Character Castings: What's Your Bird & Beast Count?

[Katie-Ellen]

Places are characters in our stories. So are the nations of other animals. What's your cast list of birds and beasts and if you have them, what's their role in your novel?

Agents of action? Omens? Light relief or Humour? A mirror to reveal the characters of your protagonists? Or are they there for general world building?

Waking in the small hours last night, I found myself conducting a bird and beast count on my finished novel.

Cat (companion, sacred beast, psychic portal and agent of destiny)
Dog ( a ghost, camp dog of Helmand. An ex- soldier has PTSD and is my MC's antagonist)
Fish - as prey and as consumers of the dead. MC lost brother when he took him river fishing.
Alpacas- the family farm of my MC's love interest.
Magpie - one for sorrow.

No world complete without the birds and beasts?
Which crime novels or thrillers have a significant animal? (Is there a novel about Shergar?)
Horror abounds with shamanic totem beasties of course,

Joanna Trollope generally features a cat for world building. To call her books aga-sagas is to underestimate their fierce intelligence. She places social mores under a microscope and dissects them.

 

[Emurelda]

I have a lot of creatures - kids today described them as mythical but not sure how to categorise the Elemons. There are at least 20 featured in the first novel.

Also Rottweilers (metal-hunter dogs).

I too woke up too early 2am!! - haven't been as productive though. Now just feeling groggy.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

2 am
Gaaah.
Should think you do.
I'm thinking more along the lines of your rottweilers; flesh and blood creatures.

I saw a programme recently about mine-hunting rats in Mozambique. They are so clever. Reclaiming workable farm land for villages that might otherwise have to relocate.

Meet Mandy

 

[Robinne Weiss]

Animals are central to all my stories. Never really considered them...they just show up. Notable among them are a cockroach with a wicked sense of humour (assistant to the MC), a vindictive mosquito, a dog who acts as an unwitting messenger between a MC and her antagonist, a gluten-intolerant dragon, and a dog who used to be a person.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

No goat?

See Dean Spanley for a film about a person who used to be a dog.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

No goat...yet.

 

[Boopadoo]

I like using animals in my stories, a lot. I like trying to give them personalities as an actual character.

In a post-apocalyptic serial I was working on (to be a novel someday?) the main character ( a biochemist named Luanne Polokov) has a mastiff-shepherd mix best friend named “Chaos.” I was told by my meager handful of readers that I did a good job giving Chaos a notable, realistic personality, which was my goal.

In another WIP, kind of a noir piece, I have a telepathic (or not - maybe it’s just in Stanley’s head?) orange cat named “The Bunnyman.”

My finished novel (currently with betas) includes huge, genetically-altered coyote-hyena hybrids, nicknamed “chupacabras” by the scientists responsible for them.

I did a flash piece (I think it may have won a contest here, many years ago), called Reversed, which is entirely from a small dog's point of view (the name plays on both the POV and the premise, the interpretation of the reversed appearance of the Fool tarot card). I’ve been told I did a good job with it.

Finally, my first 2 complete novels (well, 2.5 because it was going to be a trilogy) had no humans whatsoever - all character races were Canine, Feline, Simian or Lizard. I never finished because I concluded that I needed to learn how to write well before producing things for public consumption. Maybe I’ll rewrite someday, now that my powers are more realized…

 

[Peggy Lou]

Yes, animals just turn up when you write. How poor stories would be without them.

I have two finished manuscripts. The first one has a dog who can turn into a wolf (he's the MC's sidekick), a normal dog, a snow bear, a crow, a pair of vultures and several mythical birds. And three dragons. In the second one there is a mauve wolf, a dragonfly-buzzard and a desert fox.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

A piquant recipe of real and mythic beasts. Any special reason the wolf is mauve?

Is he a pineal gland chakra wolf?

 

[Peggy Lou]

A piquant recipe of real and mythic beasts. Any special reason the wolf is mauve?

Is he a pineal gland chakra wolf?

No. Just liked the idea. That's why I prefer writing fantasy. You can create anything you like. Nice to feel omnipotent for a moment.

By the way is your dog really a ghost?

 

[Katie-Ellen]

It really is.
Only my MC can see it but he learns why later.

 

[Peggy Lou]

That sounds fascinating. I read your first page. Looking forward to reading the rest of it, more than ever. Good luck.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

It's always bothered me, the way that some novels don't mention birds, animals and insects. But then, some novelists never write of their characters eating food, listening to music, watching television or, (horror of horrors) reading books!

My short stories, novellas and novels all mention wildlife, as well as pets. This might be a reflection of my own connectivity with flora and fauna, but my detective protagonist is a farmer's son, used to working in the landscape and looking for 'sign'—the clues offered by the behaviour of birds, alarm calls of deer and foxes and the tracks left by animals.

Sometimes, the birds in my stories bear ill-omen. Murder victims are scavenged on by all sorts of creatures, including rodents, buzzards, crows and crabs. Few people realise that some birds have a keen sense of smell. In one of my novels, a corpse is found in a remote spinney, when a farmer notices crows congregating in the trees—it helped the story that a group of crows is known as a 'murder.'

My fictional pets have acted as symbols for the state of mind and body of their owner—an ageing budgerigar in a cage, a solitary and neurotic terrier and a freshly neutered tomcat—which makes my detective protagonist consider the lamentable state of his own love life!

 

[Katie-Ellen]

I like using animals in my stories, a lot. I like trying to give them personalities as an actual character.

In a post-apocalyptic serial I was working on (to be a novel someday?) the main character ( a biochemist named Luanne Polokov) has a mastiff-shepherd mix best friend named “Chaos.” I was told by my meager handful of readers that I did a good job giving Chaos a notable, realistic personality, which was my goal.

In another WIP, kind of a noir piece, I have a telepathic (or not - maybe it’s just in Stanley’s head?) orange cat named “The Bunnyman.”

My finished novel (currently with betas) includes huge, genetically-altered coyote-hyena hybrids, nicknamed “chupacabras” by the scientists responsible for them.

I did a flash piece (I think it may have won a contest here, many years ago), called Reversed, which is entirely from a small dog's point of view (the name plays on both the POV and the premise, the interpretation of the reversed appearance of the Fool tarot card). I’ve been told I did a good job with it.

Finally, my first 2 complete novels (well, 2.5 because it was going to be a trilogy) had no humans whatsoever - all character races were Canine, Feline, Simian or Lizard. I never finished because I concluded that I needed to learn how to write well before producing things for public consumption. Maybe I’ll rewrite someday, now that my powers are more realized…

'Chaos'. Heheh. I like it. More than just a theory.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

It's always bothered me, the way that some novels don't mention birds, animals and insects. But then, some novelists never write of their characters eating food, listening to music, watching television or, (horror of horrors) reading books!

My short stories, novellas and novels all mention wildlife, as well as pets. This might be a reflection of my own connectivity with flora and fauna, but my detective protagonist is a farmer's son, used to working in the landscape and looking for 'sign'—the clues offered by the behaviour of birds, alarm calls of deer and foxes and the tracks left by animals.

Sometimes, the birds in my stories bear ill-omen. Murder victims are scavenged on by all sorts of creatures, including rodents, buzzards, crows and crabs. Few people realise that some birds have a keen sense of smell. In one of my novels, a corpse is found in a remote spinney, when a farmer notices crows congregating in the trees—it helped the story that a group of crows is known as a 'murder.'

My fictional pets have acted as symbols for the state of mind and body of their owner—an ageing budgerigar in a cage, a solitary and neurotic terrier and a freshly neutered tomcat—which makes my detective protagonist consider the lamentable state of his own love life!

I love a novel with a strong landscape, and there's no landscape to believe in without its particular range of birds and beasts. I have a young farmer in a story...who like your man with the Tom cat (ex) reflects that the tup (or ram for folk who haven't come across that word) is the only male round here that gets anything. Not that he's an incipient sheep-shagger.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

That sounds fascinating. I read your first page. Looking forward to reading the rest of it, more than ever. Good luck.

How kind! That's really kind. Thank you Peggy Lou.

Remarked to spouse this writing business is a bit like religion. You can feel a bit mad even trying sometimes but it's a job of faith.

 

[Marc Joan]

How kind! That's really kind. Thank you Peggy Lou.

Remarked to spouse this writing business is a bit like religion. You can feel a bit mad even trying sometimes but it's a job of faith.

Did you have a Damascene conversion? If so, pray tell.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Paul only needed one of those because he was a nasty man who used to persecute people.

Faith because you may put in your 10 000 hours plus over however many years, and call it 20 000, but even if you publish, no way would you expect more than peanuts, and certainly nothing to reflect that same investment of time, viewed as a job of work.

And that wasn't why I/you did it anyway so you/I must have felt we were keeping faith with something.

 

[Marc Joan]

Yes. But speaking personally I travel more in hope than in faith

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Understood. I did not mean faith in outcomes. I meant faith in doing the thing that is the right thing to be doing; whatever is the thing that sits true with oneself. I did not mean to speak for you.

 

[Marc Joan]

I know, I know, I was only being vaguely facetious, or attempting to be...One writes regardless of outcome, coz it's Good to do so.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

It's always bothered me, the way that some novels don't mention birds, animals and insects. But then, some novelists never write of their characters eating food, listening to music, watching television or, (horror of horrors) reading books!

My short stories, novellas and novels all mention wildlife, as well as pets. This might be a reflection of my own connectivity with flora and fauna, but my detective protagonist is a farmer's son, used to working in the landscape and looking for 'sign'—the clues offered by the behaviour of birds, alarm calls of deer and foxes and the tracks left by animals.

Sometimes, the birds in my stories bear ill-omen. Murder victims are scavenged on by all sorts of creatures, including rodents, buzzards, crows and crabs. Few people realise that some birds have a keen sense of smell. In one of my novels, a corpse is found in a remote spinney, when a farmer notices crows congregating in the trees—it helped the story that a group of crows is known as a 'murder.'

My fictional pets have acted as symbols for the state of mind and body of their owner—an ageing budgerigar in a cage, a solitary and neurotic terrier and a freshly neutered tomcat—which makes my detective protagonist consider the lamentable state of his own love life!

Oh, don't forget the forensic entomology! I taught a class on forensic ent at my kids' primary school back when they were of the age...we collected roadkill and had a blast watching what colonised the bodies. I got into SO much trouble with the principal...he was terribly squeamish, and totally freaked out at the dead animals (I thought we'd been very polite, putting them way back on the school grounds, and caging each one so no one would stumble on them accidentally...) I almost wish I wrote murder mysteries so I could incorporate some forensic entomology...

 

[Katie-Ellen]

When did they die? The life cycle of the blow fly will tell us.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

When did they die? The life cycle of the blow fly will tell us.

It can also tell where--different species are found in different habitats. The body could have been colonised in one place, then moved to another, but the bugs will tell where the body has been.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

More about this fascinating if unappetising subject: Forensic entomology