Handling Story Critters

[metalikhan]

No, I don't mean critiquers.

I was sent a short fantasy story with a feedback request. The story arc itself -- no problem. But the action & description of MC's horsemanship was so improbable (and impossible in a couple of spots), it was ludicrous. There are things even an expert rider just won't/can't do fleeing at a full gallop through the woods in the dark.

I made the recommendation to watch the equestrian scenes of 4 movies (two of the LOTR movies and two Australian movies) and to pay attention to what the riders do with their hands & bodies while contolling a horse at speed over rough terrain. I'll explain more about it after the movies are watched if the writer still doesn't see what's gone awry with that particular scene.

But it raised a question. For writers who aren't animal savvy, where do you go to research this or that critter you want to include, however much or little, in your story? Do you talk to animal owners? Watch movies? Rely on print resources? Or???

[tris]

You definitely need to do your research, that's for sure. Not sure how reliable movies are. I remember watching one movie that said horses won't jump in the dark. Then others have them jumping. So talking to an "expert" is probably your best bet. Local ranchers (if you live in a rural area) can probably give you enough info not to sound like a dweeb. Visit with a zookeeper, or search the local library for "life story" books, you know the kind: my life with the racoons, my pet Komodo dragon, etc.

I've run into this problem as well, which is why I stay away from critters. Too much trouble!

[Adam David Collings]

Author Brandon Sanderson has said in a podcast I listen to, that he tries to avoid writing horses in his fantasy novels because he simply doesn't know them well enough.

[lexkx]

Whenever possible, a writer should immerse at least a part of themselves in an animal's world. In my opinion. Temple Gradin's biopic (HBO, Claire Danes, really excellent) taught me things about cows and the people who "care" for them that I would never have thought of. But I don't generally write about cows, or cowboys, so it wouldn't have occurred to me to think about it. (For the horsemanship films, I hope you mentioned the Man From Snowy River...)

As far as research based on other people (either interviews or reading material), there are some factors to consider. There are people who love the idea of an animal (horses, wolves, dragons), and then there are people who live with these animals. Researching without checking on the difference between the "lovers" and the "livers" can be really confusing, because you get such a wide range of opinion. And some of those lovers will have very impractical opinions. "Livers" develop their own vocabulary and understanding that is somewhat separate from the rest of the world, and being conversant in that can lend authenticity to a writer's work. But that can backfire if you're using authentic language to describe unrealistic actions.

As a related example, I have a friend who raises wolves that cannot be reintroduced into the wild. She has the temperament and knowledge to handle wolves, even in the suburban home she lives in. Spending time with her, and working with and around her animals, has taught me a lot about wolves, predators, and the difference between dominance and aggression. HOWEVER, one odd side effect is that I now have almost no patience for werewolf fiction, because the way the authors speak about alphas or pack behavior is often ridiculous, counterproductive, and a little offensive.

For further reading on the horses, the Black Stallion books do a decent job of the psychology of the relationship between a person and a horse. More modern than a fantasy writer would like, but good for basics about how people relate to horses, that gives decent boundaries. So do the Misty of Chicoteague stories, but that's from a more juvenile perspective. Neither is any kind of substitute for going on a trail ride and having a cantankerous horse "stop, drop, and roll" with you on board, but still...

[beckyminor]

I am grateful for the years I spent riding and driving horses when I was younger, because they have given me great perspective in terms of animal transportation. Movies are a little sketchy with as many scenes are created entirely digitally--the Arwen chase in the Fellowship of the Ring is good, if one keeps in mind the fact that the woman on the white horse is a STUNT rider. To be honest, nothing that she does on that horse looks particularly spectacular to the eye trained by digital media, but the level of control she maintains over that horse is what is realistic.

On the other hand--the chase across the stampeding herd in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer-in my opinion, beyond stupid. I know there was a level of camp expected, but sorry. That many horses in a herd? Running at top speed for miles and miles and miles? The contrivance was idiotic.

Back to the original question: I think, if you don't have hands-on experience, a writer will need to immerse themselves in some solid non-fiction on the critter in question. Fiction will always choose character (and critter) actions to advance the story, and is therefore unreliable. I think I would side with Brandon Sanderson if I wasn't willing to do some in-depth research on a real-world animal and avoid including it in any significant way.

[rjj7]

I've been thinking for a while that what the internet could use is a massive database of information tailored for writers. Information on things like animals, plants, weather, and other stuff that writers need to know about if they want to portray things realistically. So much of that information is either scanty or bogged down in details that are largely irrelevant to an author.

All of which is to say, I occasionally get an irresistible urge to suffer and sweat through pages and pages of information on cloud formation and weather patterns simply because I wonder whether it actually makes sense to have an exceedingly rainy climate sandwiched between a mountain range and a large river.

[metalikhan]

Yeah, I grew up riding & driving horses, ponies, and mules, too. Did a lot of trail riding everywhere my family lived all over the country. Even rode down a hill in the Tetons almost as steep as the one in the ...Snowy River scene but nothing like that speed!

(Aside: that scene literally brought me to my feet the first time I saw it. **ahem** Kind of embarrassing.)

And yes, lexkx, The Man from Snowy River was one of the movies I recommended. The other Aussie movie was The Lighthorsemen (late 1980s movie).

Excellent observation about the "livers" and the "lovers" -- I'd like to pass that one on!

**chagrin** Sheesh, Becky, I totally forgot about the Arwen chase. The LOTR scenes I assigned for the writer to watch was the battle with the warhogs & the final charge at Helms Deep in The Two Towers, and the Battle of Pelenor Fields in Return of the King. Even though there was a lot of CGI involved, the number of actual riders was bigger than I expected (I'm one of those geeks who also watch the making of the movies, too).
But I definitely wanted the writer to see there are a limited number of things a rider could do with hands and body while riding at a full gallop in the woods at night in the rain. (Well, unless that character is turned into a 4/6/8-armed devi from Hindu mythology.)

rjj7, look up the term micro-climates. Very useful for working out geographical and climatological oddities of a world you're building -- you don't have to become an amateur meteorologist.

Thank you all for the input!

[fluke]

HOWEVER, one odd side effect is that I now have almost no patience for werewolf fiction, because the way the authors speak about alphas or pack behavior is often ridiculous, counterproductive, and a little offensive.

Because of not knowing how packs run in actuality, in a story I wrote, it became clear that the werewolves themselves got their ideas about how to run the pack from movies. Call it lampshading if you want.

[Bethany J.]

Nov 15, 2013 10:10:36 GMT -5 rjj7 said:

I've been thinking for a while that what the internet could use is a massive database of information tailored for writers. Information on things like animals, plants, weather, and other stuff that writers need to know about if they want to portray things realistically. So much of that information is either scanty or bogged down in details that are largely irrelevant to an author.

YES. Somebody please create this!!

Fight/battle scenes are also something that can use critique by people who have actual experience in combat of some kind, even any kind! I have a friend who does karate and who easily picked apart one of my battle scenes once. "Um, here he'd be dead. And he'd be dead again here. And unless something amazing happens he would be dead again here." I run a lot of my battle scenes by her now.

[lexkx]

Oh, the database thing sounds an awful lot like expecting someone else to do the work for us. Research shouldn't just tell us what we want to know. It should also tell us what we don't know to ask. The realistic details come when we make those surprises real. And a lot of internet information is unreliable. A good start, but the strings of electronics don't have to be vetted. Good research comes from using a variety of sources, and this makes for better writing. (The single best investment I ever made in writing was to pick up a couple reference books that I use *all* *the* *time*. Roget's Super Thesaurus, which has a lot of literary quotes and cross-references that include slang, and then a collection of dictionaries from the same publisher: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Dictionary of Drink, Dictionary of Edible Plants and Animals. Reference material that makes you think will shape your writing better than reference material that doesn't tell you anything new.)

Though I will add, a good librarian usually has a database available. Not just a worker bee, but a specialist at a university or the highly trained head of reference. (When I was in library science school, we had to write a lot of topic-focused source options. These were for patrons who were studying Shakespeare, or teaching, or military reenactments, or what-have-you. Each topic had a list of multiple sources that led to multiple selections, so the patron could tailor their research within the topic.)

And I don't know anyone who didn't stand the first time saw that jump in MFSR. I still do that half the time when I rewatch it.

And for your climate question, Randy, you just have to consider where on your planet you put your mountain range. Yes, really. On a global scale, weather follows certain patterns. It's why certain regions have monsoons, and others have hurricane season, and why sailors knew crossing certain latitudes brought their ship into windless seas (called 'doldrums'--we use the word differently now). The US brushes against one weather pattern towards the south, but most of it is temperate. In the temperate region, winds moving from one layer of the atmosphere to another help create reliable weather patterns--such as how warm fronts always move up from the southeast, and how cold fronts originate in the northwest. The weather you describe isn't far removed from the lush Washington/Oregon region, and it happens for a specific reason. All those cold front clouds climb out of the sea full of water and are pushed east towards the Rockies. The high intrusion of land affects the clouds, squeegying the water over the Northwest. The clouds and the cold front continue over the mountains, where they deliver very little precipitation to the east side of the mountains. So, yes, all the rain between a large body of water and a mountain range is perfectly feasible. Just make sure you have an appropriate arid region on the other side of those mountains. (You can get this information online, I'm sure, but I learned it in 5th grade science. Your local meteorologist would know this, and more, and would probably love to get email from a grown up with an interesting question.)

[Kristen]

The Internet has a forum for eveything, so I just Google, for example, dressage forum, and learned a lot just from lurking and reading the noob questions and expert answers. For example, they won't publish the command you give a horse to make it rear, because it's too easy for an inexperienced rider to hurt himself or the horse or both. So the experts tell the noobs "you have to get that from your instructor, and he won't tell you until he knows you're ready."

It was on an archery forum that I learned bowmen don't "fire" projectiles from bows and crossbows. Arrows are loosed or shot, but not fired. flaming arrows can be lit, but then they are loosed.

And then of course there's always your local library.

[rjj7]

There is most certainly an aspect of 'wanting someone else to do the work'. To realistically create a fantasy world, you would have to have a solid knowledge base in Meteorology, Biology, Linguistics, Theology, Geology, Engineering, Animal Husbandry, and an exceedingly large number of craft skills; blacksmithing, weaving, shipbuilding, stonecutting, etc.

An author can, of course, get around a lot of that by simply not mentioning it and leaving a blank page in that world. There comes a point where the amount of additional immersion and background verisimilitude provided is not worth the amount of time and effort it would take to learn the material. For something like a horse, which is probably pretty central to the story (how many stories would be changed drastically if the heroes didn't have them?), it is necessary to put forward the effort, because the gains far outweigh the costs. Cloud patterns, not so much. So few people know enough about weather to be bumped out of the story by a bit of bad information that it is, from a cost/benefit analysis standpoint, not worth researching. I would very much like to know everything there is to know about weather, but to wait on writing till I have all pertinent knowledge is infeasible. So I will write what I know, look up what I must, and bemoan the fact that a lot of information is so difficult to obtain that obtaining it is infeasible.

I was aware of the effect that mountains have on clouds, but that then leads to the question: Do rivers provide enough evaporation to produce the same effect? An ocean's got plenty of water, but how much is enough? That's the sort of question that you can't just look up an answer to. But it's not important enough to the (any?) story to justify more than a few minutes checking.

Of course, the answer is to ask someone who knows; they can tailor their responses to what you need to know. I just never think of that. My problem, I guess.

[Bethany J.]

That's a good point - the research involved can be very informative and getting instant answers might be lazy and not conducive to a realistic fantasy world. BUT, maybe even just a website with links to helpful information (and suggestions for people to ask) would be good! Sometimes I'm not even sure where to start when I need to research an odd topic.