three sentences: One set just before a climate threshold is crossed; one set during the transition; and, one set long after it has become 'normal.'
Character prompts:
Notes and ideas about characters that take deep dives into character's motivations, backstory, and unique voice. Snippets of overheard dialogue, dreams, plot twists.
Invent a character who misunderstands the science, but whose misunderstanding makes emotional sense. What do they get wrong, and why?
List five things a character mourns that are not charismatic megafauna or iconic landscapes (e.g., sounds, routines, smells, assumptions).
Create a character whose livelihood depends on accelerating climate harm. Write a journal entry they keep that they never intend anyone else to read.
World Building prompts:
Notes on settings, sensory details, maps, graphic data. Setting pushes back:
Identify a setting altered by warming (city, forest, farm, coast). Write a paragraph where the setting actively resists or constrains human plans.
Lost Infrastructure: Choose one piece of infrastructure (road, dam, sewer, power grid). Imagine how its failure reshapes daily life, and what replaces it, formally or informally.
Microclimate: Write a scene in which two characters occupy the same place but experience different climates due to age, health, wealth, or access to technology.
Language prompts:
Lists of favorite words, poetic lines, phrases, or sentences that come to mind.
Lexicon of the Warming World: List new words, metaphors, or euphemisms that emerge as temperatures rise. Which words disappear? Which ones become obscene, nostalgic, or sacred?
Syntax Under Stress: Write a paragraph describing extreme heat or disaster using sentence structures that mimic physical strain (fragmentation, repetition, breathlessness).
Nonhuman Voice: Choose one nonhuman perspective implied by the science (river, glacier, insect population, methane plume). Write 10 lines from that perspective without anthropomorphizing it.
Power and Justice prompts:
Who Adapts First? Who Adapts Best? From the science described, list who benefits from adaptation and who is sacrificed. Turn this into a character pairing or conflict.
Border Without a Line: Identify a climate-driven migration that does not involve crossing a national border. What counts as exile here?
Slow Violence Scene: Write a scene where nothing dramatic happens, but something irreversible is quietly set in motion.
Meta-Reflection as a writer:
The journal is a laboratory, not a draft.
Resistance Log: What part of the science do you not want to write about? Why? What narrative habits are being challenged?
Avoiding Apocalypse: Identify one cliche of climate fiction you feel drawn toward. How could you subvert, invert, or refuse it?
Ethical Line: Where do you feel uncertainty about representing suffering, futures, or nonhuman life? How might form help navigate that uncertainty?
