What Can Dogs Teach Novelists?

Most of us love dogs for attributes equally delightful in fiction writers. It’s easy to love someone who only wants to please, who would do most anything for most anyone. Novelist Nora Roberts claims that “Everything I know, I learned from dogs.” Perhaps not, but here are some canine secrets, anyway:

~ Tenderness

Charles Baxter was 100 % correct when he observed that “Hell is story friendly.” Kindness to readers involves unkindness to characters—often and viciously. This doesn’t mean that writers are cruel-hearted. If you want readers to bleed emotionally over these beings you’ve sent into their lives, the creator of those characters must bleed emotionally as well. 

This discomfort comes in two flavors. It’s painful to watch your good guys in trouble, yet also painful to sorrow over the pain your villains bring on themselves. Whenever this seems unendurable, contemplate the stoicism of dogs.

~ Loyalty

Even if punished, banished, struck repeatedly with a rolled up newspaper, they never give up on those they love. Don’t give up on your characters, however confusing, exhausting, or mortifying Don’t give up on making your novel everything it could be, either—no matter how many years that takes.

~ Passion

Consider how canines greet other canines, not to mention live or dead anything-in-motion, and definitely not food. Food!!! Everything, then, is delicious, captivating, magnetizing, and always new. What a terrific way to move through the world. What an even more terrific way to write about the world. Invite passion, whether about storms, ice hockey, or the bulging contours of a ripe tomato. There’s no better antidote for dismissing boredom, in your readers or yourself.

~ Shamelessness

Yes, naughty dogs droop their necks so they can look abjectly at you through half-raised eyes. It’s mostly show, however. Reach your hand down for a forgiving pat, and all’s forgotten. The next hamburger at the edge of the table will meet the same fate as those preceding it. You left it there. Do you truly expect the dog to ignore it?

“Dogs act exactly the way we would act if we had no shame,” Cynthia Heimel believes, and shame has no place in the novelist’s toolkit. Dogs teach us that having sex with strangers in broad daylight is no cause for chagrin. Neither is sniffing the foulest leavings that came from the foulest places. Don’t disrobe in public or play in the cat box. Please. Do probe humanity’s darkest places. That includes your own history, your own heart.

Tip: Dogs can be role models for the treatment of characters—and readers. 

Here’s Charles M. Schulz about being too hard on yourself: “All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed. For after all, he was only human. He wasn't a dog.”

Character and Coincidence

Heraclitus said that “Character is fate”; who you are determines what happens to you. If only it were so! The people who fill collection boxes or steal the bills in them would each get what’s coming to them. They don’t. But your characters should.

Tip: A huge part of fiction is good guys finishing first. And bad guys finishing punished.

Yet it’s tricky to make character drive character. How do you reveal that decisions and actions at least influence fate, if not overtly causing it?

Questions drive actions, and questions can drive character motive and behavior.

~ Does luck play a role in character victory or failure?

Randomness is the state of the world, but people can read newspapers or history books for that. Novel readers enjoy reaching the end and being able to trace exactly what determined that ending.

~ Do you subject your characters to dilemma?

There’s no better way to discover what a woman’s made of than asking her to choose between her art and the woman, man, or child she loves. Her decision says everything about who she is. Don’t baby your characters! Make them suffer.

~ Are your characters ironically consistent and inconsistent?

People settle into certain habits— exercising daily or never; working constantly or studying TV like an art form; hating cats or orchids or letting them take over. Yet smokers suddenly quit. Family suddenly replaces frenzied job commitment. In real life, the motive might seem inexplicable. Don’t let that happen in your novel.

~ Are your characters resolute?

At least on paper, the people we admire desire passionately, risk impulsively, and enjoy or despise intensely. That’s another way of saying that they love life and we love watching them love life. Create characters who put everything on the line. They know they might lose, but they’ll never lose for lack of trying.

~ Are your characters flexible?

Heroes adapt. They don’t just keep doing what they did yesterday and a thousand yesterdays before. They don’t just cross their fingers or wish on stars. They use their brains, muscles, and courage to affect the outcome. And how we love them for that.

The world’s certainly unjust enough, and coincidence isn’t particularly interesting. Readers expect novels to supply the causality and credibility that insures a just ending. Why not show how characters achieve the sadness or triumph they deserve.

Emotion—the Conduit that Carries Theme

Primates exhibit a huge capacity for emotion. Otherwise, you’d never hear the occasional stories about the primates who aren’t human risking their lives for those not even of their own species. For human primates, though, story remains among the most powerful sources of emotion and therefore empathy.

Story becomes increasingly essential in a world where the internet and media dull our senses: Cataclysm and death become routine in a way they never should. As a species, we dare not lose our capacity to empathize with poverty, suffering, enslavement, and tragedy. To remain human, we must continue to feel the suffering of those who endure what we cannot begin to imagine. At its best, story forces us to imagine that when we’d rather stay numb to. After all, that’s what plot and characterization are for.

The kind of suffering that spawned the French Revolution still exists. Yet that uprising feels remote. How do you bring it close? Make a movie. Reproduce a mother’s willingness to prostitute herself for her child, a bishop’s tenderness toward the thief who stole from him, a man forced to choose between passion for a woman or for freedom. Make the movie from characters who’ve endured for 150 years yet seem relevant right now.

Les Miserables has a lot to do with whatever story you want to tell. The questions it poses are the same ones your story must ask.

·         What does each of your main characters desire more than anything on earth?

·         What opposes each of those desires?

·         What lets each character control fate?

·         What obstructs each character from controlling fate?

·         What links your antagonist to the values of the good guys?

·         What feelings and situations connect your characters to all people regardless of time or place?

·         As the story advances and you pile up problems for the good guys, what humor or beauty or insight keeps the audience anxious yet still believing that morality stands a chance?

·         What truth about human nature leaves your audience with some glimmer of hope when your story ends?

These aren’t easy questions, and many writers confess to me that they write “only to entertain.” Entertainment gets people to movies and originated story in the first place. Entertainment sells films and books. It also sells empathy. You need bushels of insight and energy to create a decent novel. So when there’s so much trouble in the world, why go to all the trouble of writing a novel that doesn’t use its entertainment to teach us a little something about being human?

Tip: We write stories because we’re human. Our best stories remind us what that means.