We present seven strategies adapting dramatic-writing craft for cases where both data and character actions motivate the story, and two practice cases of climate data comics co-created by a cross-disciplinary group with climate scientists. From these cases, we contribute two things: 1) the framing of diegetic data stories, in which empirically grounded data, visualizations, and scientific arguments are told from within a storyworld; 2) a two-axis design vocabulary: structural strategies (plot, conflict, character) and explanation strategies (explaining a scientific concept within contextualized events) with seven named strategies that map climate-data characteristics, counter-intuitive or methodologically distributed, onto diegetic narrative form. On the structural axis, we suggest Misconception-as-Conflict (Misconception or misreading is voiced by a character and resolved on stage by an explainer character), and Detection-as-Plot together with Instrument-as-Character (the data investigation is the engine of the plot and each measurement instrument is personified as a character). On the explanation axis, we name Real-Event Grounding, In-world Experiment as Demonstration, In-world Visualization Production, and Felt-Phenomenon Anchor. We offer them as transferable design strategies for climate data communicators.
