The questions I’m most frequently asked as a writer are these: Were do you get your ideas?  How do you decide what to write?

For me, stories—whether long (a novel) or short (a short story)—begin with a seed. The seed can be a scene, a character, or a place.

I suspect this is true of most writers, including writers much greater than I. Faulkner described having an image of a little girl climbing a pear tree to look into the parlor of the house where her grandmother’s casket had been placed. Her brothers are on the ground looking up at her. That single scene was all Faulkner had, but it recognized it as a germ of something greater, and from it grew one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, The Sound and the Fury.

For my novel-in-progress, the seed was walking into San Quentin prison as a volunteer ten years ago and wondering how someone might escape. This gave birth to a character (a woman) who wondered the same thing. Then the inmate she would help escape appeared, and those two characters sprang to life. I watched them happen in my mind.

I watched it happen in my mind. Well, yes. Though Bill Smoot (who else?) created these characters, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like they arrived and I watched them, occasionally using my author’s hand to nudge them this way or that. But most of what they said, did, felt, and thought came from them. I’m like a god who created humans and endowed them with free will.

The seed for one of my stories was a bad memory of having a pet rabbit killed by a raccoon.  When that memory resurfaced in a way that haunted me beyond reason, I was moved to make it into a story. I imagined who might own the rabbit, how they decided to get one in the first place, the aftermath of its being killed. The result was “Raccoon” (click here to read in Tupelo Quarterly).

I’ve always loved this passage from T. S. Eliot: “Why, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt…do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path…such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.” Those certain images are the seeds.

Though current neuroscience finds the popularized right brain-left brain dichotomy to be oversimplified, I think it works as a metaphor to say that my right brain knows a seed when it sees one, for reasons that the left brain cannot fathom. My memories sit on the shelves of my mind, but sometimes one will glow and pulse with life. I lift from the shelf and breathe life into it. I write the stories it is their destiny to become.

Animals in fiction

When someone observed that animals are frequent in my fiction, I realized it’s true.

Asked why, I couldn’t give a reason. The animals in my work are no more planned than a fawn stepping from the trees or a hawk soaring across the sky with a snake in its talons. Welcome but uninvited, animals show up in my stories, as they do in the works of many writers.

I am reluctant to call them symbols, though sometimes they are. Kierkegaard reminds us that one lives forward and knows backward. Writing and reading are like that. I realize an animal’s symbolism later, even if I felt it sooner. In my story “Broken Eggs,” (click to read in Verdad) the girl finds the frightening miracle of life in a dropped egg. In my story “Raccoon,” (click to read in Tupelo Quarterly) a couple falling in love acquire a rabbit, feed it, delight in it, offer it love. The rabbit accepts the love—to a point—like the woman in the relationship. Soon after the couple splits up, the rabbit is savagely killed by a raccoon, and the nothing is left for the bereft man but to bury the body. I nod in agreement when readers point out the symbolism, but it was not self-consciously intended.

I’ve always liked Melville’s idea about characters serving as Drummond lights, characters whose function is to illuminate others. Animals do that, in literature as in life. They shine light on our care, our indifference, or on our cruelty. They rumble like storm clouds on the horizon. In my story “Hetrick’s Army,” the leader orders his troops to shoot a stray dog, and we see the cruelty in Bob Hetrick. When Charles Bovary approaches Emma’s farm for the first time, his horse shies. The warning is lost on Charles, but it stays with the reader like a small pebble in the shoe. In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the Bundrens’ wagon upsets in the swollen river, and the eyes of the drowning mules say that the horror is not just the event, but the family itself. The family has been seen.

Descartes believed in two realms of being—body and spirit. A human being was a ghost in a machine. Lacking souls, animals were nothing but machines. His logic was perfect, his understanding blind. Every animal in literature, like those in the field or the forest, undermines Cartesian dualism. Though philosophy might have moved on, our civilization is still Cartesian. We treat animals as raw material for our food factories, wind-up zoo toys for our amusement.

In the myths of various cultures, human life represents a fall from a long-forgotten paradise. Humans lived in fellowship with animals, or were married to them, or embodied their spirits. Now we inhabit a fallen world. If animals remind us or our fall, they also provide a glimpse, like a barely remembered childhood, of a life without boundaries.

All literature addresses the question, what does it mean to be human? Animals in literature pose the same question. The value of animals is that they live without costumes, titles, or roles. Their aggression is not disguised as moralism. They feel no shame for their feelings. Past and future matter little. Those that are wild need to be left alone, and those that are not need us to be their stewards. They need our care.

Even if we cannot name it, we sense the power of animals. We have an intimation that they have meaning. This explains the impulse of the national park tourist who approaches a bear, the apartment owner who puts out peanuts for squirrels. We hunger for them like a lost love. Once in Hawaii I was sitting on the black rock lava flow that dropped off into very deep water. No more than twenty feet away, a great whale breached the water and I felt it look at me with one great eye. The impulse to jump in and swim to it was overwhelming. Had it not dropped beneath the surface and disappeared, I think I might have answered some wild call.

In literature as in life, as both a reader and a writer, my heart quickens at the appearance of an animal. I want to jump in and swim in its direction.