Wind turbine service technician is one of the more abundant energy transitions jobs. You’ll need to be capable of dealing with heights, you will need to be physically fit, but otherwise it is a job well within the range of most of our workforce. The future is bright in this field where the career path in the coal industry is limited.
How I work as a climate change comedy writer has to do with coming up with stories that arouse optimism, that give us an opportunity to think about our climate emergency, but to think through our predicament with humor. A lot of our climate emergency news is many things but far too often funny is that last thing that comes to mind.
Developing a plot and plan for this new screenplay is in its infancy. I still haven’t figured out how to place my wind turbine service technician into this next plot and how to drive this character from beginning to the climatic end.
I’ll need a location. I’ll need an obstacle. I’ll want the technician to struggle. Without the character dealing with obstacles there is no drama, no theater, it becomes a documentary instead.
I surfed over to YouTube, and I’ve watched a few hours as service technicians do their job. Fear of falling feels like a cheap shot. A technician fighting among friends working at the local coal fired power station has potential. Thinking comedy, we can use all kinds of devices to accentuate his situation. Maybe it is girlfriend who only dates men working in the coal fired power station. Maybe it is the mother that doesn’t believe her son has a future in wind turbine service employment. Maybe he drives a gas-powered beater of a car that smokes.
Best to keep the obstacles visual. If our protagonist is mostly to shift in this character arc driven plot to some different interior shaped insight that might not be sufficiently cinematic. Perhaps a bolt of lightning strikes while he up in the turbine and he becomes an entirely different person. I like that idea!
In a novel I wrote I used an explosion at a hot spring when the well drilling rig injures my central character. With no recollection of his former wife or marriage he is released from the medical clinic and the first woman he sees is his ex-wife who he instantly and totally falls in love with at first sight. Of course, she is unconvinced and his pursuit and finally winning her over again takes the rest of the novel to tell.
Think how circumstances can change suddenly. One day you see things through one set of eyes and the next instant everything looks different. Comedy likes sudden change.
A wind turbine service technician like my hot spring well drilling central character might be thunderstruck, might one day see his life heading one way when all of sudden the next he is on a new path.
To create a compelling climate change comedy, you want the stakes involved to be big, you want the obstacle to be overcome to be epic, Spartacus huge, gladiatorial, the struggle must be epic.
Here’s a bit of truth. A massive new wind turbine installation has been built in Wyoming. Getting the wind power to California has been a struggle. New high power transmission lines need to be built from Wyoming, Utah, Nevada to California. Building the wind turbines has been relatively easy while securing the necessary easements and right of ways to build the high-power transmission lines has been excruciating.
Raucous town halls where neighbors are pitted one against the other, fighting bitterly over how things were and how the new power lines could destroy everything has the necessary friction. How could a wind turbine service technician turn this plot and make a good story?
I like the stakes. I like the service repairman. I am attracted to the hassle of getting the transmission right of way issue sorted out. So, there is perhaps a plot here. It will take more time.
