256. How to Create Animal Characters For an Older Audience

Author Kenton Kilgore talks about writing animal characters for older audiences and how to make them believable.

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Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the podcast for people who write, edit, read, or listen. Today we're talking about how to create animal characters for an older audience. Author and fellow Rudyard Kipling fan, Kenton Kilgore, is going to share just how to do that, as well as how to make them believable, and the differences between writing these types of characters depending on your audience's age range.

Jennia: Well, first, it's lovely to have you here!

Kenton: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jennia: Yeah! Share about the books you've written because I think one reason that you're the ideal person to have on for this topic is because you have written for such a broad age range, from picture books to adult.

Kenton: Right, yeah. I'm Kenton Kilgore. I write books for kids, young adults, and adults who are still young. And as you mentioned, I write children's books all the way up to young adult novels, and a lot of them feature animals. It just sort of worked out that way.

Jennia: So what are some of the differences that you've encountered when it comes to writing for, say, the picture book audience versus the young adult audience?

Kenton: Well, for the young adult audience, those were the first sort of books that I wrote. I was trying to portray animals very realistically.

Jennia: Mhm.

Kenton: Admittedly anthropomorphizing them to some extent so that they would have thoughts and distinct personalities and could dialogue with each other. But I made a very deliberate decision to do a lot of research ahead of time, to look into different dog breeds and how their breeds affect their personality and to have all those reflected in their characterizations. And cats were a little bit tougher. I have a book, Lost Dogs, which focuses on dogs after the end of the world, and then Stray Cats, which is kind of a spin off to Lost Dogs. Not really a sequel, per se, but the idea is that cats really do have nine lives, but they live them all at once on different worlds. One of those worlds is the world of Lost Dogs, where the world has come to an end. So I also have that going on with cats—after the apocalypse with cats. I found that my experiences with them—I've owned cats for decades—and my research, they're more individualistic than dogs. It's not nearly so easy to say, like, this type of cat will behave this way, right?

Jennia: Right, yeah.

Kenton: You know, that was a consideration I had to make when I was coming up with the cat characters. As for the children's books, it was much sort of simpler. I could just use your traditional sort of narratives about dogs and cats, and not try to introduce all that biology and science into it for younger readers. I don't need to explain a cat too much to a four year. You know, "This is Pimmi. She's a cat." Boom, they know.

Jennia: Exactly! Yeah, you have the illustrations too, to help carry out some of those cat or dog like traits and let them speak for you. I agree with what you've just said, that you can keep it simpler as far as even their characteristics and how they might act in different scenarios. But I would think that the difficulty in writing for the older audience is: how do you get them to attach to a character who's not the same species as them? And granted we see this a lot in fantasy and Sci-Fi but now we have this addition of they are just completely opposite from us in some ways, and how do we get that across in a way that might not be too precious?

Kenton: I almost feel like I'm cheating with Lost Dogs because people love dogs so much.

Jennia: (laughs) Yes!

Kenton: I mean, I've had people buy my book just on the cover alone.

Jennia: That's what I did!

Kenton: Right, so I'll be out somewhere and somebody will say, like, "Oh my gosh, this book has a dog on it. I have to buy it." And I'm like, you know, "Sure! Would you like to know what it's about?" You know?

Jennia: *imitating pretend customer* No, not really! (laughs)

Kenton: I always get asked, "Does the dog die?

Jennia: Ooo, yeah.

Kenton: You know, I have to assure people that it'll all be fine in the end. Trust me.

Jennia: At least for the dogs!

Kenton: Right, without trying to spoil it. People ask me about that, and I say, "Well, this is an end of the world story. So in the first chapter, I wipe out every human being on earth, including you, me, and everyone you love." And they're all like, "Well, that doesn't matter. I don't care about the—is the dog okay? This fictional dog that I didn't know about 10 seconds ago?"

Jennia: Right.

Kenton: So it's been very easy to get people to like these characters. People tell me how much they love the main character, Buddy, who's a German Shepherd. They really like Sally, a secondary character who's a Beagle Bassett mix. And I've had a surprising number of them tell me how much they like Rex, who is the antagonist of the book. He's a Border Collie who has been mistreated by people, so he doesn't like humans at all. And later on in the story, when the lost dogs encounter some humans, he's not happy about that at all. And that's where the sort of concluding conflict of the story comes from.

Jennia: Mhm.

Kenton: And then again, with cats, it's just particularly like Sci-Fi conventions. I don't know why that is, but my book, Stray Cats, always just sells a lot of copies because people are like, "Oh my gosh, this has a cat in it. Let's pick up this book!" So I can't explain it too much, other than people love dogs and cats and they glom onto them.

Jennia: There does seem to be something almost interworldly with cats. We do see them crop up in—there's that space opera book, for instance, where there's a whole species of cat-aliens, or cat-like aliens, rather. You know, even Coraline with the cat able to shift in between dimensions so easily. It's almost like they're an established part of speculative fiction without even having done anything that we know of.

Kenton: I've seen this meme on Facebook. I wish I had copied it, but it's like, you know, dogs are like the guardians of our physical world. They keep us safe from physical threats, other people, and animals. And cats are like the guardians of the spiritual world. They can see into other realms, and they protect us from spirits and ghosts and things like that, which I thought—

Jennia: That's pretty fitting, yeah! I mean, even when you think about books that feature them in prominent roles, that does seem to be how they're portrayed throughout most of them. Do you think there's something to that, to having to fit to some of those parameters that have been outlined? Like, even in that meme. And that if you had tried shifting away from that, then you might have gotten maybe possible reader backlash or, "Oh, that's not cat like at all. It's not believable."

Kenton: I don't know. With Stray Cats, I was mostly just trying to tell a fun, lighthearted adventure story because I came across that idea of cats having nine lives and living them all at once. And I said, like, okay, I just want to run with that and do something sort of light in a multiversal sort of narrative where the cat lives its lives on different worlds. And I got to explore being creative and world building on—in multiple styles of writing. So that's just what I was going with with that. If I had thought about it, I might have tried to do something a bit more spiritual with it. But as it was, it was just hard enough just to get the story down and to write it the way I did, where all the stories weave into each other. That was hard enough! (both laugh)

Jennia: I'd love to expand on how you do your world building, because even when you have something taking place in our world, or at least a version of our world, the perspective is so different since you are using it from the POV of a dog or a cat. And I'd also like to bring up your unique use of terminology, and especially like the glossary in the beginning,

Kenton: Lost Dogs was very much influenced by Richard Adams' Watership Down—

Jennia: Oh, I love that book.

Kenton: —many years ago. And in that the rabbits have their own sort of language, and I wanted to do something similar for Lost Dogs. Point of view was all sort of shaped by what I had learned about dogs' senses.

Jennia: Mhm.

Kenton: Their primary sense is scent, of course, which is much more developed than ours. Then their secondary one is hearing, and sight is sort of third for them. And I learned that dogs are not actually colorblind, not in the way we think. They're red-green colorblind. So they have problems seeing greens and reds and things like that. That's where I sort of came up with the idea that, okay, a dog would describe the grass or the lawn as yellow, because that's what it would look like to them.

Jennia: Mhm, yeah.

Kenton: And when I was coming up with how they view the world, I was also bearing in mind that almost everything in our world is made for us, by us, and it's not for them. So there are many things that a dog might not sort of understand. They might not understand what a car is or what it does. They might not understand what the purpose of a road is. You know, so to the dogs, the road is just—it's gray. They don't really know why it's there or what it does. In the book, I describe they imagine, like, a car coming up, like it's a living being that comes and picks up their person—

Jennia: (laughs) Yes.

Kenton: —and drives off with them. That was sort of where their vocabulary sort of came from. And also, dogs are pack animals, so they would all tend to see each other as—"friends" was the word that I came up with for each other.

Jennia: Yeah.

Kenton: And birds would just be "flaps," you know, it doesn't matter what sort of bird it is. A very sort of simplified understanding of what the world is and the other creatures in it.

Jennia: Yeah. It's a good form of categorization that fits the species that you're using as your character.

Kenton: Yeah.

Jennia: And, not to give anything away, so I picked a word from one of the first few pages, which was "prey-stench," and I thought, oh, man. As soon as I read that, I thought, this is just so fitting for dogs and the way that they would react to something, because I feel like we would probably be looking at someone's facial expression or their body language to pick up on how they're acting, and they do that too. But just showing, again that you're using scent as the main sense they're employing that. That prey-stench has such predominance on the page, and that's, like, their first real trigger, that, "Oh no, something is super wrong."

Kenton: Yeah, prey-stench is, I think, I described as, it's the smell that other animals make when the dog is chasing them.

Jennia: Mhm.

Kenton: You know, they're fearing for their life, and the squirrel is running across the yard, and the dog's going after them. The dog might be intent on catching the squirrel and eating it, or it might be like, "I just want to chase it just for fun." But to the other animal, they don't know that, so they're in fear of their life. Their body chemistry changes immediately, and the dog can sense, "Aha!" That's sort of the thing that I wanted to bring across in Lost Dogs and in Stray Cats as well, is that we think of dogs as pets. We think of them as our friends. We call them fur babies. We love them. But really, dogs and cats are highly evolved predators. They are dangerous animals, you know, to anything that's smaller to them. I wanted to sort of introduce that element into the book and sort of remind people of that they're more than just cuddly, fuzzy fellows who live with us and love us.

Jennia: Yeah. I've even thought that a few times, looking at our 120 pound dog.

Kenton: Right!

Jennia: You know, I lift his mouth laps up, and I think, "My gosh, look at that canine. It's like the size of my pinky. I let this thing sleep next to my face!"

Kenton: Exactly! Yeah, I have an Anatolian Shepherd, and she's, like, 80 pounds. And Anatolians have a bite of, like, 700 pounds per square inch. Their bites are much stronger than Rottweilers or Dobermans or anything like that. And I'm just like, "Oh my gosh." Sometimes I think, like, "This housewolf that I have living in my house, it's a good thing she loves me so much."

Jennia: (laughs) Yes!

Kenton: She does. She lets me take food out of her mouth. If we're out walking and there's a chicken bone that somebody's thrown by the side of the road, she picks it up, and I'll take it out of her mouth, and she just lets me. And I'm like, "Well, thank you for letting me do that and for not taking one of my fingers in exchange."

Jennia: Exactly! "[Thank you for not] severing my hand."

Kenton: Exactly.

Jennia: I think that creates another interesting dynamic that we need to think about when we're creating these animal characters is how they interact, not just with each other, but how they interact with other species and how that's different from writing, say, a human POV.

Kenton: Yeah. In Stray Cats, I had a scene where the main cat, Pimmi, at one point she catches a mouse and she plays with it until it dies, you know, as cats do.

Jennia: Right.

Kenton: And I had that scene in there again to sort of reemphasize that, again, we love cats. We think they're adorable, but they are on some level, they are sort of like merciless killing machines. And they do sometimes just kill stuff for reasons that we think are just like, "Oh my gosh, why are you doing that to that poor mouse and to the cat?" It's perfectly natural.

Jennia: Yeah. Did you have any difficulties interpreting some of these behaviors or even just finding a way to interpret some of these behaviors when you were writing?

Kenton: No, I did a lot of research, like I said, and I looked into all of it, the various things, and I think I was just able to go ahead and do them and to sort of understand why they were doing them. I have this one scene in Lost Dogs where it's a literal pissing contest. Like, this big Rottweiler, he's walking around a backyard, and he's, like, lifting his leg on the shed there, and on a truck tire that's there, and on a tree stump. And behind him, there's like a Pomeranian walking up right behind him doing the same thing and saying, like, "All right, that's mine, and that's mine, and that's mine too." You know? Yeah.

Jennia: You've mentioned research a few times. Do you think that research is always necessary when writing about a different species in order to make them believable? Or do you think it's ever something that can be skipped?

Kenton: I mean, you don't need to do that for, like, a children's book or something like that, like we touched on. You don't have to get too complicated for kids. I think it definitely helps if you're writing about dogs and cats, because I think a lot of books are sort of lazy—

Jennia: Mmm.

Kenton: —in you know—like, the depiction of dogs in common pop culture is they are either these devoted, all-loving, just loyal pets who would literally cross plains, and swim rivers, and climb mountains to get back to their owners or rescue them from all kinds of perils. I mean, how many times did Lassie save Timmy, anyway?

Jennia: Yeah, no kidding. Timmy needs to get it together.

Kenton: Or they're these adorable, lovable goofballs who do funny, silly stuff all the time, like chase squirrels and things like that. You know, or there's some kind of combination of both. Like the dog from "Up," you know, where he's like, "I've just met you and I love you—squirrel!" Right? I think it's very easy for authors to sort of fall into those stereotypes about dogs, and it really doesn't do anything for you narratively. I think it's more interesting to talk about how they actually perceive the world and even to indulge in sort of some dog psychology—

Jennia: Mmm.

Kenton: —because the theme of Lost Dogs is abandonment.

Jennia: Right.

Kenton: And that's why I consider it a young adult novel is because a lot of teenagers who come from families who have split up, who have absent fathers, they can sort of identify with abandonment, of being abandoned. So when all the people disappear, the dogs feel abandoned, and they cope with it in different ways. Buddy is determined to get his family back no matter what. Sally, his, his companion, she's more kind of like, "Well, okay, this is the situation. We had these people, and now they're gone. And now we'll sort of move on with our lives and accept it and deal." And Rex is like, "Okay, all the people are gone. They've left us. Good. We don't need them anyway."

Jennia: Right.

Kenton: And these are all sort of emotions teens and young adults and people can experience dealing with those sorts of things.

Jennia: And not just from their families, but even friend groups, as friend groups take a more important role in their lives or those first breakups.

Kenton: Yeah. It's no accident that almost all of the dogs in Lost Dogs have people names, you know, like Sally, and Jake, and Rex. Very few of them are like "Spot." I mean, there is Buddy, but it's like a metaphorical name because he really is very devoted to his family.

Jennia: Yeah. He does fit that every-dog role.

Kenton: Exactly, exactly. But again, that's sort of determined by his breed. He's a German Shepherd, so they are very loyal and dedicated.

Jennia: Yeah. I think that's one thing that makes your characters so memorable, and also a tip for other writers is that you are looking at them from an individual perspective. Who are you? What shaped you? Why are you this way? Not just, "I'm going to write a cat," and then you pile on all these cat stereotypes, and then that's the cat.

Kenton: Yeah. Like I said, it was a little harder to do the cats because they're more sort of individualistic. I actually patterned them off of cats that we have, so, you know, Pimmi, the main cat, is very much like Pimmi, our real life cat.

Jennia: Mhm.

Kenton: She's curious, but kind of timid. She's often unsure of herself. Sort of sweet and lovable. We have a cat named Gandalf, and, he's—we didn't name him. We got him from my sister-in-law. And he's just, God, he's weird. (Jennia laughs). He's just a weird cat and he does all kinds of weird things. Makes random weird noises in the middle of the night. He's very vocal. He just talks all the time. There's sort of a weird cat in Stray Cats, and that's patterned after him. We had two cats named Sophie and Claudia, and they're calicos. And there does seem to be what they call a tortitude.

Jennia: Yes! (laughs)

Kenton: That's where tortoiseshell shell cats or calico cats are definitely seem to be more sassy, so that definitely shaped their personalities. But, yeah, it was a little bit harder to come up with good personalities for the cats.

Jennia: Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of Walt Disney and how he would bring the real animals into the studio for the animators and the writers to watch and observe and see how they actually act, instead of just relying on secondhand information or maybe their own assumptions about "This is what a deer does." But, yeah, seeing them actually moving around and how they greet each other and how they react to different scenarios, like you've done with your cats and then pulling out those different attributes, I really think that's what adds a lot of their characterization to them, and does make them believable and feel real.

Kenton: Yeah, definitely based them off of real dogs and real cats and try to make them just as realistic as possible.

Jennia: Mhm... Well, do you have any other advice to anyone who maybe doesn't have an animal in their life to easily observe, but they have this deep-seated need to have a main character who is a real life animal?

Kenton: Go ahead and borrow somebody's dog for a little while, spend some time with them (both laugh). It's kind of funny, I have to admit, when I was researching Lost Dogs, I actually did spend, like, a substantial amount of time one day when my wife and daughters were out of the house, crawling around on all fours in my house, just to see, like, what's the point of view of the dog? What does the world look like from a dog's point of view? You're only, like three feet off the floor. And, um, the human world is definitely made for us. Dogs are constantly looking up, they can't see the tops of tables, they can't see the tops of counters.

Jennia: Not easily. (laughs)

Kenton: Not easily, right. Not unless they stay on their back feet. They can't open things up. It definitely sort of opened my eyes, even if I did feel absolutely ridiculous doing it. (both laugh)

Jennia: That's some dedicated research!

Kenton: That's right. Just sort of like, you know, get into the dog's head, don't take the easy way out. Try to do some work with it, try to come up with a fresh perspective.

Jennia: Mhm, yeah, love that. That's great advice. Well, do you have any projects upcoming or events you'll be at that you'd like people to know about?

Kenton: I'm working on a new novel. It's called The Scorpion and the Wolf, which actually has nothing to do with real life scorpions or wolves.

Jennia: Oh good to know. (laughs)

Kenton: It's a traditional swords and sorcery young adult fantasy. And I was very sort of influenced by the old Fafhrd and Gray Mouser novels, and Elric stories, and the Conan stories. A few years back, I was giving a talk at a high school. I was talking to the kids, they have a writing program, and the kids asked, you know, what were my influences? And I mentioned all these authors and characters like Fritz Lieber and Lovecraft, and their eyes were just sort of, like, glazed over. They had no idea what I was talking about. And I'm like, I guess younger people haven't heard of these authors, so they inspired me to sort of write these new characters for these new readers in that sort of style. So I'm going to have that out this year, and I hope people will like it.

Jennia: Oh, good! Well, I'm excited for it.

Jennia: And that's all for today. Thank you for listening, and please check out the show notes for more information. And then please join me next week when Dr. Keith McNally will be here to explain how sharing our personal stories can also bring clarity to our goals. Thank you!