Plotting During a Pandemic

 By 2045, everything has gone terribly, predictably wrong due to a weak global response to the climate catastrophe.

…so goes my cli-fi (climate-fiction) near future dystopian novel that I’ve been working on for about 18 months.

I’ve written about 30,000 words so far. A novel is usually around 60,000 to 90,000 words. Fantasy novels often far longer for building a new world from scratch. 

But this novel is set in this world. This world, this earth, my neighbors, and our descendants. This world with its 7,500 varieties of apple and warring Reddit pages devoted to what popular true crime podcasts got wrong. This world where 197 nations signed a historic agreement to reduce their carbon outputs in 2015, and wherein the country with the most CO2 emissions per capita—the U.S., of course— pulled out of the agreement just a few years later. The novel time hops between the recent past and the near future. I hit my reader with nostalgia for 2015, and then I smite them with the grim realities of the year 2045.

I started writing as an outlet for my surplus cynicism. Working in the climate change advocacy space requires the mindset of a futurist. Climate activists refer to 2025 targets, 2030 phase-outs, and mid-century predictions. We measure both the utopian and dystopian outcomes for everything: there are the actions we can take now that will make 2050 a little better, and then there’s “business as usual” that will set up 2050 to be a dumpster fire. The novel became a lockbox for cynicism so that I could keep meeting dour scientists and attending unsatisfying UN climate talks without screaming.

I don’t think I’m writing the Great American Climate Novel here, but there’s love and murder, betrayal and kelp farming.

My protagonist meets the challenge of survival in 2045 with grit and enough paranoia to believe she has an outsized role in both what has occurred and how to make things right. My protagonist doesn’t have the luxury of a complicated worldview. She grew up in this world and has watched it slowly burn. She wants someone to pay. And she succeeds, in a fashion. I have most of the plot outlined. I knew how the story ended.

But this world has served me with a supremely unwelcome plot twist. What does 2045 look like after going through a global pandemic in 2020? I didn’t plan for a lethal flu so early in my author surrogate’s timeline, but to ignore it will make the book even more unrealistic. Fiction has to have its own internal logic for the reader to suspend disbelief. COVID-19 has lit up a new path—one that might be much, much worse than the future I have already sketched out, or it could be the spark the world needed to change course. The future is hazier than it seemed just a few months ago. Back then, I was writing about a situation I still believe we can avoid. I never really thought I might end up like my protagonist—broke, damp, and angry in what used to be Oregon. That was the whole point.

Writing a book is inherently a hopeful act.

In March 2020, the world got smaller overnight. Working from home combined with almost never leaving my home seemed like the writer’s dream. So much time to spend with my computer! Of course, this was a fool’s notion. Akin to believing I could write two books a year simply by spending the summer in a West Elm-style log cabin upstate. This fantasy includes an endless supply of off-white, Diane Keaton-esque turtlenecks. But writing fiction takes more than time or turtlenecks. The writer needs external stimulus to rub up against. Crying because it is Wednesday again, and the President is talking about drinking bleach is not a healthy environment for creativity. 

And while the draft patiently waited for my renewed interest, I was staring out the window of my NYC apartment wondering what this all means. The surge in car buying as urban dwellers fear for public transit. This is officially “Road Trip Summer!” says major media outlets. Even little things like plastic bag bans were rolled back with breathtaking suddenness. More and more plastic is required for PPE. Temporary declines in smog and air pollution have already been reversed. Even when oil was zero dollars a barrel, banks continued to finance new exploration for harder-to-reach fossil fuels.

I still believe we can turn this ship, but I don’t know if my novel’s plot can be salvaged.

I might have to start over. I might be able to save some of those 30,000 words by stretching out the timeline. Setting a book in the more distant future means the present won’t matter as much.

“By 2184, everything has gone terribly, predictably wrong due to some poor management decisions surrounding the K2-18b terraforming project…”