12 Climate Screenwriting Prompts to Kickstart Your Next Script
Columnist Leigh Medeiros offers up 12 screenwriting prompts to help you discover fresh climate ideas for your next TV pilot or film script.
If a wrestling match and an escape room had a baby, it would be the 6-inch-tall pile of papers on my desk. This unruly stack is the aftermath of laboring over a climate screenplay for the better part of two years. Just how half-baked my initial story idea was only revealed itself when I was deep in the narrative wilderness without a map. Wayfinding became a long, messy endeavor as discarded pages, filled-to-the-brim legal pads, and indecipherable sticky notes grew in direct proportion to the amount of dead-end story paths I traveled.
That screenwriting relies on a sense of economy is not lost on me. The energy expended on this project was about as efficient as mining tar sands for petroleum. To save you the same meandering fate – and because the clock is ticking loudly on climate issues! – I’ve created some prompts that will help you generate story ideas. When working with them, I highly recommend freewriting with a timer set to the smallest achievable increment of time, be it 2 minutes or 20. Accomplishing your minimal goal will leave you feeling heckin’ chuffed, especially if you write beyond the bounds of the timer.
Once your freewriting is complete, extract all parts of the text that pique your interest. Shape those nuggets into loglines, plot summaries, and character studies and you’ll be traversing the narrative wilds with a sense of direction and purpose in no time.
Here are 12 climate screenwriting prompts to jumpstart ideas for your next script:
- A researcher’s long-lost relative arrives at a remote base where they’re working to prevent the last Antarctic ice shelf from collapsing. How does the family dysfunction mirror what’s happening in the environment?
- After being displaced by a disaster, a climate refugee sees visions of a spectacular, harmonious future. What do these visions look like? Do people believe them?
- After stumbling through a portal, an indigenous teen arrives on their ancestral homelands before the lands were stolen and settled by colonizers. What was the portal they passed through? What differences between past and present does the teen notice?
- A woman wakes to find she and her home have been swept out to sea during a massive tidal surge. What happens next if this is a comedy? What happens next if it’s an action film? Play around with genre and see what changes.
- The reemergence of a long extinct species holds the key to a climate crisis mystery, but will forensic biologists solve it in time? What is this species?
- An anti-car bicycle activist and the President of an auto manufacturing plant are horrified to find themselves falling in love. What was their meet cute?
- After chemical toxins lead to an outbreak of illness, an epic David and Goliath legal battle ensues. What does jury selection look like? What are the closing arguments?
- An overlooked group of people bridge the divide in a community torn about whether to rebuild after a devastating wildfire. Who are they, and what’s their plan?
- Members of a magical eco-coven cast spells on greedy fossil fuel executives. What spells do they cast, and how do the spells work?
- Breaking news causes a group of exhausted climate scientists to rejoice in relief. What’s the news, and what happened in the months leading up to it?
- The world of fast fashion gets turned upside down when a thrifty designer with a keen eye for upcycling disrupts the industry. What does the final showdown between the designer and the antagonist(s) entail?
- A former oil field worker, who’s shunned by his community for taking a job with a sustainable energy company, struggles to fit in with his new coworkers. What event shifts this dynamic for him?
After using these climate screenwriting prompts tag us on social media to let us know how it went. Don’t forget to include the hashtag #ClimateScreenwriting!
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Leigh Medeiros is the co-director of the Hollywood Climate Summit’s ‘Writing Climate: Pitchfest for Film and TV’, author of ‘The 1-MinuteWriter: 396 Microprompts to Spark Creativity and Recharge Your Writing’ (Simon & Schuster, 2019), and founder of the Linden Place Writers’ Residency in Rhode Island. Her screenplays have placed in numerous competitions, including the Nicholl, Project Greenlight, San Diego International Film Fest, and PAGE, and have also garnered two Screenwriting Merit Fellowships through the State of Rhode Island. Leigh is a member of the United Nations Entertainment and Culture for Climate Action (ECCA) working group and has consulted with Good Energy on a climate story campaign. Her motto is: Big Impact, Small Footprint. And, yeah, she hugs trees!
LeighMedeiros.com | Twitter: @Leigh_Medeiros_ | Instagram: @leigh_medeiros
