putting an animal into your story is one of the best things you can do just think of all the popularity of cat videos on social media and and news organizations you know saluting dogs who rescued humans I mean animals create waves animals attract attention people love animals so why not have an animal in your book now in this video we're not going to be talking about books where all the characters are animals like waterers ship down or animal farm and we're also not talking about books where the main character is an animal like the art
of racing in the rain or Jack London's White Fang what we're talking about is human Centric stories where an animal plays A Part we're going to talk about 10 animal writing lessons that you can learn from famous authors and pay attention until the end because the last four are the Advanced Techniques let's start with number one use animals to progress your plot if you're struggling to find a way to make certain plot elements in your book really work then you might need an animal to grease the wheels let's let's look at the Wizard of Oz
by Frank bomb and the little dog Toto Toto is absolutely essential for the entire plot of this book in the beginning he is the reason that the story starts they are going to euthanize him and so that's why Dorothy runs away Toto is also the one that makes the climax work because he's the one that escapes the castle and brings the Tin Man and scarecrow and Cowardly Lion to Dorothy and in the end Toto's also the one that makes Dorothy miss the hot air balloon which ends up leading her to discover the power of of
the red shoes without Toto the whole storyline of this book and movie don't work so I would just recommend that you look at your own story to try to figure out ways where an animal could affect the plot in some way the second thing we have to learn is use animals to characterize your humans there's this old screenwriting advice that says if you want to establish who your heroes and villains are have your Heroes save a cat and have your villains kick a puppy they give that advice because how your characters treat animals reveals so
much about who they are as a person let's look at all the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy John Grady Cole is this Rough and Tumble Cowboy but when he interacts with redbow his horse we see this tender gentle side of him come out and if that relationship with that horse didn't exist then he wouldn't be as fully rounded or as likable as a character I mean look at these two quotes like as he's riding his horse he's just he's just talking to his horse telling it about the things he thinks are true and then in
another quote he says he thinks about horses and it was always the right thing to think about which is the most Cowboy line ever I think now while we're on characterization I should also mention that you need to do characterization work on the animal in your story too they can't just be a formless vague like representative of a dog or a cat or a horse they need personality they need to seem different from other animals the third way that you can use animals in your story is to make animals provide character motivation there is some
old screenwriting advice that says never kill the dog no matter what you do don't kill the dog you can have people dying like flies and apocalyptic scenarios but like keep the dog alive you'll make people very angry if you kill the dog but sometimes anger is the actual point I think of John Wick when they killed his dog what does he do oh you know he goes on a rampage and kills like 300 different people and in many ways the death of his dog launches the entire Four movie franchise I mean can you imagine in
the John Wick storyline without his dog dying it's Central to the plot now obviously you don't need to have an animal die to provide character motivation it could be that an animal needs cataract surgery or something and a character needs to come up with money to provide that for them it could be a very you know heartwarming story but because people love animals so much it creates extremely powerful motivation for your characters the fourth tip that's going to help us write animals into our story is use animals to tug at our emotions the first book
that made me cry was a book about dogs I'm sure a lot of you have read it it's Where the Red Fern Grows billy gets two hounds Old Dan and little an and by the end of that story I mean if you haven't read it I don't want to spoil it for you but by the end of that story I was in my bedroom in the high desert of California balling my eyes out like crying as I had never cried before it's a heart heartbreaking story and um but that's what what animals can do to
you right like we love animals so much so you don't just want those animals affecting your character you also want those animals affecting your reader emotions as well here's another example from a man called UA by Frederick Bachman so UA goes to his late wife's grave and he kind of like breaks down as he's talking to her and in that moment the cat which he calls the cat annoyance because he's super grumpy comes and just lays its head on his palm home as if to comfort him and it's such a sweet moment that really makes
you feel like oh yeah this is what animals do for us they Comfort us in our darkest moments and by the way I talk a lot more about how to handle your character emotions and also the reader emotions in my writing techniques course and also in my how to write a novel course in my book Fox Academy so please check those out a fifth way that you can use animals inside your story is to create leverage for the antagonist so if you have an ant that needs to be pressuring your main character in some way
that needs to be attacking them in some way but it's too early in the book for them to attack your protagonist physically then often times having your antagonist attack a proxy of your character like a pet of theirs works really well let's look at Harry Potter's hewig uh which is a snowy owl so Dolores Umbridge is sort of the antagonist of Harry in one of the books and when she is intercepting letters she ends up intercepting the letters from Hedwig but ends up injuring the owl in the process now what this does is it really
inflames the reader emotions making them even more angry at Dolores Umbridge because what kind of monster hurts an animal especially hewig for another example of this think of a story like 101 dalmati where the main antagonist their main goal is kidnapping all these dogs and the intent is to make a coat out of them I mean that's such a horrible horrible thing to do Cruella but once again we more fully understand the depravity of the antagonist when we see what they're doing to these animals of the main character a sixth thing you can do with
animals in your story is to use animals for comic relief if there is anything that we have learned from social media it is that animals are really truly funny I could honestly list tens of millions of examples of this but just for now we're going to look at one story Dr Evil's hairless cat in Austin Powers Mr Bigglesworth so Mr Bigglesworth has lost all of his hair in the reanimation process and the way that Dr Evil interacts with Mr Bigglesworth throughout the entire movie is actually hilarious including like the crazy way that mini me reacts
to him he tries to eat Mr Bigglesworth and he has to be reproved no we don't gnaw on our kitty but if you have a chance to throw a little bit of humor in your book with a dog or a cat or a parrot or whatever animal doing something funny it's going to tickle the funny bone of the reader and when you huge brownie points in your book now for these last four points we're going to look at some more advanced techniques that you can use in your story starting with number seven animals as symbols
probably a lot of you have read to kill a marking Bird by Harper Lee and we have two animal symbols in this book one is the one in the title The Mocking Bird atus Finch tells his children it's a sin to Kill a Mocking Bird because a mocking bird does nothing wrong it just makes music for people to enjoy so the mocking bird in the story really represents a char who is innocent and therefore it's wrong to kill Tom Robinson who's falsely accused of raping this white woman because he is one of those Innocents he's
like a mocking bird on the other hand the Rabid town dog Tim Johnson which is a funny name for a dog but whatever is a symbol of racism the dog becomes rabbit and wanders around town threatening to bite people and in the end attakus actually has to shoot it and the rabbit dog really represents all the racist town people so I said this was an advanced technique and I think now you see why but I want you to think about animal in your book and what they can symbolize for the reader do they symbolize innocence
do they symbolize anger you can make an animal symbolize quite a lot for the eighth way to incorporate animals into your story let's look at animals as metaphors so a lot of what we've talked about in this video so far is animals as a minor character in your story but what if you just want an animal to play sort of a cameo role you might know Barbara Kings solver because she's written books like demon Copperhead and also The Poisonwood Bible but for this one we're going to going to draw from one of her lesser known
novels The Bean Trees in this book there is a three-year-old foster child who is being X-rayed at the doctors and the foster mom realizes that he has all these healed broken bones in his body and she doesn't want to think about all the horrors that he's endured so what she does instead is she looks out the window and she sees this tiny little bird flying around all the spikes of a cactus and into the cactus where it has a nest in there and she doesn't make this explicit but I think it's such a Wonder ful
metaphor for what this child must have endured this frail little bird of a child who even when living in a cactus right in the cactus of domestic abuse and violence finds a little nest and tries to survive in that situation now as an author if you think about what else Barbara Kings solver could have done she could have had the mom imagin very explicitly perhaps the violence that that child endureed but she didn't want to be that direct she didn't want to be that explicit instead she resorts to Metaphor with an animal to syb sybiz
what that child went through so your goal might be to find an animal that reflects what your character has experienced and here's one final example of this uh in Frederick buchner's Lion Country there's a character whose twin sister is dying now it's just too painful for him to deal with his sister dying so what he does instead is he talks about a cat of his who is also dying the cat's Health struggles are a way to talk about his sister's Health struggles but but talk about it in code now let's get to number nine which
is animals as spiritual guides animals quite often are more than mere animals they can rise to the level of Representative of some sort of spiritual reality an obvious example of this would be in CS Lewis's Narnia series you have the character of aan who's a lion and he's very obviously a Christ figure to the point where he ends up being sacrificed as a substitute to save one of the human characters or you have a book like the master and the margarita by m bov in that book you have an enormous black cat called Behemoth and
this character is very much like representative of a demon he's a very funny character yes but ultimately a very dark and negative spiritual presence and lastly let's look at JK Rings Harry Potter think of Harry's petronis the Stag the Stag symbolizes protection and guidance it almost plays a kind of Supernatural role in protecting him kind of like a guardian angel would and for our last and final Point let's look at animals as mirrors so the role of a lot of animals in books or stories is simply to provide a mirror or to reflect what their
human character actually is like in Confederacy of dces by John Kennedy ool there is a dog who is so slovenly and lazy and the main character Ignatius J Riley comments on that and says like oh this is obviously my pet he's exactly like me so having a pet that's exactly like your main character is another way to characterize that character indirectly in Gabriel Garcia marquez's Love in the Time of Cera we also see a parrot and the parrot's High Intelligence really mirrors the owner's High Intelligence or maybe some of you have thought of this already
George RR Martin's Game of Thrones we have direwolves and the direwolves have this deep connection almost mirroring the Stark children each direwolf is pivotal to the Stark children's identity and fate and the direwolves Really reflect the personality of these kids and these mystical aspects of the north if you don't yet have an animal in your book now is the time to add one I hope one of these ideas helped stir up your imagination
