Guest Post: Jeffrey A. Carver on How I Ventured into Audiobooks and Lost My Shirt"”or Maybe Found It

As someone who works deeply in the zoo/conservation industries and spends a lot of time pretending to be a tiger at conventions around the country, you might say I’m enthusiastic about animals.

You’d be wrong, of course.

I’m zealous in my love for them. If I could be a little shield-carrying furry paladin, I would. (In fact, I play one in a homebrewed Dungeons and Dragons campaign.) I could go on and on about the why””because as an autistic person I relate to critters more, because there’s always something new to discover about “˜em, because they’re just badass””but the point is this”¦

I love writing about them. I love reading about them, especially in fictional settings. Whether they live in a Societyâ„¢ or still bolt from men with guns, they’re fascinating. Yet I’ve found that most “talking animal” tales out there are for kiddos. Y’know: Redwall, Peter Rabbit, and the like.

If you’re like me””in the furry fandom or furry-adjacent, or just someone who admires the natural world and takes inspiration from it””you may want to know how to go about writing anthropomorphic animal characters for adults.

There’s two things you gotta consider when you’re writing anthropomorphic animals for an adult tale:

1. Unless you’re specifically looking to write an allegory, you have to actively avoid making your species and characters allegorical or symbols or stand-ins for something. It’s rather patronizing at best and can get offensive at worst. (FYI, we’re not dealing with allegory in this post.)
2. At the same time, you don’t want to be self-indulgent and make all your characters, like, hyenas just because it’s cool, as much as I totally understand the compulsion. (Did you know that spotted hyenas may have critical thinking skills on par with chimpanzees?)

So, in short””don’t use your animals as overwrought symbols if you’re not trying to tell a story that way, but also, at the same time, ensure your animal characters feel authentic and purposeful in the story.

Sound confusing? Paradoxical? Yeah, I get it.

It comes down to this: use the real-life differences between animals and ourselves to explore whatever themes, aesthetics, relationships, etcetera you want in your writing.

Examples:

1. African lions (Panthera leo) have a complex social structure. Related females live together and share one to four related males; these males, most of the time, prefer to stay on the outskirts of the territory to protect it. Male cubs, and sometimes female cubs, leave the pride after a certain age. What kind of stories can you tell about family, home, and love with anthropomorphic lions?
2. Virginia opossums (Didelphis virginiana) famously “˜play dead’ as a defense mechanism. What kind of society would develop around a race or culture that involuntarily goes limp at the drop of a hat?
3. Numerous insects go through an intermediate pupa stage before emerging as an adult. In an anthropomorphized world, is this transformation celebrated? Feared? Is it spiritual or magical? How do insect civilizations work, knowing that a part of their young population is, at any time, inert inside of a cocoon etcetera?

You get the picture, I think.

Essentially? Just treat your anthropomorphic animal characters as you would any other fantasy species you’re putting together. Tell stories that require animal characters. It’ll all work out…which I’m sure is easier said than done, else I wouldn’t have to write this post at all.

And so! My tips to find inspiration for your anthropomorphic characters and portray them in a sincere, intelligent manner”¦

First, do your research on the animals you want to scribble about. Non-fiction research, naturalistic research. Go to the zoo and stare; watch documentaries twice, once with the sound on and once with the sound off. Try to avoid folklore or myth as it can lead you into allegory, although giving your animal-folk these beliefs as a part of their culture can create a multilayered narrative. Magic’s a pretty awesome use for animal-based misconceptions, too: no, it isn’t true that goldfish have a five-second memory, but maybe they’re masters at amnesia-based magic.

Second, remember, still, to have fun. I outlined a lotta DO NOT in this post, but there’s a lotta DO. Do imagine interesting cultural, magical, and spiritual reasons for why animals do that weird thing. Do tell stories in space and in kingdoms, in dystopias and in alternate dimensions. Do give your animals diverse personalities, ways of thinking, ways of being. Do breathe empathetic life into creatures that most folks don’t even think about.

And do write about animals that talk, for grown-ups like you and me. Whether your critters walk on two legs or four (or have wings), you’ve got it in you to create a fantastic, genuine story that just happens to feature wolves and tigers and boars at its center.

Before I head out, here’s a few books and other pieces of media that I feel present really thoughtful anthropomorphic animal characters:

• Watership Down by Richard Adams. Adams’ rabbits aren’t just fuzzy humans””they have their own beliefs, their own culture, their own limitations, most of which are based on how wild rabbits truly act. Adams did his research. (He got some of it wrong, but hats off to the dude. This book is enthralling and creepy.)
• Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen. Sci-fi with anthro elephants. It really doesn’t get much better than that…or much more creative!
• Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad comics. Detective noir with animal characters. The universe has a history that parallels our own””the comics deal with the post-WWII era””but each species has a culture, has a personality.
• Fudoki by Kij Johnson. Kind-of a cheat on this list, as the cat protagonist temporarily turns into a human, but it’s wonderful for its depictions of cat culture (and medieval Japanese culture, too!).
• Disney’s Zootopia. It’s a movie, yes, and it’s for kids, yes, and it leans a little into allegory, yes, but the crew behind the film put thought into what a consolidated society of mammals would look like. Prey animals find predator animals a little unnerving; bunnies can’t be cops, because they’re not bulky like elephants or polar bears; trains need different-sized compartments for everything from hamsters to giraffes. The story and the universe feels purposeful.

About the Author:
Chelsea “Little Bean Tiger” Eckert (she/her) is a graduate of UNC Greensboro’s MFA program, as well as a zoo worker, furry, and fantasy fiction fan. A nonbinary writer, she happily babbles about queerness, anime chicks, and her love of binturongs to anyone who will listen. She’s proud to be the sometimes-haggard but always-cheery Communications Director of Atlanta’s MultiverseCon. You can find her either 1) at your local furry con running animal quiz shows, 2) spamming the Multiverse Slack with memes only she finds funny, or 3) on Twitter (@chelseayrbff).

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

#sfwapro

I admit to being a sucker for the Ticky Box. Which is to say, I am perhaps excessively motivated by having Lists and Ticking Things Off Them. I like setting goals for myself, and I’m good at breaking those goals down into smaller steps, rewarding myself for them, all that sort of self-management stuff. I’m keen to write, to write more, to write better; so I use my goals to manage all those things. And as far as it goes (and for as long as it works), that’s great.

The trouble is that sometimes all those lists and goals instead get me stuck in fear: fear of not meeting the goals, fear of not improving “˜enough’, fear of not writing the book of my glorious imaginings. (Spoiler: I am never going to write “˜the book of my glorious imaginings’, because my glorious imaginings are a cloud of inchoate vibes, not a collection of real actual words, and a book is a collection of real actual words, not a cloud of inchoate vibes. The best I can do is to approximate it.)

Fear is not good for creativity.

Play, and freedom: those are good for creativity.

So I’ve been working, lately, on freeing myself (somewhat) from the tyranny of the Ticky List and the goals and all of that, and to find ways to engage in writing as play. For me, this still has to go along with a certain amount of structure ““ “˜pissing around on the interwebs for the morning’ is also bad news at least for my creativity (I know people who get inspiration that way, which is awesome; I just get my brain jammed up with everyone else’s thoughts). But it’s structure of the “˜put the internet down’ variety, not structure of the “˜achieve this, that, and the next thing’ variety.

So, here’s some of the things I’ve been trying lately to get my brain playing instead of freaking out. I can’t imagine they’ll all work for everyone, or every time, but hopefully they’ll spark further ideas to go along with them.

Alright, the first one is a bit of a cheat as it isn’t exactly “˜play’, but for me, morning pages or something along those lines (a stream of consciousness onto the page for 5 minutes or 15 minutes or 3 pages or whatever is feasible for you) does a great job of freeing up my brain before I start anything.

Multi-coloured pens! I have a lot of fountain pens with a lot of different inks (not to mention a pack of glitter pens); writing a line in each different colour is ridiculous and time-consuming; and looks REALLY PRETTY and makes me laugh. Win.

Try spending a few minutes before you pick up pen or keyboard on something creative that isn’t writing: drawing, colouring-in, knitting or crochet, whatever. Bonus points for being really bad at it. (Drawing, I can confirm, is most certainly not my strong point.) Embrace being bad at it, and lower the stakes for your creative brain.

I recently received the Story Engine deck, and I’ve been loosening up by pulling a set of cards as a prompt, then writing a paragraph story outline (taking no more than five minutes, and without stressing about how well it works) for each one. The idea isn’t to come up with Your Next Story, the idea is to let the idea-muscles have a bit of unweighted fun.

Try five minute writing challenges: challenge yourself to describe the scene outside (or the passer-by, or the coffee shop) with only concrete nouns (or abstract, which is trickier); or describe a colour without using any colour words; or describe your current situation as if you were in an epic fantasy or a hard SF story; or anything else that feels entertaining. I find that especially with that last one, it pays to remind myself that no one will ever read this, and throw myself into it as thoroughly and dramatically as possible.

Get one of your characters (or someone else’s, if you don’t have an active project or am super stuck on the active project) going on a good dramatic internal monologue. Personally I do rather love a good internal monologue, but often at the edit stage have to administer some cuts. This, however, isn’t the edit stage. This is a time to hang out in a character’s head and be really OTT and self-indulgent. A bit like morning pages, but for someone else’s consciousness.

Make a list of your favourite tropes and do five minutes of your characters (or, again, someone else’s) using each of them. This can be super sketchy / outline-y; I usually start off with bullet points, then get some dialogue popping up, then a bit of description, and sometimes it turns into a “˜real scene’ as I go. But it doesn’t matter if that happens or not; the point is to let yourself go on something purely enjoyable.

Write fanfic, of your own stuff or of someone else’s, as you prefer. (Writing fanfic of your own stuff can be surprisingly enjoyable.) Again, this is about being wildly self-indulgent. Lean hard into your favourite tropes, AU settings, vibes, anything like that. Keep it brief and sketchy; or get stuck into masses of dialogue and detailed description; do whatever feels like fun in the moment. This really is just for you.

In a similar line, you can dive into writing only the bits of your current project that really call to your id, without worrying about creating a Proper Scene or whether it needs any connective tissue. If you do need connective tissue, you can sort that out later. Maybe you won’t need it!

If you’ve got any further ideas for writing as play, share them in the comments! This whole thing is, after all, supposed to be fun. At least some of the time. Embrace the play.

BIO: Juliet Kemp (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, writer. They live in London by the river, with their partners, kid, and dog. Their most recent book, The City Revealed, the final book in the Marek Series, is out now; and their short fiction has appeared in venues including Analog, Uncanny, and Cast of Wonders. When not writing or
child-wrangling, Juliet knits, indulges their fountain pen habit, and tries to fit an ever-increasing number of plants into a microscopic back garden. They can be found at https://julietkemp.com, on Twitter as @julietk, or on Mastodon as @juliet@zirk.us

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!