Two Degrees
Two Degrees
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Alan Gratz on Two Degrees
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Students asked, then asked againThe assignment came from his audience, not from Gratz himself. After finishing ‘Ground Zero’, his 2021 novel about 9/11, he returned to school visits expecting new questions. He got the same one, repeated by kids who had been waiting.
The whole reason I wrote Ground Zero was because I had kids at school visit saying, ‘When are you going to write a book about 9/11?’ So I did that. And then once I did that, they said, ‘When are you going to write a book about climate change?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, um, I hadn’t thought about it, but sure, let’s go for it.’ [paraphrased from audio]
Once he committed to the subject, he had to settle a prior frustration: that most fiction treats climate as a mood or a symbol rather than a fact. That frustration had been building before he wrote a single page of ‘Two Degrees’.
I admit I have less and less patience now with stories that are just a metaphor for climate change. I don’t want to read a story that is metaphorical for climate change. I want to read a story that is literally about climate change. The time for just talking around climate change is gone, the need for talking directly about climate change has been with us for some time.
With subject and approach decided, he still faced a question no amount of research could answer for him: when to set the story. He considered spanning back to the Industrial Revolution and forward to a post-two-degree future before arriving at the only setting that felt necessary.
All those were good ideas, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted the story to be about right now. [paraphrased from audio]
The present, he found, was already generating more material than one book could hold: wildfires, hurricanes, polar bear encounters in Manitoba. The crisis his students were asking about was not a forecast. It was the news cycle.
How he wrote it
Two years, too much science, one tight ratioThe research phase for ‘Two Degrees’ ran roughly two years, longer than his usual preparation for historical fiction. He built his scientific literacy through a sustained practice rather than a single research trip: attending weekly Friday Zoom sessions with climate scientists at NOAA’s National Environmental Information Center in Asheville, where he lives, and working through Yale’s published resources alongside those conversations.
I did my homework beforehand, and actually I used a lot of the Yale resources for background, spoke with numerous climate scientists, attended regular Friday NOAA National Environmental Information Center weekly Zoom meetings with Asheville scientists, and listened to what they have to say, and I interviewed many of them.
Deciding where to set the stories was as consequential as the research. He started with a global scope, then pulled back, reasoning that recognizable geography could carry familiar weight and free him to spend the reader’s attention on the one element that was unfamiliar.
I focused in again on my own home, on North America. And I thought, okay, if I write about people and places that most of us, most of my readers would be familiar with, that means that I could focus more on the one thing that most of us are not familiar with in my new book, and that would be climate change. [paraphrased from audio]
Even after two years of research and a clear structural plan, the first draft went wrong in a specific way: he over-trusted the science. His editor’s instruction to be ‘subversively educational’ came with a hard constraint about what that phrase cannot mean.
In my first draft, I had chapters and chapters on the peer-reviewed science – too much science. My editor wanted it to be ‘subversively educational’ – but with a need to consider what science talk could be deleted that is killing the pace of the book for a youthful audience.
What survived that editorial pass was a ratio Gratz arrived at deliberately and describes with precision. Action was never decoration around the climate material; it was the delivery mechanism for it.
I might say ‘Two Degrees’ is 80% action and adventure, and 20% science.
That proportion tracks his broader definition of what he’d been trying to build across his last several books: what he calls, borrowing a term from filmmaker Jordan Peele, a ‘social thriller,’ a book that functions as a genuine page-turner while carrying a social argument at its center.
On what’s at stake
The yacht and the wreckagePart of Gratz’s structural goal in giving the three protagonists different economic backgrounds and geographies was to make one specific argument visible: that climate change is not distributed evenly. He wanted readers who are insulated from its worst effects to see, through the novel’s action, what that insulation actually costs other people.
Even if they’re riding out the storm in a yacht, I want them to realize there are other people who are clinging to the wreckage in the storm and already having a much worse time of it.
The urgency point he most wanted to land was not about the future. Readers who understand climate change as an approaching threat rather than a current one can still defer, still wait. The book was designed to close that exit.
I want kids to understand what climate change is. And I want them to also understand that it’s not something that’s coming down the road... it’s happening now. [paraphrased from audio]
Gratz knew that a book organized around crisis could easily tip into guilt or despair and lose middle-school readers entirely. He built the emotional architecture of the ending around a logical inversion: the same fact that produces the bad news also produces the good news.
If the bad news is that humans are causing climate change. The good news is, humans are causing climate change. That means we can stop it, right? We can change it. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
An invitation, not an indictmentGratz spent time thinking about tone before he found the one that would not push readers away. Middle schoolers respond to unfairness quickly, but they resist being accused. He structured the book’s moral address around that distinction.
Instead of saying ‘You’ve made some mistakes, you’re a bad person,’ I say ‘look at this bad situation. What do you think a good person would do to fix this bad situation.’ And then I invite the reader to be that good person.
The term he found for what he’d been building toward came not from literature but from a podcast interview with filmmaker Jordan Peele. Gratz had already written several books that operated this way before he had a name for the method.
I heard a really great podcast interview with Jordan Peele, who referred to Get Out as a ‘social thriller.’ I heard that, and a bell went off in my head. I realized that’s what I’d been trying to do with my last few books. I’d been trying to write books that are great reads and also mean something, but I didn’t have a great way of referring to it. I love the term social thriller.
The thriller mechanics of ‘Two Degrees’ are not separate from its climate argument; they are the argument’s vehicle. Gratz has articulated this ordering of priorities across multiple interviews: grip comes first, because a reader who puts the book down learns nothing.
The first thing I do with this story is, with all three of these stories, is to write something that’s a page-turner that keeps kids on the edge of their seats... But at the heart of it, though, is a social element, a social justice element. And that’s the climate angle. That’s the thing I hope to leave the kids with thinking about once they’re done. [paraphrased from audio]