Animals

diversify your narrative ecosystem

Here’s the next in December’s series of morning prompts inspired by the reading of Agnes Smedley and James Joyce in the 24-Hour Room’s free virtual Studio. If you’re so inclined, come listen or help read weekday mornings at 7 and 10 am ET, with prompt-guided co-writing at 8 am M-F and 10:30 am Tu-F. Not every prompt will go out over this Substack, but you can find them all here or just browse our extensive library of Craft posts and prompts.

Do you include nonhuman animals in your narrative, perhaps as motifs, pets, familiars, domestic animals, meat, even vermin? Do you do it enough? As anthropocentric as we tend to be as a species, the connection to other living beings is a powerful way to humanize a character and animate a world.

On p 126 of Daughter of Earth, as Marie recuperates in a Carlsbad rooming house after her episode of near starvation, a nightingale visits her: "a strain of liquid music poured out of the darkness." It's a crucial turning point, very close to halfway through the book, and it reminded me of the Danish seabird that swooped across the book's first paragraph. Clearly birds are important images for Agnes Smedley, but intriguingly, they don't always have the same meaning. The initial seabird symbolizes the possibility of an escape from the earth and its struggles — an escape she rejects. The Carlsbad nightingale suggests that beauty and persists in the world, even at the darkest moments. The novel's final bird image is of a raptor, representing to Marie a man who wants to carry her off as carrion or chattel.

And then we read the end of the Eumaeus section of Ulysses, where Bloom, just off successive extended riffs on music and overused figures of speech, pauses to observe a cart horse let fall "three smoking globes of turds." It certainly puts the pontification and the blather in perspective, that literal load of crap.

In my own writing, I've been working on a scene that includes a disagreement about walking the dog. Today's Smedley and Joyce prompted me to go back and let the animal kingdom into the story, in this case by breathing a bit more deeply into the dog herself, developing her character and relationship to the human characters, rather than relying on a mere idea of a pet, no livelier or filled with narrative potential than a stuffed puppy sitting on a shelf.