The American West. Imagine it - the entirety of California, the red rocky National Parks of Utah and Arizona, Yellowstone, all these wonderful places to go get in touch with nature's stark beauty - all inaccessible, because the towns nearby needed water from Lake Mead, and the Colorado River won't have snowpack from the Rockies to keep the West wet. Imagine the suffering as LA and Phoenix and Vegas fall. Imagine wildfires burning with no water to quench them. Imagine half of this nation's ecosystems dead on arrival. That's the future if we don't do something about climate change. (I've been writing a Western sci-fi screenplay in an environment like this. It is an unromantic and unpleasant setting.)

Think of it like this. The natural world is complex and nasty, saturated with information. To survive, one compresses information into somewhat predictable patterns. To make sense of those patterns, we compare them to one another in metaphor. And when we make metaphor - and when we make metaphors work with one another - we are narrativizing information. Storytelling is just that cognitively vital to human functioning.

I've been doing a great deal of creative writing - fanfiction and otherwise - in preparation to be a fiction writer IRL. I realized awhile back that most of what I like to write is high-octane stuff, so to speak, so I switched schools and majors and am now aiming more narrowly to be a screenwriter. That doesn't mean I don't write other material, just that it's what I would like to do for a living. And it doesn't mean I want to make what I write less intelligent - I still think writing about climate change, post-capitalist justice, and other such topics is incredibly important - it just means I want to go about dealing with those topics in a different way. I brim over with unexpressed potential and working with the Creative Process helps me realize that potential.