Image Credits: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. Book cover images from Chapeltown Books.
Some of my favourite childhood books involved animals. Think about Timmy from The Famous Five by Enid Blyton. I suspect he was the most intelligent of the lot of them.
I am an asthmatic, it was worse when I was a child and there was no question then of being able to have a dog of my own. But I could read about them and loved doing so. Ironically now I have no problems with having a dog as a companion and I still love reading. Neither do I mind animal characters as long as they are realistically portrayed.
Favourite Animal Fiction
Other favourites included:-
Black Beauty. I found out later that this one-off novel by Anna Sewell was specifically written to encourage kindness towards horses. I hope it encouraged that trait to other creatures too. And I just love the whole idea of an autobiography of a horse. Humans get to tell their stories all the time. I just love the idea of an intelligent animal getting the same opportunity!
Aslan from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Winnie the Pooh – the entire “cast” here. I do have a soft spot for Eeyore.
Confession time. I am not much of a cat fan. Sorry but there you go. I do love Puss in Boots though as portrayed in the original story and in the Shrek films. I just love the idea of the cat being much more intelligent than his human “master”. That has always amused me and still does.
Cat owners out there, I’m sure, will think nothing of it. They know who the master is – it isn’t them! (There’s a good joke which regularly appears on Facebook saying that dogs have owners, cats have staff. I swear there is a lot of truth in that!).
Can the same be said for dogs? Hmm… jury’s out on that one. It does depend on the dog!
Moving on into adulthood, The Hound of the Baskervilles was a riveting read (and dogs come into the Conan Doyle canon again thanks to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time reference. Holmes was right on that. It was curious the dog…. No spoilers here – but do see the link for more on this).
Writing from an Animal Viewpoint
I’ve sometimes written from the viewpoint of an animal. My Time for Some Peace, which I used as the book trailer for Tripping the Flash Fantastic, is written from the viewpoint of a mother dragon.
This story was great fun to do but works best as a very short piece. Why? One of the problems with writing from an animal viewpoint is working out what would be realistic (even for a fantasy creature such as a dragon). So the best way to approach this is to look at natural animal behaviour in our world and start from there. Here, my mother dragon character defended her young in a way anybody would understand and which matches what we know of animal behaviour here.
Most of my characters are human/humanoid and the advantages of writing from that viewpoint is I know something about human nature and behaviour, I know something about how we think and I can extend that out for humanoid creatures. For animal characters, it does have to be reasonable behaviour as we would expect from animals. So there is a huge limit immediately to what I can do for an animal character.
Limits are useful. They encourage you to think creatively but this is a major limit, for me anyway. So my animal stories will always be kept short though not necessarily sweet.
Animals can be a major feature in horror – think Jaws. I am so glad I only swim in a swimming pool. Even hearing the music for that film makes me shudder though John Williams did a fantastic job here. I heard an interview with him once where he said he was writing the score from the shark’s point of view.
You really can hear it in that music. I’ve not seen the film in its entirety – nor do I intend to! Listening to the score every now and again is as far as I go. And if you can hear the opening notes to this in your head, as I can while typing this, you will sense just how well Williams did here!
The length of the story helps here too. I’m asking a reader to suspend their disbelief when reading my words. For an animal story, I am more likely to achieve that over a short distance.
Watching the wildlife programmes is excellent research for fiction writing if you’re planning to bring animals into your stories. (It’s also a wonderful thing to do in and of itself of course).
Animals should be integral to your story and not an add-on
I am also wary using animals in fiction for another reason. They do have to have a good reason to be there, same as with any other character. It won’t work if the animal character is just added in. They have to play an important role. You shouldn’t be able to imagine the story without them. And this is why the classic fairytales work so well with their animal creations. All of them play a vital part. After all, where would Cinders have got her coach from without animals contributing to it?!
Animals crop up in other ways. We can refer to characters (or indeed each other) as rats, being as sly as a fox etc. We know that it is the key characteristics of the rat or the fox we are referring to here. It acts as a kind of shorthand though, by far, the best way of depicting characters like this is to show them being rat-like or fox-like in their behaviour. Readers will pick up on this without the writer having to spell it all out.
Animals can also reflect on us and our behaviour in works of fiction. Animal Farm by George Orwell, whom I’ve always admired for annoying the far left and the far right (the worst extremes), is probably the best known example here.
Conclusion
So think about why you might want to bring an animal into your story at all. I won’t fictionalise my pets. (I won’t fictionalise any other member of my family either, which I am sure will come as a relief to them!). I am happy to write stories, occasionally, from the viewpoint of other creatures, including dragons, but I want those characters to resonate with my readers. My readers still need to see why those animals are in the plot at all and why they are the way they are portrayed.
Mostly when I write animal stories, I want my readers to have some sympathy for those characters even if they then go on to dislike their actions. Understanding where a character of any kind is coming from is key to readers suspending their disbelief so they happily engage with the fiction you’re presenting to them.
Related Posts:-
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Read blog posts by Allison Symes published on Chandler’s Ford Today.
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War Horse deserves a mention. A book where the film by Spielberg improves on Morpurgo’s writing. Perhaps The Jungle Book of Kipling is too anthropomorphic to be included.
I am writing a piece from the point of view of the coronavirus – they hover between living things and inanimate objects.
Many thanks, Mike. And yes War Horse definitely deserves a mention. Mind you, I think the story has to be pretty good for a film to bring more out of it. I liked The Jungle Book as “done” by Disney. I only have to hear the title to start humming “The Bare Necessities”!
I wonder if you’re presenting the coronavirus as a villain? I can’t think of many people with a good word to say for it! My publisher did invite contributions to two anthologies dealing with Covid and its aftermath but I couldn’t bring myself to write for those. I wanted to escape all of that.
Mind you, fiction can take you away from problems or help you find ways to cope with them. It depends on how realistic you want your fiction to be. And animals have a role to play in both.
Perhaps one of the great animal stories is Moby Dick.
As for Jaws, I once gave a musical performance to the film music with one of my dogs. We had 19 seconds of music before it bursts into the sound of the shark attack. My dog circled for 18 seconds and leapt up to bite on the 19th second. I don’t know if the photo will reproduce here.
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Many thanks, David, and I absolutely love that picture. I can’t say I blame your dog. In a way it is a tribute to the skills of John Williams the dog thought it was real!
You are right about Moby Dick. I’ve never read it but what I do know (and from what I’ve heard about it), all the sympathy has rightly gone to the whale. Has it contributed to the general loathing of whale hunting? I hope so. I suspect Herman Melville may have wanted that, just as Anna Sewell wanted Black Beauty to encourage the better treatment of horses.