The Importance of Storytelling

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For me, it's about character, narrative structure, dramatic tension. One of my ways of getting unstuck is to write my story like a fairy tale. Because I think that that is how humans have communicated from the very beginning. It's not necessarily right for every writer and there's lots of other ways of doing it.

Jeff Goodell is a climate change writer for Rolling Stone and the author of seven books. His new book is The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

“I would not have said this even five years ago, but I have really come to see this now as a crime story. This is a kind of looting of the atmosphere of the earth, siphoning off resources and grossly profiting off of that at the expense of many other people—billions of people—on this planet. And I understand that’s a big thing to say, but I think it’s just pretty obviously true. … I don’t mean that personally that each one of them personally is a criminal. We are all complicit in this.”

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