Breaking the Taboo

by Kate George

 There is somewhat of an unwritten law in writing about kids and animals. It goes something like "No Harm Shall Come to Children or Pets."

I’ve heard a number of variations of that rule through the years, and I pretty much stuck to it. That is, until I went to a writing seminar with writer/agent Donald Maass. 

Donald spent some time researching best-selling novels and discovered that one of the things they had in common was a high level of emotion. I learned a lot from Donald Maass but the most surprising thing was that bestsellers didn’t necessarily follow the rule about kids and animals.

Forgive me for messing up this quote, Don, but here’s what I heard: “Don’t just kill the kitten, make the kitten save the child’s life and then have it die.” In other words, elevate the pet to the level of a hero and then when the reader is as attached as she can be, kill the sucker flat. 

Yikes. “Really?” I asked. “Even in books with a lot of humor?”

Yes, even when books are meant to be funny.

I wasn’t sure I subscribed to that theory. The “no harm” rule had been hammered into me pretty firmly. I’m not really brave enough to break big taboos. And yet I did.

I got to the point in Crazy Little Thing Called Dead where something drastic had to happen. Something that would push my protagonist into acting against her own nature. She had to be reduced to a flaming ball of murderous rage. Actually Bree was more like a frozen ball of icy rage, but you get the drift. Something had to happen that was horrific. I suppose I could have had the antagonist kill one of her brothers, or her parents. But Bree’s family is not on the page much. Her fur-babies, however, are on the page quite often. They are her children, her companions, her joy in life. Her cat and three of her dogs die in a fire. Her beagle attempts to save her tabby before she dies.
 
Good lord, it’s awful. How could I have written that?

I knew there would be some fallout. Readers were bound to be upset. But I trusted Donald Maass when he said that the emotion would improve my books. I was not prepared for the level of hatred in the letters I received. I was called a murderer. I was told I should be blackballed. No one should let me comment on their blog. One woman who was particularly distraught told me that I am God in my stories and I could have saved the animals. They didn’t have to die. But that’s not how it seems to me. Stories unfold. They come to me. I don’t create them, at least not in a conscious way. I avoided the fire as long as I could, but it needed to be there.

Did you see Romancing the Stone? Do you remember how Laura Wilder cries while she’s writing her books, tissues everywhere? That was me. It didn’t help that we had recently lost a dog to cancer. I was a weeping mess.

The negative un-fan mail has been fairly intense; however, I am also getting a lot more positive comments. More readers telling me they like my books. Asking when the next Bree MacGowan mystery is coming out. I’m getting more “yes” mail than I’m getting “hell no” mail.

So what have I learned? Well, for one, Donald Maass was right when he said readers would become more invested. The readers that don’t like my books really don’t like them. Some would like to see me incarcerated for crimes committed. I haven’t pointed out to them that incarceration would give me more time to write. That might be insensitive. And frankly, I don’t want to give anyone any further reason to come looking for me. It’s scary how much some people hate me.

On the other hand the opposite is also true. It’s wonderful how much some fans like me. I get messages everyday telling me how much they like Bree.

Have my sales increased? Yes, but that may have happened anyway. The more you write, the more you sell. It’s kind of a rule. So the jury is out on the numbers.

Would I do it again? Kill pets? I don’t know. I do know I will push my characters out of their comfort zone. I will create situations that push them into doing things they wouldn’t normally do. Because that’s the stuff that compelling stories are made of. I’m not making any promises. I will write what I need to write for the stories. Whatever I write, not everyone will be happy, and that’s okay. My readers will be happy, and they’re the only people I have to please.

Do I recommend breaking the “no harm” rule? I can’t tell you what to write, but I can advise you to grow some pretty thick skin before you try it.

Kate George is the author of the popular Bree MacGowan mystery series. She lives in an old farmhouse in the backwoods of Vermont with her husband, four kids, and three rescue dogs. Visit her at www.kategeorge.com, or contact her at kate@kategeorge.com.

Tell me your pet stories!

By Sandra Parshall

Tell me your pet stories today and you’ll have a chance to win a hardcover copy of my new book, Under the Dog Star – plus the right to name an animal in a future novel.

Under the Dog Star is a mystery, first and foremost, but it’s also about veterinarian Rachel Goddard’s determination to rescue abandoned and mistreated dogs and give them the better life they deserve. Rachel doesn’t resemble her creator in many ways, but she gets her passion for protecting animals directly from me. I’ve spent many years of my life with wonderful, loving pets that other people didn’t want or wouldn’t care for properly.

On two different occasions when I was much younger, I swiped kittens from people who were neglecting them so seriously that I feared for their lives. I kept one. I gave the other – a tiny ball of white fur that was forced to sleep outside, regardless of the weather – to a friend’s mother, who named her Mary and loved her dearly for the rest of her pampered life. (Mary’s story, slightly altered, is mentioned in my book Broken Places.)

My husband and I have had several cats that came to us because their original owners didn’t want them. Sam, a beautiful blond tabby, was a neighborhood cat who visited me when I worked in my garden. I never knew who he belonged to. Then came a day when he wouldn’t leave and was obviously hungry. We couldn’t locate his owners, and we concluded they had moved and left him behind. Sammy became ours, and we cherished him.

Frank was immediately recognizable as a stray or abandoned cat. Despite prodigious hunting skills, he was so thin I could see the outlines of his ribs, and he had bald patches in his dull coat. One ear had been almost completely torn off, probably in a fight with another roaming cat. Frank had once had a home – he wore an old flea collar – but he’d been on his own for a long time and might not survive another winter. I began feeding him. He wanted the food but was so wary of people that it took a couple of months to persuade him to let me touch him lightly and briefly. After trust was established, Frank became our cat. I cut off that old flea collar, we had him neutered, he put on weight and his blotchy black and white fur grew thick and shiny. He was never a beauty, but his joy in belonging somewhere at last gave him a proud demeanor that would charm anyone. Frank died many years ago, but he lives on as Rachel’s one-eared, squawky-voiced cat in my books.

Simon

We acquired our wonderful Simon when the young woman who had him discovered that her live-in boyfriend couldn’t stand the noise and demands of a lonely, frightened kitten who had just been separated from his mother and litter mates. He weighed about two pounds at the time, but he took charge of us immediately, letting us know he intended to sleep on our bed, not in a cat bed on the floor. Simon and I had the same birthday, and of all our cats he was my truest soul mate. We lost him on 2006, when he was almost 18.

Simon had grown up with Nicholas, our first Abyssinian, and when Nicky died we wanted to bring kittens into the house to help Simon – and us – endure the loss. We wanted another Aby, but we also wanted to give a home to a kitten that desperately needed one. Before Gabriel, a ruddy Abyssinian like Nicky, was old enough for us to take him from the breeder’s home, we found Emma through the Feline Foundation of Greater Washington. 

Emma

Emma had been abandoned as a tiny kitten at a truck stop in West Virginia. It was pure luck that the son of a man who does cat rescues happened to spot her running around, terrified, under the wheels of the enormous trucks. He snatched her up and delivered her to his father, who kept her long enough to make sure she was healthy, then drove her all the way to Northern Virginia, where she would have a better chance of finding a home. Emma is 10 years old now, still bossing Gabriel around, still pretty much running our household.

Have you adopted a homeless dog or cat? Tell me your story and you’ll have a chance to win a free copy of Under the Dog Star and name an animal in a future book. 
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Find and support a no-kill animal shelter in your area. http://www.nokillnetwork.org/

How Mr. Piggles Rewrote My Book

Sandra Parshall

I thought donating naming rights for animals in one of my novels would be an easy way to contribute to charity auctions at mystery conventions and wouldn’t have any effect on the book. Because my protagonist, Rachel Goddard, is a veterinarian, I’ll always have animals in my books and will always be in need of names for them. I’ll just stick in the “purchased” names without changing anything, right?

To my surprise, those animal names led to some major revisions in Broken Places–all of which strengthened the story.

I first sold naming rights at Bouchercon in Baltimore in 2008. I offered to let someone name a dog. Bidding was going well enough, but it could have been better, so I spoke up and offered to throw in a cat too. This, predictably, led auctioneer Chris Grabenstein to comment on the perils of throwing a cat, but it also inspired Meg Born to raise her hand and say that if I added a guinea pig, she would pay handsomely. Sold! I did, and Meg did.

Then I thought, “Guinea pig? I don’t even have a guinea pig in the story!”

Back at home, I had to do some research about guinea pigs because I've never kept one. Unless you're a guinea pig aficionado, you would not believe how many books about these animals are in print. You would think every home in the nation harbored the cute little rodents. Anyway, after I learned a bit about the species, I realized I had a perfect place for Mr. Piggles, Meg’s guinea pig. My hero Tom Bridger has a seven-year-old nephew, Simon, who plays a role in Broken Places. Giving Mr. Piggles to Simon allowed me to write a short scene where I could show the bond between Simon and my heroine, Rachel, as well as cast suspicion on another character. To bring Mr. Piggles to life, I used what Meg had told me about his habit of soliciting treats by lifting a tiny, empty bowl in his teeth and squeaking.

As it turned out, Meg didn’t have a cat’s name in mind, so she named two dogs instead. Again, I added animal characters I hadn’t planned for. A crusty old geezer who lives next door to two murder victims comes off as completely unsympathetic, not to mention suspicious, when he’s introduced in a scene with Tom Bridger. I didn’t want readers to make up their minds about him immediately, though. He acquired Maggie and Lisa, the dogs named by Meg. His late wife had doted on the dogs, and since her death he has pampered them out of love for her. Who could hate a guy like that?

Still working on Broken Places, I offered animal naming rights at the Malice Domestic charity auction in spring of 2009. When Marisa Young bought this auction “item” neither of us knew that she would help me make a breakthrough in a vital section of the book. The dog name Marisa donated was Cricket. I don’t want to give away too much by revealing how Cricket changed my story, but when I was looking for a place to put her, I realized what was missing from a certain part of the book and how I could fix it. Thank you, Marisa and Cricket!

Of course, not all the animals in Broken Places were named by other people. Rachel’s African gray parrot, Cicero, and her cat Frank (who has one and a half ears) carried over from the previous book, Disturbing the Dead. Cicero was inspired by our veterinarian’s green parrot and shares a bad habit with him–a habit that saves Rachel’s life. Frank is a replica of a cat we adopted many years ago when he was a starving, beat-up stray.

Rachel’s friend Ben Hern—a murder suspect in Broken Places—is a popular cartoonist who uses his cat Hamilton and his dachshund Sebastian in his comic strip, Furballs. Hamilton is named for the handsome cat (pictured) who lived in Lelia Taylor’s Creatures ‘n’ Crooks Bookshoppe. (Hamilton is now retired from bookselling and leads a life of feline leisure.) Sebastian has a name that I just happen to like.

I may be finished with naming my own animal characters, though. The names that came to me through auctions worked minor miracles on the manuscript of Broken Places. Maybe the names I auctioned at Bouchercon in Indianapolis will work the same magic on my current project. If I’m still in need of inspiration, the next Malice Domestic auction is coming right up.

Don't kill the cat. Please.

Sandra Parshall

The question pops up regularly on e-lists like DorothyL (where it has been discussed this week), but as an animal lover I’m surprised anyone has to ask it: Why do so many readers get upset when a pet is harmed in a novel?

I can write scenes in which pets are temporarily endangered, but I could no more produce a graphic description of animal abuse than I could write a description of a child being raped. Reading such a scene turns my stomach, and more often than not I give up on a book if I come across one.

There are people who say that since these things are part of life, it’s ridiculous to reject them in fiction – especially in fiction that revolves around murder. Why is it that I can read and write about human characters being shot, stabbed, strangled, and run down by vehicles, but I can’t bear the thought of fictional animals being hurt?

Several reasons come to mind.

Animals are like human children – innocent and dependent. Not even a tiger has a fighting chance against a human with a gun, and a pet cat or dog is heartbreakingly vulnerable. Humans have domesticated dogs and cats and made them dependent on us for everything – food, shelter, affection, and safety. In return, they give us their hearts. Neglecting or abusing a creature that wants only to spend its life in faithful companionship strikes me as unspeakably cruel. I feel the same way about wild animals in zoos. We have taken their freedom, and in many cases destroyed their natural habitats. We have a responsibility to treat them well and give them as good a life as possible under less than desirable circumstances. I despise circuses with animal acts and believe they should be outlawed. There is simply no justification for using animals in that way.

But the animals in novels aren’t real, so their suffering isn’t real. Why do I object to descriptions of their imaginary suffering? The main reason is that I don’t want those images in my head. I don’t want to read a book that I can’t stand to remember afterward. I’m also afraid that such scenes may desensitize some readers to animal suffering, or reinforce the beliefs of those who think animals have no emotions and don’t feel pain the same way humans do.

From a purely artistic perspective, I think that relying on animal abuse to show the reader how evil a character is will often result in weak writing, however violent it may be. Kicking a cat, shooting a dog – those are cliches, done to death, if you’ll pardon the expression. An author should try to come up with something more original. (Remember that Hitler adored his dog.)

On the other hand, I’m a sucker for characters who love animals. A writer who can capture an animal’s distinct personality and its unique relationship with a human companion will always win me over. Animals are invaluable for showing the reader a side of a character that might not come through in dealings with other people. We don’t put on an act around our pets. We let them see our true natures.

A writer is entitled to write anything she or he wants to put on paper. I wouldn’t want anyone violating my freedom of expression by telling me what I can or cannot write about. But readers have a right to pass up books they don’t enjoy reading. When I’m browsing in a bookstore or library, I’m a reader, and if a novel contains brutality toward animals, I will pass it up.

Here are the two companions who know what I’m really like and remind me every day of the human obligation to treat animals with kindness and compassion. Gabriel is an Abyssinian, purchased from a breeder.


Emma was abandoned at a truck stop when she was about four weeks old, and we adopted her a couple months later from the Feline Foundation of Greater Washington.