Animals in Fiction
Animal characters add a fun and critical storytelling element to a story.
Anyone who knows me understands how much I love animals. Few things in life bring me greater joy than spending time with pets or watching wildlife from a distance.
Perhaps that’s one reason why I’ve been drawn to include animals as characters in many of my stories. Animals open windows into the soul of a person. You can connect with a character on a deeper level through observing their interactions with animals.
My First Animal Stories
Whenever I’m asked when I decided I wanted to be a writer, my mind always goes back to when I wrote my first stories at 12 years old. I like to recount how I started typing up those stories on my parents’ old manual typewriter, got bit by the writing bug, and the rest was history.
My love of animals influenced the creation of my early stories. I wrote nine stories in total. A litter of mischievous talking kittens were the main characters in the stories. Each kitten or cat in the story was based on family pets we had at the time. I gave them the same names and modeled their fictional personalities after the traits I observed in each real-life cat. They were, in essence, little furry muses for channeling my creative energy.
I look back on those stories with fondness. Those cats all died within five years of when I first started writing those stories. The stories are a memorial for pets that my siblings and I loved. My goal is to eventually publish them as a children’s book, once I can partner with the right illustrator.
Alien Animals
One thing readers of my science fiction novels will notice right away is the inclusion of alien animal species. My stories are filled with alien animals that populate other planets. It’s so much fun bringing them to life and I feel like their presence makes the alien worlds feel more realistic and humanoid alien characters in my stories more relatable to a human audience.
In Under a Fallen Sun, Melody recalls moments on Rubrum where she spent time with Oarc, her pet treema, watching him play in a ravine near her home. Her experience with owning a treema, and love for that animal, influences Melody’s decision to turn against the other Rubrum aliens after witnessing them perform genetic experiments on a small girl and her cat.
Similarly, alien animals play an important part in fleshing out character personalities in the Alien People Chronicles. Calandra owns Bella, a pet cala, who offers comfort to her in Dark Metamorphosis during her frustrating search for Xttra following his abduction by Confederation agents. In Alien People, Atch details a fight between Xttra and a Thetian pirate that started over maniogo racing. Xttra objects to racing maniogos because he owned a couple as pets when he was a child, and he understands how frightening those races are to the little creatures.
Characters gain greater emotional depth in a story when they interact with animals in a positive and/or negative way.
The Role of Animals
Animals are a fixture in books, movies, and TV shows. Why is it this way? The biggest reason is that animals reveal things about human nature that don’t show up as visibly any other way.
Animals will always play an important part in my stories. They enrich the worlds I create between the lines and between the pages. Animal characters are a barometer measuring the souls of human and alien characters alike.
Who are your favorite fictional animals? Feel free to share with me.
John, I love your metaphor of animals as "barometers" for their human companions at the end of the essay. I quite agree, though with amendment. Humans -- or, for you, humanoids -- are the main characters in our stories, so we tend to think of barometers of one kind or another as storytelling tools (like the objective correlative). However, when I tell a story with an animal character, I try to bear in mind that animals are living beings in their own right with their own distinct personalities. I can use it to gloss what humans are thinking, feeling, or doing, but not only to gloss. The animal has a mind of its own, agency, and it can venture off-script, defying the humans' expectations of it. I think this is an important rule for writing realistically with animal characters.
So far, my novel Quibble has featured a horse, a silver gyrfalcon, and a wolf. Later, a raven will make a cameo appearance. In my favorite "animal" chapter, the wolf Clarity plays the role of peacemaker between two sparring humans: https://singulardream.substack.com/p/quibble-chapter-45
Yes! Great piece on animals in writing.