Across the generations: the ability to make sense of the future

In her novels, Audrey Schulman elaborates on the relationship between man and nature. A Canadian writer born in 1963, Schulman is an activist for climate change and her stories focus on the importance of humans continuing to feel they're a part of the natural world –rather than distinct from it. “That simple assumption is the problem.It allows us to harm the ecosystem because we wrongly think that the damage we do to nature is not being done to us.” According to Schulman, now is the time for a new,more constructive relationship. This theme enriches her novels, including her most recent:The Dolphin House.

Think of the last time someone argued with you about climate change or the extinction of a particular species. They probably used a lot of statistics and big words. They probably lecture you. But no one is ever changed by that. Writers are storytellers.We can help bypass the intellectual defences of humans and speak directly to the heart through emotion and imagery,helping to shift the internal emotional imagery that informs people's decisions. You can't do that through lecturing, but you can [achieve it by] creating a vivid world and letting your audience choose it. The reader must be a willing participant and be emotionally moved. That's how change comes about.

Empathy is critically needed in the world. My goal is to take the reader somewhere they haven't been, to take risks and feel fear and love, to mentally leave their own constrained life and feel greater for it, to step into another's shoes and walk around [in them] for days or even years.

Earlier writers used more words. They had more time to build a connection with their reader. Now a book needs to pull people in fast. The best contemporary writers have a concision of language that can leave you breathless. There's a grace and pow-er to their language and an emotional pull to a plot, which can be incredibly strong.

Of course. Female characters today are not passive objects to be rescued. They're not as one-dimensional. They're not as likely tobe plot points disguised as characters: the perfect Disney mom who dies in the first scene; the beautiful wife who sleeps around; the alluring love-interest who gets kidnapped... Now, they're more likely to be complex people with resulting weaknesses and strengths.

The big change is that it seems a much larger percentage of young people care about the damage that humans are doing.And they're taking a variety of approaches to activism. However, I wish they'd concentrate on simply stating again and again, indifferent dramatic and visual ways, that the people in power are stealing their future and their children's future. That statement has the power to break hearts – and possibly even to make those in power take action.

I believe all the time we spend on our computers is time taken from being with other people and living life. I'm envious of the time that previous generations had when computers were not an essential part of the basic mechanics of life, work andsocialising.

As humans, we seem intent on causing environmental collapse.But from that collapse, there will be the kind of deep commu-nity that comes from disaster, the kind of love that comes from the vivid understanding of threat. Every bite of food will bring such gratitude. However, I would never take that experience of connection and love from the next generation. They deserve to have something as we will have taken so much else from them.

Lillian Fishman is an American writer born in 1994. Her debut novel, Acts of Service, explores the lives – in particular, the lovelives – of those approaching their thirties. Her writing offers generational reflections on gender and explores how love is the channel through which powerful relationships unfold and how customs have changed enormously in recent years. Fishman starts her writing process with the question “What Do I want to analyse?” and says that with most of her work she doesn't know where her writing will take her.

That's such a good question. This is what I spend all my time working on, so it's very hard to simplify. I don't think there's a new concept, we just have a new language for love. On the one hand, it's the same as it's always been for all of us, but I think we've come to expect too much from it. But I think the origin and impulse of that expectation was a very noble one, right? Ithink my generation was brought up to expect a different degree of freedom and self-fulfilment, perhaps, and that comes from a loving place – socially and within our families. But it's sort of an impossible dream, I guess, like the dream of less compromise in love.

I think maybe retrospectively, say in 30 years' time, we'll see a common thread between the writers from my generation who have lasted – those who are most loved and made the greatest impact. But I think right now, living in the present with the richness of contemporary literature, there are many different languages and themes, and a lot of writers [focusing on] each of them – and I think there are many different approaches. I don't think we're all doing the same thing at all.

What's most important to me is for the reader to feel like an ideological or a moral problem is being unravelled in real time in the novel; as if it's not been thought about [in advance] and been written like an obvious statement – and certainly not like a side-effect of the narrative. I tend to start with the problem and build a narrative that will carry it along and unravel it. I think that's quite an unusual way of going about things and it means I often don't know what character or story I'm writing about for a long time. But I think that's the most important thing to me – to feel there's an ongo-ing analysis throughout the story.

Yes, definitely. Erica Jong's novel Fear of Flying [1973] is aboutsexual experimentation and I love the writing of Anaïs Nin. Shewrote so much more about taboo [topics] and being exploratory than what we're writing now. I definitely don't think it's a newtheme.InActs of Service, even though I'm trying to engage with today's cultural morals and the women in the book have to grapple both with what their sense of freedom is and their continuing sense of expectation, all the exploration still happens in private. And This is true of all of these books throughout the decades, right? A hundred years ago you could explore this type of relationship in private just as much as you can now. With Acts of Service, even though theoretically we live in a less taboo society when it comes to sex, it's still just as private for her, like she feels she can't tell people about it and that there's something shameful in it. So I Don't think that's any different [today].

This is a poor answer, but the word that keeps coming to my mind is “transfixing”. I'm gripped by it. It's a neutral word, I guess, because you can have all kinds of reactions to it. 

It's complicated, but I have a sense that in previous genera-tions there were more opportunities for most people to feel a greater sense of belonging and to be more ensconced in their background and their communities. And this is complicated because I think everyone pushes against that, but at the sametime we envy it and wish we had access to it. I think this tension between an inherited life and the life you create for yourself is the richest tension we have. We all have it,  but I do wish I had a greater sense of that.

I don't know because all the answers seem very clichéd. In a way,we admire the younger generations for their ease with radical-ism. What seems radical to us is easy for them.