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Of Mice that Talk like Men: The Joy, and Danger, of Writing Anthropomorphic Fiction
As a kid, I must have read Richard Adams’ Watership Down seven or eight times. The novel is a saga of refugee rabbits fleeing their destroyed home for a new one. The rabbits are much like people, with different characters, a social order, politics and even their own language.
Animals dominate children’s fiction, but they have a place in serious, purely adult fiction too. Animal Farm is perhaps the best-known anthropomorphic work of fiction meant for adults. Duncton Wood by William Horwood, a tale about moles, matches Watership Down in its epic, historical tone.
My novel, To Follow Elephants (Stormbird Press), has both human and elephant characters. Though the elephants “talk” to each other, but never to the human characters, their narratives intersect and affect each other. I divided the narratives by chapter — in some, you see the human story; in others, you see from the elephants’ point of view.
As an author, using animals as characters who act human can open doors to creating a satisfying story, because it provides a wealth of creative freedom. Your animals can have their own social…
