Have you ever written a book where some of your main characters are animals?

Your spider woman sounds creepy and fascinating! I drew one once.

Anyway to the OP - I dunno, personally I wouldn't do it. It's too damn hard lol. What's the point of making the characters animals if they're just gonna act totally human? And if they were to act like animals, but who simply spoke and had higher intelligence, it would be hard to keep it serious for long I think. Like a dog character who might be discussing something serious frequently distracted by squirrels. Or a cat who can't finish her conversation with the duck without trying to jump on him lol and the duck quacking, "You're doing it again! Stop looking at me like that!"

I have the opposite problem. I have humans acting like animals. I've had so much trouble keeping it serious that, in the end, they just ended up acting like humans. I'm never doing this again.

 

After studying animals, having close emotional ties to some of them and seeing what people do and say, to me animals are sentient. To think we are the only sentient species on this planet demonstrates our lack of understanding. In my story these animals love the woman, and she's having difficulty. They have decided to help her.

 

Writing something at the moment with a Raven in it. Havcn't decided if the Raven will have it's own voice yet. I'm dabbling in Fantasy, which is not my genre. I'm not sure if I give the Raven a voice, do I need to explain how that came to be? I dunno. Good luck with your novel, sounds very challenging!

 

I will just treat them like any other characters - except they will have a different point of view about some things. I look forward to exploring that. I'm just about done with my 12th book. I want to do something different. I like the challenge of it. I've had animals who became part of my soul. My cat just died at age nineteen. I got to know her pretty well. Her sister died at age 16. So I knew her well too.

 

What's up, duck?

 

Sometimes I think we limit ourselves when we try to stay within our "genre". I think we write because we have a need to create something. To me it doesn't matter the genre. I'd say go with it and see what happens. I never know where my story is going to take me.

 

I think there a number of decent pieces of literature where the narrator or main character takes on the form of an animal. I'll list a few below.

1). Watership Down by Richard Adams, which Jannert mentioned before.
2). You're and Animal, Viskovitz! by Alessandro Boffa which is an especially interesting one as the narrator changes animals per chapter and makes commentaries on society.
3). Maus by Art Spiegelman which makes excellent analogies by converting races into different animals.
4). The Metamophosis by Franz Kafka is also a great example, yet very odd. More on the philosophical side than anything.
5). War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. Not the highest on my list, but the perspective is from a horse used in war and it is pretty powerful

There are many other examples, but my best suggestion is that if you want to write from the perspective of an animal, read it first.

 

Thank you. I read Watership Down, but not the others. I don't want to copy anyone's style, but I could give them a look.

 

Very valid point. I guess I try to limit myself because the alternative is doing research and that seems like hard work I'm very lazy. The first time I featured magic in a story I quickly discovered that I was scratching at the surface of something that went very deep. I was going to have spell casting, but then thought there'd need to be some world building and "rules" around magic etc.... not my cup of tea. So I scaled it down to just one simple potion.

Sorry, what was the question?

oh yeah..in terms of helpful references I'm thinking The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London. If I remember rightly they had the animal in "first person" ?

 

No it was not a question. I loved Call of the Wild and White Fang when I was a kid. I can't remember if they were first person or not. It's been a long time. I rarely do research for my books. I did some when I wrote a story which featured characters from a variety of religious beliefs. Mostly it's off the cuff. I do know that some of the Native American people I think from the north believed that a raven created the world. Here's a link. http://native-languages.org/legends-raven.htm

 

Don't forget about "The Dog that saved Christmas"! And similar titles. The animals can't directly communicate with people if I remember correctly but they find ways to help them nonetheless and the audience gets to hear their thoughts.

 

Thanks. One of the reasons I'm interested in doing now is because the entire human race is going over the cliff and taking all other life with it.

 

Not really for "Call of the Wild," though the third-person perspective goes to the dog at the end for a few lines. But I can't believe I forgot about White Fang. I really do love Jack London's work. The naturalist genre was excellent and there certainly is a reason he was the best-selling author in America for so long.

@Astrea You going to cater to the animal readers? Kidding, but honestly animal analogies for groups of people or humanity as a whole have been utilized well for some time. You could easily write this perspective with a little research. I wrote from the perspective of fire at one point and it's one of my favorite little stories that I wrote. Odd perspectives can be a good time.

 

I have done it although the work is not published yet. It is part of a much bigger theme which is complex and therefore demanding to write. Maybe your angle could be similar or at least the start point - animals have a say in the future - in fact maybe they always have. From that start point, you could choose your end point. For instance horror - mystery etc. Good luck!

 

Sentient doesn't mean human. You don't seem to understand my point. If your animals behave as humans do, then you're not writing animals. You're writing humans in the body of an animal and pretending they're animals. Animals show love differently, they express fear, anger and the whole range of emotions differently. They'll have different body language. They'll do different things to relax. Just as bunnies do flips for fun and rats bulge and vibrate their eyes to show relaxation and cats purr and knead to show pleasure. A human will not knead to show pleasure, unless you're talking about kneading bread because this character loves baking lol. No typical human I know of would start bulging their eyes to relax. What might distract a dog is not going to distract a human. A human will not start scratching things because their nails are long, like a cat. A human would not get spooked by a flash of light to the side as a horse might. A human isn't going to be riveted because a squirrel scurried across the park, except to go "Aw, how cute!" perhaps. We will not normally, naturally think "Let's hunt it!" Nor would we sit in front of the door waiting for our spouse or parent to arrive as a dog might. We would probably not wag our bums in welcoming our loved ones home, as a dog might wag its tail.

So the question is: Do you wanna write about actual characters who are animals? Or do you simply want to write humans in the body of an animal?

There's a reason why animals are typically humanised in media. It's because if you were really writing from the perspective of an animal, it's going to sound absurd very, very fast, and would be very hard to write well. Anything is possible and why not give it a go, but it's not a challenge I'd personally take. Not because I think animals aren't sentient, but because I realise they're not human. A cat may bring you a rat as a sign of love - if you went home with a dead rat for your girlfriend or your mother, she would probably not be pleased lol.