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NaNoWriMo and Isaac Asimov

Every year, during November, thousands of budding authors take part in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). They’re using their spare time during these thirty days to write a novel.

NaNoWriMo Overview

That may sound impossible, but over 400,000 people will participate this year. Perhaps 20% of them will meet the requirements, to write 50,000 words in 30 days. When they’re done, they’ll feel immense relief in December and will relax after the strain of writing so much.

Of the “winners” (who don’t really win anything), many will edit their manuscript and some will see their work published. A handful might make some money from sales.

Purpose

If you scoff at the low success rate, you’re missing the point. NaNoWriMo aims to get you accustomed to writing fast, to spilling the words out. You can always go back and edit 50,000 words to improve the prose, maybe molding the manuscript into a suitable shape for publication. At least you have a first draft to work from, and that’s further than most wannabe novelists get.

Some Math

Simple division tells me a NaNoWriMo participant must scribble, on average, 1,667 words every day during November to accomplish the goal. That’s almost 1,700 words. Every day. Why does that wordcount number ring a bell?

Isaac Asimov

The brilliant and prolific science fiction author Isaac Asimov once said, “Over a space of 40 years, I published an average of 1,000 words a day. Over the space of the second 20 years, I published an average of 1,700 words a day.”

There’s that 1,700-word number again. Think about that. Long before NaNoWriMo even started in 1999, Dr. Asimov wrote the equivalent of a NaNoWriMo every month. For twenty years. That’s 240 NaNoWriMos back-to-back.

More amazing, he didn’t just write that much. Every word he wrote during those twenty years got published.

Dr. A’s Secrets

In achieving that, several factors worked in his favor, advantages you and I may lack.

He was a genius, and a member of MENSA. He earned a PhD in Chemistry from Columbia, and taught biochemistry. A polymath, he’s one of few authors who published high-quality, authoritative books in nearly every major category of the Dewey Decimal System.
He timed things well. Asimov enjoyed writing science fiction just when the reading public demanded more of it than authors could supply.
He wrote in a plain, unadorned style, typed ninety words a minute, and didn’t over-edit. Those traits allowed him to churn out words faster than most.
He benefited from a favorable snowball effect. (1) The more he wrote, (2) the better he got, (3) the more of his books got purchased by readers, (4) the more famous he got, (5) the more enthused he got about writing…back to (1) and around again. A positive-feedback loop.

Lessons for Us

Perhaps the rest of us shouldn’t compare ourselves to Dr. Asimov. On the spectrum from low-output to high-output, he breaks the scale at the high end, one of the most prolific writers of all time.

Still, if he were alive today, he might well ask, “What’s so special about November?” Why not do NaNoWriMo every month? Perhaps that positive feedback loop that worked for him would work for you, too, at least to some extent.

That may serve as the real lesson of both NaNoWriMo and Asimov’s success. Writing at breakneck speed means you write more, and in time, through practice, you may write better.

If you aspire to become a writer, try writing 1,700 words today. Should you fall short of that, at least try writing more tomorrow, and more the next day. When you achieve a daily wordcount of 1,700, keep going at that rate.

Try NaNoWriMo every month. Maybe you won’t get 500 books published, as Isaac Asimov did, but perhaps some measure of literary success lies in the future for you and—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 17, 2024Poseidon's ScribePermalink Leave a comment

Make Your Characters Distinctive

You populate your stories with a full cast of characters and expect readers to keep them all straight. Asking a lot, aren’t you? Today, I’ll explore ways to make that task easier for your audience, those kind folks who shell out money for your books.

Source Unknown

Though I try to credit my sources, I’ve misplaced the inspiration of this information. I subscribe to newsletters from DreamForge Magazine and one item from over three years ago prompted me to take notes. Now I can’t find the original newsletter. In any case, I’ve put the advice in my own words and added items to the list.

Pair Description with Action

You need to describe your characters, of course, and physical appearance plays to the primary sense—sight. You’d do well to appeal to the senses of sound and smell, too. But a paragraph weighed down with description slows the story’s pace. Consider sprinkling in the description verbiage with action. Examples:

“No!” Her long, brown hair swished as she turned and stomped away. “I won’t do it.”
Jake used his long arm-span to advantage, sweeping his knife to keep his adversary’s slashes out of range.

Be Specific

Edit out generalities and replace them with concrete terms. Appropriate similes and metaphors can serve you well here.

Instead of “He looked, in a word, handsome,” use “His physique would prompt Michelangelo to destroy David out of shame.”
Instead of “She was strong in every sense of the word,” use “She could have bench-pressed a life-size marble statue, then won a stare-down contest with it.”

Use Revealing Traits

Often a character’s physical appearance or mannerisms can indicate a characteristic emotion or internal conflict. This falls in line with the “show, don’t tell” adage. The Emotion Thesaurus by Angel Ackerman and Becca Puglisi can aid you here.

Instead of “He seemed perpetually afraid,” use “He huddled in corners, sweating, trembling, and avoiding eye contact.”
Instead of “She looked okay, but I could tell something troubled her,” use “She paced back and forth, frowning, and running a hand through her hair.”

Provide Distinctive, Identifying Traits

Consider giving each significant character something that sets the character apart. It could be an unusual hairstyle, an item of clothing, a scar or other imperfection, an atypical gait, a characteristic gesture, an odd verbal expression, or anything in a near-infinite list. I won’t provide examples here, but you get the point. Every now and then, when that character appears in the story, mention that specific trait to jog your reader’s memory of that character.

Add a Weakness

Give your character a flaw, a weakness, a vulnerability. As a minimum, your protagonist needs one, if not all your major characters. Later in the story, let your antagonist test the protagonist’s weakness and exploit it in some way.

Don’t Forget Motivation

Give each major character a motivation. You may select from a large number of these, including love, revenge, greed, survival, etc. For your protagonist, consider showing why the character feels that motivation. Perhaps it springs from a formative childhood experience. That motivation should tie in to the protagonist’s goal. Don’t confuse goal with motivation. Goal is what you want. Motivation is why you want it. Together, the motivation and goal of the main character drive the plot along.

Assign the Right Name

Spend some time thinking of the right name for your characters. I’ve blogged about this before. An unusual name can set a character apart and help a reader remember the person. A common name can identify the character as an “everyman.” Two characters with similar names, especially with the same first letter, can cause readers to mix them up. Names that resemble a word can help a reader associate a character with that word, whether the word is appropriate for that character or diametrically inappropriate. You can also use the syllabic rhythm of the name (first-last or first-middle-last) to suggest something about the character.

If you apply the above techniques, you might create characters almost as distinctive as—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 10, 2024Poseidon's ScribePermalink Leave a comment

Story Versus Craft, in a Cow Pasture

We’ll consider story and craft first, then relate them to a cow pasture.

Impetus

I read Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses, hoping to learn to become a better writer. The book’s second half helped with that. The first half, which I read first, differed. It enumerated a list of grievances with a writers’ workshop that the author attended.

To understand the gist of his complaint, let’s start with definitions.

Story

For our purposes, let us define a ‘story’ in broad enough terms to encompass all human cultures across all human history. We could say a story is a text narrative featuring one or more characters in one or more settings, in the course of which, one or more events occur.

Craft

Craft, we’ll say, is the way a writer writes a story. It includes the techniques the writer employs, the story aspects the writer emphasizes, the words the writer chooses, etc.

The Universal and the Particular

We’ve defined ‘story’ in a universal manner so it includes campfire tales told by prehistoric tribes, Gilgamesh, The Story of Tambuka, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and King Lear. ‘Craft,’ by contrast, varies across cultures and time periods. A particular technique, word cadence, or plot structure might resonate in one country but not another, one century and not another.

Controversy

A difficulty might arise when a writers’ workshop or Master of Fine Arts (MFA) course teaches craft suited to its culture, but a student accustomed to another culture’s craft attends.

That occurred when Matthew Salesses, a Korean-American, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. To him, the workshop seemed too prescriptive, too intolerant of other approaches.

My Take

Never having attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I can neither validate nor dismiss Salesses’ experience. That workshop, founded in 1936, produced graduates who went on to earn Pulitzer Prizes, Booker Prizes, National Humanities Medals, and MacArthur Fellowships. Five graduates went on to become U.S. Poets Laureate.

Matthew Salesses has written six books and dozens of essays, been named one of thirty-two Essential Asian American Writers, and received multiple awards and fellowships for his writing. He runs his own graduate-level workshops in creative writing.

Perhaps the Iowa Writers’ Workshop had been teaching craft suited for modern-day tastes of U.S. readers. Perhaps Salesses found that approach too rigid and inflexible, based on his experience with Korean literature. If so, his dissatisfaction appears understandable, despite the success and staying power of the workshop.

As I’ve noted, though, craft changes, often based on reader whims and sudden fads. A given formula works well for a while, then readers tire of it and it becomes stale. A different kind of novel catches on, perhaps one from a foreign country, or one written in a foreign style, or a nostalgic return to a previous style from long ago. Other authors then write in that vein to capitalize on the trend, to catch the wave. In time, that style fades in its turn, soon replaced by another.

Why do these fads, these literary waves, occur? The fickle nature of readers doesn’t explain it all. I suspect some influential readers, eager to experience fresh books, seek something unusual, find it, and enjoy its newness. They see beyond craft to the underlying story. They spread the word, sparking a trend.

The Cow Pasture

Permit me a silly, Iowa-based simile. Think of story as a cow pasture, one of vast size with grass growing in every acre. Readers are the cows, gathering to devour grass/stories in a particular area. We’ll call that particular patch of grass the craft. In time, the cows consume the grass in that place, and have deposited cow-pies there, rendering that grass less desirable.

One cow moves on, finds a fresh patch with tall, tasty grass and begins munching there. Other cows notice and join the loner.

The process continues, cows moving from zone to zone. They drop fertilizer as they go, so previously grazed parts grow and become fresh again later.

Takeaway

Writers generate stories. They grow the grass, but don’t control the cows. Writers can create stories using currently successful craft. Or they can write stories outside that craft and hope a straying cow notices and draws the herd. A writer might dislike the popular and crowded area, and might fume that his favored grass zone attracts no cows. But cows go where they go.

Hey, cows! Over here! The tastiest grass is grown by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 3, 2024Poseidon's ScribePermalink Leave a comment

Select Your POV Character in 6 (or 7) Steps

You’re planning to write a story, but you don’t know whose point of view (POV) to tell it in. Author K.M. Weiland wrote a wonderful post on the subject, and I suggest you start there. I’ll wait here while you read that. The rest of my post supplements hers.

Credit to www.perchance.org for the images

List the Contenders

Weiland’s 6-step process starts with identifying the contenders. You could choose any character in your story, or even select an omniscient, god-like POV.

Winnow Down the List

Next, Weiland suggests you think about which contenders matter least to the story’s drama. For example, a servant or guard who rarely speaks and whom you’ve only included for authenticity—a ‘spear carrier’ in literary lingo—makes a less useful POV character.

Rate the Stakes

In the next step, you consider each character’s stakes. What do they lose if they don’t get what they want? You’ll get more dramatic impact from characters with the most to lose.

What Type of Narration?

Choose from among first person (I/me), second person (you), third person (she/he), and omniscient (god-like). I’ve written about these before.

Pitch Your Tense

Most writers chose past or present. In past tense, she ran, she sat, she said. In present tense, she runs, she sits, she says. More stories use past tense, but you may choose either one.

Final Auditions

After going through the above steps, you might still face a choice between more than one possible POV character. Weiland suggests you write a few paragraphs of the story in each of the remaining contenders’ POVs. They don’t know it, but they’re auditioning for the POV role. Choose the one with the most interesting voice, the one who tells your story best.

One More Consideration

The post by K.M. Weiland addresses all the above points better than I have, but I’ll add another thought. Nothing limits you to one POV for an entire story (though in flash fiction, you should restrict yourself to one).

You might choose a different POV for each chapter, or even each scene. As you do so, use the same six-step process mentioned above in selecting the appropriate character.

Also, make transitions between POV characters clear to the reader. In the first sentence of a section with a new POV character, include a thought, or a feeling, or both, from that character. That alerts the reader about the POV shift.

Of course, throughout the literary world, experts agree the very best point of view is that of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 27, 2024Poseidon's ScribePermalink Leave a comment

Ain’t Our First Rodeo

Once again, some stories of mine got published. The anthology Ain’t Our First Rodeo: Another Fort Worth Writers Anthology just came out.

They roped me into co-editing this anthology, the third for which I’ve served in an editorial capacity. With any luck, another geological epoch will pass before I edit another one.

We wrangled a lot into this volume. Altogether, seventeen authors contributed eighty-six works, including poems, essays, chapter excerpts, and short stories. They hogtied every mood, topic, style, and tone you can imagine, and then some you can’t imagine.

As a rule, I don’t put my own stories in anthologies I’m editing, but, well, it’s more of a guideline than a rule. You’ll find three of my short stories cluttering this book.

“Voyage of the Millennium Quester”

A time-traveling duo ventures back to record the most incredible astronomical sight in history. If they’re not careful, the dumber one of the pair might mess things up.

“Weathervane Wally”

A Texas farmer claims his weather-forecasting armadillo surpasses Punxsutawney Phil in prognosticating prowess. Can he prove that to a Pennsylvania TV reporter?

“Bringing the Future to You”

Doctor Edison Thornwhipple couldn’t see anything in Doctor Rachel Clairvaux’s crystal ball, but what she saw changed the next ten minutes…and the world. First published (with some text differences) in the anthology Cheer Up, Universe!

Y’all can lasso your own copy of Ain’t Our First Rodeo here and get a good roundup of stories by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 20, 2024Poseidon's ScribePermalink Leave a comment

3 Tips for Compelling, Shareable Writing

Everyone who creates an online post, tweet, or meme hopes it goes viral. That occurs when others read it, like it, and share it. Viral posts often contain three key attributes. Do these same attributes apply to fiction in general?

Author, speaker, and producer Shane Snow blogged about these attributes and gave them an easy mnemonic to remember—FIN.

Fluency

The F in FIN stands for fluency. Snow means this in the sense of smooth, flowing prose, rather than familiarity with a language. He advocates plain, easy-to-understand writing.

Go for a low number in the readability index. Don’t force readers to wade through flowery phrases to grasp your meaning. Shorter words, sentences, and paragraphs make life easier for your readers. Read your writing aloud to check for awkward phrases or other stumbling points and edit as needed.

Identity

Here, Snow refers to how well the reader identifies with the characters or topic. To engage readers, connect with universal themes and struggles.

Give readers something familiar to latch onto. Often, novels begin in a familiar setting to orient readers to an identifiable locale—home, office, neighborhood, etc. They give characters commonplace problems readers can relate to. Having grounded the reader in a familiar place, the novel can then launch into the unfamiliar.

Novelty

Speaking of the unfamiliar, Snow includes novelty as the final third of the acronym. We call them novels for a reason. Be bold and creative. Strike off in a new and different direction.

Take an old idea and give it a fresh twist. They say there’s nothing new under the sun, but ‘they’ haven’t read your book yet.

Putting FIN Together

Shane Snow focused on FIN as a technique for giving your social media posts and memes a better chance of going viral. Fiction stories can be sharable, too, in the sense that fans get a buzz going and that increases sales.

For a short story, novella, or novel, consider applying these attributes in reverse order–NIF. First, think of a new and fresh thing to write about. Then, begin your story by giving readers something to identify with. Last, as you edit, work to keep your prose clean and fluent.

Soon, you’ll FINish a wonderful, sharable tale, thanks in part to Shane Snow and—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 13, 2024Poseidon's ScribePermalink Leave a comment

Revive Your Open, Creative Mind

How often do you read a book, watch a TV show, or see a movie, and think, “How clever! I wish I could come up with ideas like that.” You can. I’ll tell you how.

Seeing the World a New Way

Creative people share a trait. Their brain neurons connect in a different manner than those of other people. When you sense the world around you, it is what it is. Creative people sense what the world could be.

Psychologists talk of ‘trait theory’ and the ‘Big Five’ personality traits. (For information, those are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.) Of those, creatives seem loaded with an excess of Openness to Experience.

In this post, Luke Smillie and Anna Antinori explain how we all form mental models of the world. The closer our mental model matches the real world, the better we can deal with things.

Creatives play with their mental models. They think about unusual connections between unlike things. They imagine different possible worlds. They see in a way most don’t.

Binocular Rivalry

As one example, psychologists showed a group of test subjects a different image to their right and left eyes. The subjects tried to make sense of what they saw as one image rivaled the other.

The test revealed the more creative test subjects ended up ‘seeing’ a combined picture, one sharing attributes of both images to a greater extent than less creative subjects did.

Inattentional Blindness

In another test, psychologists gave test subjects a task requiring focus. They showed the subjects a video of six young people passing two basketballs around. The task—count the number of times people wearing white pass the ball.

Half of the test subjects concentrated so much on the task that they missed a bizarre event occurring in plain sight during the video. Those with more ‘openness to experience’ saw the event. Creatives saw what others screened out.

The Openness of Writers

The best fiction writers see what the rest of us see, but combine unlike things. Micheal Crichton merged his children’s interest in dinosaurs, then-current genetic engineering research, and mathematical chaos theory when writing Jurassic Park.

Suzanne Collins had been flipping TV channels between a reality show and coverage of a war when she combined the ideas and wrote The Hunger Games.

The ideas lie out there waiting for all of us, but fiction writers join and twist things and ask ‘what if…?’

**Opening Your Mind**

Can you train yourself to think like that, to see the story ideas others miss? I think so. In fact, I believe we’re born with the ability, and most of us lose it over time.

Most five-year-old children teem with creative ideas. They see animals in clouds, monsters under the bed, imaginative uses for sticks and stones and acorns. For some, that ability never fades, but most grow out of it, abandoning their magic dragons.

By increasing your creativity, you’re not learning a new skill, you’re re-learning a forsaken one.

Travel, especially foreign travel, can expose you to different ways of thinking that might spark creative ideas.

I like another technique, one much cheaper than flying overseas. Psychologists call it the ‘divergent thinking task’ but I call it ‘brainstorming twenty ideas.’ Take a common object and write down twenty alternative uses for it. Your ideas need not make practical sense, but don’t stop until you reach twenty. You can do this for any problem you face, not just imagining uses for things. By churning through the absurd and crazy ideas, you might hit on a brilliant one you wouldn’t have considered otherwise.

But That’s Not All

Disclaimer—writing a book requires more than just creativity. If you’re able to bolster your imaginative ability, you’ll generate good story ideas. But you still have to buckle down and write the novel or TV/movie script. Many writers consider that the hard part. Still, if the techniques in this blogpost help you over the first hurdle, that’s a win for you and for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 5, 2024Poseidon's ScribePermalink Leave a comment

Uptime for Writers

You’re a fiction writer who wants to crank out better books faster. Maybe this blogpost will help you do that.

Intro to Uptime

I just read Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing by Laura Mae Martin. The author worked as a productivity expert at Google who helped employees do more work faster, with less stress. Could her techniques work for fiction writers?

She packed her short book with numerous techniques, and many might work for you. I’ll focus on one of those here.

Power Hours and Flow

She discussed the concept of ‘power hours,’ the few hours of highest productivity in your day. That sounded a bit like being ‘in the flow’ to me. I’ve blogged about that wonderful feeling before. Picture the flow state as focused concentration, effortless action, a lack of self-consciousness, unawareness of time, and obliviousness toward bodily needs.

When I wrote about it, I imagined doing the more creative phases of writing while in this flow state. But fiction writing includes more than creativity and that complicates the picture.

Off-Peak Hours

In addition to power hours, Martin discussed off-peak hours, during which fatigue sets in (or continues from the night) and you’re less productive. Each of your workdays contains power hours and off-peak hours, and they’re somewhat stable, occurring at the same times each day. However, these cycles vary between people, so you’ll have to experiment to discover your own power hours, if you haven’t already identified them from past experience.

Uptime, Downtime

Uptime, if I understand her concept, can include both power hours and off-peak hours. During uptime, you’re performing work, but not always at the same level of productivity.

However, for your health, you require downtime, too. Downtime includes non-work-related activities, particularly those requiring little concentration. Examples include meditating, showering, walking, mowing the lawn, gardening, etc. Unlike power hours and off-peak hours, you can schedule downtime. You’re in control.

Funny thing about downtime. People report their most creative ideas occur then. Fiction writers can use that to their advantage.

Fiction Writing Tasks

The fiction writing process contains many tasks, including generating ideas/brainstorming, outlining/researching, writing the first draft, editing later drafts, and marketing. Some require more creativity, some less.

If you had the option, you’d choose to accomplish your highest priority writing tasks during the power hours—in the flow, ideally. You’d save routine or less vital tasks for off-peak hours.

Don’t forget the advantage of downtime, which you control. Say you get stuck while writing—a plot problem, a character motivation issue, etc. Take some downtime, a few minutes off from writing. Your subconscious may work on the problem and solve it when you least expect it.

Get Real

I know—most fiction writers have day jobs. You seize as much writing time as you can, cramming it in among all the other obligations of life. Some days you barely write for half an hour. Perhaps your writing time varies from day to day. How are you supposed to make use of this uptime/downtime/power hours/off-peak hours concept?

Maybe you can’t. But perhaps just being aware of your daily productivity cycles and the creativity-laden power of downtime will help you reschedule as close to your optimum writing times as you can. Also, this knowledge may help you squeeze the most from those rare days you can devote to writing.

Uptime over. It’s now downtime for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 29, 2024Poseidon's ScribePermalink Leave a comment

Authorial Reticence—Why Writers Hold Back

You’re asking if you read that subject line correctly. Hold back? Aren’t writers supposed to explain things? Aren’t they supposed to…you know…write to be understood?

I’d never heard the term ‘authorial reticence’ until last weekend, when I listened to author Michael Scott Clifton talking about it at a conference.

He spoke on the subject of ‘magical realism’ and dropped ‘authorial reticence’ on his audience. Intrigued by his description, I decided to blog about it.

Definition

Most often associated with magical realism, authorial reticence refers to a writer refraining from explanations about a fantastical setting or event. The story proceeds as if the astounding, magical thing happened every day. This encourages the reader to accept it and keep reading.

Antonyms

If that seems confusing, it might help to understand the term by exploring its extreme opposites. Think of a story where the author used an As-You-Know, Bob or an infodump to give a detailed description. Or consider a story where the author wrote out the moral. In each case, the writer took you by the hand and told you what to think.

Authorial reticence is the opposite of that.

Example

Authorial reticence can apply to sub-genres beyond magical realism. A classic example from science fiction occurred in Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Beyond This Horizon with this three-word sentence: “The door dilated.” No further explanation or description. Heinlein expected readers to form the mental picture, accept it, and read on.

Pros

Done well, this technique fosters engagement on the part of the reader. The author says, in an implicit way, “I trust you. If you’ll go along with me, I’ll entertain you without moralizing or boring you. No spoon-feeding, though. You may have to stretch your mind beyond normal credibility limits.”

Benefits include a shorter, tighter story that highlights action and drama. Readers get a sense of being welcomed into your story’s world, as if they’ve lived there for some time. Also, readers who feel trusted might well buy your other books.

Cons

Like any good thing, you can stretch authorial reticence too far. Throwing too many bizarre or fantastic elements in at once can confuse a reader, who now will be less likely to finish the story, or buy another.

Also, if you fail to establish authorial reticence in your writing style at the story’s outset, introducing it later can prove jarring.

Reticence and Me

Given my engineering training, I suffer from a tendency to over-explain. I fear the reader might not form an accurate mental picture, or might reject my story element as too far-fetched. I’ll strive to resist this impulse. I’ll try to trust the reader’s imagination to fill in gaps.

From now on, if you’re looking for authorial reticence, you’re looking for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 22, 2024Poseidon's ScribePermalink Leave a comment

What are Animals up to in Fiction?

Animals don’t read. People do. Why, then, do authors include critters in their fiction? First off, most readers like animals. But what literary purpose do animal serve?

Diogenes from *Ripper’s Ring*, created using perchance.org

I’ve blogged before about the pets owned by authors. But authors write about animals as well, and my topic today is about how animals make stories better.

The Talking Kind

From ancient times to the present, authors have penned tales about talking animals. Though they make endearing characters, I’ll gloss over them in my post today. For the most part, talking animals merely substitute for human characters. Speech serves only to make these animal characters more relatable and places the story in the realm of fantasy.

An author may, however, write about normal, non-magical animals that have been given the power of speech. Science fiction author David Brin exemplified this in his Uplift Universe series, where humans biologically manipulated some Earth animals and designed in the ability to speak.

In any case, according to editor Mary Kole, stories with talking animals aren’t trending. She suggests including a talking animal only if your story won’t work any other way.

Purposes

Why include regular, non-talking animals in fiction? In a valuable post on the subject, editor Moriah Richard listed three reasons: tool, weapon, and companion. Richard noted these purposes overlap and do not constitute all possible uses. I’ll explore the ones Richard listed and add some of my own.

Tool

For any attribute humans possess, (except speech, higher level thought, and manual dexterity), you can name an animal that surpasses us. Access to narrow places, burrowing, seeing, flying, hearing, smelling, speed, strength, and swimming—certain animals have us beat. Often, in stories, we read of a human using a trained animal as some sort of tool. For hearing and smelling, writers often choose dogs. Easy to train and readily available, dogs are also well known to readers, so require little description. For transportation, horses seem ideally suited, though other animals can suffice.

Weapon

I suspect this use occurs less frequently in fiction than the tool use. A weapon is a kind of tool, though, so you can regard this as a subset of the previous use. For attacking other people, dogs again represent a good choice, due to their trainability, their speed, and their teeth.

A writer may use all types of other animals as weapons in a story, including bears, bees, hawks, lions, sharks, and dozens of others. However, these belong in the difficult-to-train category, and might just turn on the person who releases them.

Companion

Perhaps the most often used purpose of animals in fiction, companionship provides the author several opportunities. When a character enjoys a companionable relationship with an animal, it endears the character to the reader. It also portrays, by inference, the kind and caring nature of the character.

Examples include the film Hachi: A Dog’s Tale and the book Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, by John Grogan. A stranger example might be Life of Pi by Yann Martel, featuring a tiger as companion.

Antagonist

I’ll add this purpose to Moriah Richard’s list, though the traditional role of antagonist doesn’t fit most animals. Animals do not often oppose a human through hatred or malevolence. They act according to their natures, but humans may hate them for that, so it’s more about the human’s feelings than those of the animal. In stories with animal ‘antagonists,’ often the real antagonist is another human or a psychological struggle inside the human protagonist.

Examples include Moby-Dick by Herman Melville and Jaws by Peter Benchley.

Symbol

This blogpost at MasterClass.com explains the use of animals as symbols in literature. As metaphor, the animal represents something else, often some quality of humanity, without stating the comparison in an overt way.

The albatross in the poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Coleridge symbolizes good luck. The bird in the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe symbolizes the persistence of grief. The owl Hedwig in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling symbolizes Harry’s innocence, which he loses when the owl dies.

Conscience

An animal may also serve as a sort of unwitting conscience for a human character. The character who talks to a pet may arrive at a solution to a problem without any reaction from the pet, and nevertheless credit the animal with providing valuable assistance.