Giving Voice to the Wilderness as a Writer
Whenever I’m considering point of view in my writing, I remember a moment of play with some young cousins at a big family dinner. They had constructed a play restaurant in the next room complete with kitchen, dining table, scribbled menus, and eldritch decor. They invited me to dine.
(Crafting Animal Characters Like an Expert.)
“What part shall I play,” I asked.
“You be the waiter,” they said, so I headed for the pretend kitchen.
“Nooooo!” Great wails of disdain from my young restaurateurs. “You are the waiter! You have to sit down and WAIT!”
I love this so much! It perfectly encapsulates the child’s experience of a restaurant. Everyone says you are going to dinner. But is dinner on the table when you get there? No. You have to wait donkey’s years for some bloke you’ve never seen in your life to bring you food not prepared by your mother. The nerve!
It’s no wonder children have tantrums in restaurants. We are asking a lot of them. Everything that I know and love about restaurants is invisible to the child. The joy and the great challenge of writing is to delve into somebody’s invisible world and invite the reader in.
I try to take this to heart when I write my animal character. I want to convey the world not as it is, but as the animal perceives it. The animal needs to respond to the events of the story with only the repertoire of behaviors available to that animal. And all the action needs to occur within the confines of the physical ecosystem and the social environment of the wolf pack or pod of orcas or band of horses.
At the foundation of all of my books is extensive research into wolves, orcas, and mustangs. I read 20-30 books for every one that I write. I visit museums, national parks, and wildlife refuges. I watch documentaries. I talk to wildlife biologists, park rangers, naturalists, tribal historians, wildlife photographers, hunters, farmers, and fishermen about what they have seen my animal subjects doing in the wild—not just the typical behaviors but the really unusual behaviors, the striking personalities, and the most memorable encounters.
From that research I pay particular attention to three things. The intricacies of the physical environment, the way an animal communicates, and the kinds of trouble that animals can realistically encounter.
Check out Rosanne Parry’s A Horse Named Sky here:
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I always travel to my story location. Luckily these books are set on public land making it possible to drive, hike, paddle, and camp where my animals live. I always hope to see wolves or wild horses or orcas in the wild, but what I really need to experience is the habitat as a wolf or mustang or orca experiences it. If I’m trying to think like a wolf, I get on my knees. This puts my head to the height of an adult wolf. What can I see at this height that I didn’t before? What can I hear? What can I smell? I was amazed to discover that just being a little bit closer to the ground made it easier to smell and hear water I couldn’t see.
Kayaking in the Salish Sea gave me great insight into the strength of currents and the power of tides. A passage that is dead calm in one moment might be nearly impossible to paddle through at high or low tide. A rogue current can take you hundreds of yards off your course in just a few minutes.
When out in the Steens Mountain Wilderness I was fascinated to watch the subtle communication between mustangs in a band. Young male horses are driven out of their family bands at age three or four, and they team up with their fellow teenage stallions to practice fighting so that one day they will be able to fight a stallion for his mares or tempt a mare to leave her band and join him.
One spring afternoon when I was watching a band of mares and their foals grazing with a smaller band of bachelor stallions nearby. The bachelors started by talking trash to each other. Then they kicked dirt. But the minute one of them reared up and punched another, the stallion, whose band was nearby, lifted up his head from grazing and made one, not especially loud snort. Well, you’d have thought he caught those boys smoking behind the gym. They dropped the fight instantly and went back to grazing. That one interaction says volumes about how band structure works among wild horses.
As I write, I’m constantly asking myself what sort of trouble my character can find. It’s not a simple question, especially for an apex predator. Nothing hunts an orca. They are not afraid of any creature in the sea. But, big and strong as they are, giving live birth comes hard to them and many calves die in the first year (mostly due to a build-up of ocean toxins in the mother’s body). They are also vulnerable to shipping noise, too. If they cannot hear their own echolocation, they cannot see to hunt. Those vulnerabilities gave me a something to structure my young orca’s story.
Wolves are vulnerable to poachers and to road strike. But I was surprised to learn that they kill each other fairly often. That too gave me fuel for my plot.
I have been cautioned by scientists not to over dramatize my animals. Not to put human emotions on them that are projections of my feelings and not native to the animal. Solid advice. I am quite afraid of heights. But when I write my mustang running up a steep mountain path, is he afraid of heights? Maybe, but probably not. He’s never fallen off a mountain and isn’t likely to. So fear of heights wouldn’t be rational there.
On the other hand, my orca character heading out into the open ocean for the first time—would she fear depths? I think it’s likely, not because I would be afraid, but because she relies on the feedback from her echolocation. If those pulses take minutes longer than usual to return or don’t bounce back at all, I think that would be an uncanny feeling. So her fear would be reasonable and not my own projection.
I also heard this from more than one animal behaviorist and it has shaped my thinking too. They’ve said, we should be careful about anthropomorphizing animals. But we should also be careful about denying them feelings and motivations we would prefer to reserve for humans alone. That is also an error of pride and does not serve our fellow creatures well.
If you are hoping to write from an animal’s point of view here are a few tips to get you started.
Think about how your animal moves and how it feels to move that way. For example, if your animal is running over a slick surface do they have grippy feet, like a wolf? Or not grippy like a mustang? Walk around on an unstable surface. Look for ways to physically inhabit your animal’s physical experience.Use all of your senses. Humans are very sight focused and most animals are not. Listen. Smell everything. Taste things if you can do it safely.Remember that most animals are neither entirely nocturnal, nor entirely diurnal. A habitat can change dramatically day to night, so investigate the habitat at night.And finally, don’t be shy about asking experts. Most people love to talk about their work, and you will learn things that no amount of reading and exploring will tell you on your own.