May Experiment: Cats and Characterization--Toby Explains It All (Patreon)

Cats and Characters: Toby Explains It All

Greetings and salutations from the Mad Fiction Laboratory. Here in Maine, we are knee deep in that time of year when the heavens scoff and say: April showers bring May flowers? What? No, dude, half the time it’s still snowing in April, you’ll take these June showers and gold rainy garbage you’ll like them and maybe I’ll think about flowers next month if you pay me. 

It is also a time of deep sorrow in the Lab. We have lost a denizen, and she has left a hole in the universe too big to ever fill and too small for most people to notice. My cat October, also known as Toby, Toblerone, To-To, Doc Ock, Tobicus Maximus, Comrade Tobachevsky, Miss Tobes, Princess Pantaloons, and Bantha Butt, passed away last week while I was stuck in New York and couldn’t be with her. What we thought was stress-related dehydration and refusing to eat turned out to be lymphoma, and to be perfectly honest, without cute mad science wordplay, I’m just blown apart by her absence, by the suddenness of it, by the whole concept of death in general and how horribly casually it can just bust through the windows of your life and steal all your stuff when you thought everything was safe. She was only eight. She died almost a year to the day after my beloved golden retriever. And yet the Evillest Cat in the World hangs in there at 19, snarling at passersby on the porch and biting small children whenever she gets the chance. There is no justice in this world. 

And so, approaching this month’s experiment, all I wanted to do was write about Toby. She’s all I’ve been thinking about, as I clean the vomit and fur and spilled gruel from the floor the room where I tried to nurse her back to health, thinking, for eight or nine days, that she was going to be okay, that any minute she’d snap out of it if I just held her close enough and fed her enough of her favorite food and showed her enough Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns and told her enough how beautiful she was, that I could love her back to the world of the living.

Aw, Rocky, that trick never works. 

But I’m not supposed to be telling you about my cat. I’m supposed to be teaching you How to Write Reel Gud. No matter how much the hole in the fabric of time where my baby used to be threatens to engulf everything, the show must…well. Go on. You don’t want to hear about that fluff-face you never met, you want to get some stone cold, hardcore, XXX insight into bookcraft. 

And yet, says the grieving Mad Fictioneer in her house by the sea, we can do both. We have the technology. 

Creating characters that people actually like and want to spend time with is one of the most constantly-discussed aspects of writing. Hell, many of us have enough trouble getting people to like us enough to want to spend time hanging out in the real world. People are messy and complicated and weird and usually it takes decades to make a convincing one so how are we supposed to do it in 300 pages? And that’s not even taking into account whether or not that character is maybe a gorilla or an intelligent shaft of moonlight or a shambling horror or a wyvern. 

I’ve said a lot about characters over the years. But I’ve stumbled across a new technique in the bombed-out crater of my emotional life through the last few weeks. And rather than telling you about it, like a good writer who does all her homework and sharpens all her pencils and brings an apple every day to eat luxuriously in front of a teacher who doesn’t make enough to afford fresh produce, I’m going to show you.

I’m going to tell you about Toby. 

October was the most beautiful cat you ever saw. She was the most beautiful cat anyone ever saw. One time, a little girl was visiting my house, saw Toby drinking water, and asked, in a hushed and awestruck voice: is that a cat? She looked like she was created in Jim Henson’s workshop for the express purpose of seducing those who love the wild and wily and the ever-so-slightly villainous. She was a Maine Coon, so you have to think bigger than you’re used to when it comes to cats, in all senses of the word—personality, heart, and belly. Her tail looked like a quill pen, and she always held it aloft in the shape of a question mark. She had huge gold-green eyes in an improbably enormous face, tortoiseshell fur that ranged from brown and red to grey to peach, so fine yet absurdly thick that no matter how you brushed and brushed it, it always matted and tangled up anyway, and grew so fast we had to shave her completely twice a year. It grew back longer, softer, wilder each time. Her tufts were so long their weight pulled down the tips of her ears and made her look terribly wise. She had the strangest purr, more like a trill, like you were listening to an alien purr a purr of profound existential uncertainty underwater. Sometimes, one of the chickens would chortle outside the kitchen window and I’d think Toby got stuck outside. 

Toby was a deeply emotional cat, strung as high and tight as violin strings. She always moved like she’d just seen Godzilla and was trying to keep it cool. She didn’t like children, she didn’t like thunderstorms, she didn’t like dry food, even the fancy stuff scientifically formulated for her breed, she didn’t like exercise or going outside or her brother. She didn’t like most things, in fact. She had a resting bitch face for the ages, so severe it should have been carved in marble and displayed in the Louvre, titled: This Cat Has No Time for Your Foolery. She hated more than one person petting her at once. Toby was a very proper and dignified cat, and felt such things were deviant. She thought affection should take place privately, behind closed doors, with no one watching. But if those conditions were met, look out—she would smother you with a savage abandon of love and kisses.

She loved only three things in this world, eating, one elderly German Shepard, and me. We used to joke that late at night, when everyone was asleep, she’d sneak into my study and play The Sims, only her Sims house was exactly the same as her regular house, only the only things in it were her and food and me. No other animals. No other people. No nasty phones or televisions to steal the affection that was her right. Just her and me forever, fat and fed and forsaking all others, softly illuminated by the glowing arrows over our huge heads. 

This one is odder and less presentable to the public at large: Toby was obsessed with licking plastic. I heard somewhere that this is common among cats who were weaned too soon or abandoned by their mothers, but Toby was perfectly well loved and cherished and consistently snuggled from birth. Yet I would come downstairs in the night and find her sitting in a corner, lovingly licking the corner of a bin bag, glaring at me as though I was disrupting mass at Notre Dame cathedral. 

She was terribly fastidious, but not in a prissy way. She just wanted everything, including and especially herself, to be clean and correct and in its place, and if it wasn’t, nothing could ever be right and she would have to sing a mournful song concerning the tragedy of the unscrubbed bathtub until the universe mended itself. 

Back when my books used to come to the house to be edited or copy edited in big envelopes full of physical, marked up, unbound paper instead of singing through the digital network of the world, Toby used to fall asleep on my manuscripts almost every night. It was like something deep in her cells was inexorably drawn toward the stacks of pages, and if so much of a chapter was left on the dining room table, I’d find her fast asleep on it with the tiniest smile on her face as she dreamed.

I never once trimmed her claws. Somehow, by an eldritch magic I know not of, they stayed neat and short until the day she died. 

I once saw her go after a mouse via the usual Maine Coon technique: rearing up in the air like a lion on a national flag and falling paw-first onto the thing to stun it with her sheer size and enthusiasm. She then shook her head, surprised by the force of her own landing, looked desperately around for the mouse—up, down, around, under her paws, in the doorjamb—and then, upon finding nothing, settle down for a nap like settled down for a nap like nothing had happened, no one saw a thing, she’d never wanted it in the first place. The mouse was hiding in her prodigious belly fur, eyes bulging with terror while Toby snoozed away unconcerned. 

When I first brought her home, we didn’t leave my bedroom for a week. Nobody but us. I don’t think she ever stopped thinking that was how the world was meant to be shaped. Two girls and a big red bed and a thousand autumn crows to watch outside a high window. 

Toby was extremely particular about water. She would not touch her bowl if a dog had drunk from it this decade, or another cat, or if it was a little too warm, or a little too cold, or the bowl wasn’t clean enough, or it had sat too still for too long, or if too much of her fur had fallen into it, or if the moon was in Scorpio, or if the local news had upset her. She would sit primly next to the bowl, her spine as straight as a finishing school headmistress, and meow her most plaintive, melodious meow until I washed out the bowl and filled it with the freshest of all possible tap water. The champagne of tap water. When we heard that meow, we used to say Toby needed her bubbles. 

She had about twenty different meows, all fine-tuned to communicate clearly, efficiently and, though you won’t believe it, artistically. There was the bubbles meow. There was the my litterbox does not sparkle, and therefore I am morally compromised meow. There was the I want to be snuggled in your lap but I am too fat and/or refined to do the jumping-up, please arrange me the way I like it meow. There was the I am starving to death because the world is cruel and not everything is made of food you’re doing this on purpose meow. There was the leave me alone I’m in a mood and considering the socio-political implications of public funding for the arts meow. There was the why did you have to get another cat/dog/chicken/hobby was I not company enough meow. There was the polite may I come in meow. There was the less polite the current situation is displeasing me please make it die in a fire meow. There was the I want to go outside but I am afraid because outside is lava meow. There was the late night long dark teatime of the soul meow. There was the love me meow, the I don’t care how heavy I am I need to be all over you right now or the world will literally end meow, the one she mostly saved for me, accompanied always by a fond bonk of her giant head against my giant head. 

Whenever I was sad, she knew. She always knew. She’d appear from whatever dimension cats occupy when not with humans, meow her I know, everything is hard, but I am easy meow, curl up beside me, and put her white paw on my chest.

When she got sick, she never let me know. She just got a lot more insistent about needing to be next to me, no matter what I was doing. I thought we were having the best time together for those last few months, that somehow at eight years old, we’d found a whole new level of closeness no one else knew about. And when she got really sick, when I left for France and came back to a cat who’d lost a quarter of her body weight and the light in her eyes, I thought she had just gotten afraid because I was gone, the way she always did, refusing to talk to me for exactly two days after I returned from any business trip, seeking me out and then turning her back on me and showing me her rump so I’d know how mad she was, and stopped eating or drinking. I wrapped her in a towel and held her and fed her like the baby I’ve never had for eight days in the library while I finished a vastly overdue novel and we watched every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation together, because I’ve always found it soothing and she’d never seen it before. It’s a future she would have loved, full of alien trilling and impeccably clean spaces and the purest of water available at the perfect temperature with the slightest meow. 

Toby held on for eight days. She even gained weight, got the brightness back in her eyes, purred against me and faintly, weakly, touched her head to mine. She held on exactly as long as I stayed with her. But I had to go to an industry show in New York, the biggest of the year, booked in months ago, I couldn’t cancel. She wouldn’t go while I was there. She wouldn’t leave me. Whether she just wanted to stay as long as she could be held by me or she couldn’t bear the thought of both of us holding her at the vet or she knew I couldn’t handle seeing her die, she clung to every second that she could get with me with the steeliest pair of stiff upper whiskers. When my flight took off, she was still very sick, but she was herself. When it landed, she was fading away. 

When she died I was standing against a glass wall in a convention center in New York, desperately leaning into a bad cell signal. They held a phone up to her ear. I told her she was going to that Sims house where it was just us, and infinite food, and no exercise, and no one else forever. I told her to think about Captain Picard and how annoyed he was by everyone, just like her, just like me, just like us, think of the stars and those long, spotless halls and plastic as far as the eye could see, and me holding her forever, which is all I ever wanted out of this horrible stupid life. I know, darling, everything is so hard, but I am easy, and I love you, and it’s just two girls in a big red bed now, just like you wanted, for always. 

She was wrapped in my clothes and she could hear my voice. Maybe she thought I was there, just out of sight. She lifted her head and meowed when she heard my voice. And that was all. 

Toby was a wedding present. One of my dearest friends was a Maine Coon breeder, and I’d always wanted one. I saw her and my fate was sealed. Just like that. She died the year I got divorced. Any cosmos that pretends like it can go on without her in it is a dirty broken liar and I hate it and want it to burn. 

Okay. 

I’ve stopped crying now. 

On to the lesson. 

People are hard. But cats and dogs and birds and hamsters and iguanas are easy. Everyone loves them. If you don’t think that’s so, consider the fact that you can mete out murder most foul in the most egregious and grotesque fashion to every human in a story, line the pages with their bodies, paint the cover with blood, and you’ll be praised to the heavens. You might even get an HBO show. But lay one finger on a dog or cat…

So here it is: write your cat/dog/pet/someone else's pet, change the anatomical nouns and a few verbs, give them human names, and call it a day. The most beloved character I ever wrote, a half-wyvern, half-library called A-Through-L, and so much of him comes from Toby, from the way she moved and the way I imagined she’d talk. They are as quirky and weird—sometimes weirder—than any people you’ll ever meet. We tend to go for the archetypal in SFF rather than the specific, but the specific is where the good stuff is. Animals are ALL specificity. They are inexplicable and transparent, they are needy and aloof, they are stubborn and helpless by turns. It’s hard to create a character with all the dimensions, vulnerabilities, and fascinating neuroses of a real person, because our ideas of what People should be get in the way. People have to have dignity and their fixations should be endearing and their behavior appropriate. People have to make sense. But they don’t, really, and it’s only that we are a People so we want those things that drive us to give characters in a book manageable, manicured inner lives. That and having to wedge them into 100,000 words with a bunch of other characters. But no one in the real world is all that manageable and few are manicured. Inner lives are jungles, and they make jungles on the outside, too. And the people we remember most and tell stories about forever are very often the ones that don’t make sense, that require understanding and a lot of petting, that sometimes pee in your shoe because they’re angry.

So if you want to create a believable, lovable person, let go of your ideas of People. 

Our animals are the thing we see when we look up from our work. And they are often better people than we are. People want to love animals, unless given a strong reason not to. They most want to not love other people, unless given a strong reason to do it. Our hearts go out to domestic animals, we want to protect them, we want to make things good for them. It’s wired into millions of years of co-evolution. Use that. Make it a shorthand. And know that it works the other way around, too—we love people when we see them hurting and want to help. We love people for the way they love others. We love how they talk about the things they love. If your narrator is describing something or someone they love, no matter how, and perhaps especially if it is, small, it is hard not to become at least a little attached to them. The transitive property of love is such that by the way they talk about the object of their affection, we feel affection toward it, and toward anyone who could feel that much about something so little.

But nothing I say will convince you as much as actually doing it. So, despite knowing that I’m about to make myself cry again, watch this, and just try not to like Anna and the narrator who loves her. 

Anna was the most beautiful human you ever saw. She was the most beautiful human anyone ever saw. One time, a little boy was visiting my house, saw Anna drinking a glass of water in front of the kitchen sin, and asked, in a hushed and awestruck voice: is that a girl? She looked like she was created in Jim Henson’s workshop for the express purpose of seducing those who love the wild and wily and the ever-so-slightly villainous. She was a Mainer, so you have to think bigger than you’re used to when it comes to girls, in all senses of the word—personality, heart, and belly. Her long neck looked like a quill, and she always held it to one side, almost in the shape of a question mark. She had huge gold-green eyes in an improbably enormous face, tortoiseshell hair that ranged from brown and red to grey to peach, so fine yet absurdly thick that no matter how you brushed and brushed it, it always matted and tangled up anyway, and grew so fast she shaved her head completely twice a year. It grew back longer, softer, wilder each time. Her eyelashes were so long their weight pulled down the tips of her lids, which made her look terribly wise. She had the strangest voice, more like a trill, like you were listening to an alien purr a purr of profound existential uncertainty underwater. Sometimes, one of the chickens would chortle outside the kitchen window and I’d think Anna was outside, even though I knew she was upstairs in the shower. 

Anna was a deeply emotional creature, strung high and tight as violin strings. She always moved like she’d just seen Godzilla and was trying to keep it cool. She didn’t like children, she didn’t like thunderstorms, she didn’t like dry foods, even the fancy, expensive gluten-free stuff, she didn’t like exercise or going outside or her brother. She didn’t like most things, in fact. She had a resting bitch face for the ages, so severe it should have been carved in marble and displayed in the Louvre, titled: This Girl Has No Time for Your Foolery. She hated more than one person touching her at once. Anna was a very proper and dignified person, and felt such things were deviant. She thought affection should take place privately, behind closed doors, with no one watching. But if those conditions were met, look out—she would smother you with a savage abandon of love and kisses.

She loved only three things in this world, eating, one elderly German Shepard, and me. We used to joke that late at night, when everyone was asleep, she’d sneak into my study and play The Sims, only her Sims house was exactly the same as our regular house, except that the only things in it were her and food and me. No animals. No other people. No nasty phones or televisions to steal the affection that was her right by birth. Just her and me forever, fat and fed and forsaking all others, softly illuminated by the glowing arrows over our huge heads. 

This one is odder and less presentable to the public at large: Anna was obsessed with licking plastic. I heard somewhere that this is common among children who were weaned too soon or abandoned by their mothers, but Anna was perfectly well loved and cherished and consistently snuggled from birth. Yet I would come downstairs in the night and find her sitting in a corner, lovingly licking the corner of a bin bag, glaring at me as though I was disrupting mass at Notre Dame cathedral. 

She was terribly fastidious, but not in a prissy way. She just wanted everything, including and especially herself, to be clean and correct and in its place, and if it wasn’t, nothing could ever be right and she would have to sing a mournful song concerning the tragedy of the unscrubbed bathtub until the universe mended itself. 

Back when my books used to come to the house to be edited or copy edited in big envelopes full of physical, marked up, unbound paper instead of singing through the digital network of the world, Anna used to fall asleep on my manuscripts almost every night. It was like something deep in her cells was inexorably drawn toward the stacks of pages, and if so much of a chapter was left on the dining room table, I’d find her resting her head on it like a pillow, fast asleep with the tiniest smile on her face as she dreamed.

I never once saw her trim or file her nails. Somehow, by an eldritch magic I know not of, they stayed neat and perfect and lovely until the day she died. 

I once saw her go after a job via the usual Anna technique: rearing up in the air like a lion on a national flag and falling ambition-first onto the thing she wanted to stun it into submission with her sheer strength and enthusiasm. She came home from the interview, shaking her head, surprised by the force of her own landing. She looked desperately for a response for days—up, down, around, in her inbox, on her phone—and then, upon finding nothing, settled down for a nap like nothing had happened, no one saw a thing, she’d never wanted it in the first place. The acceptance letter was hiding in her spam folder, bulging with lost promise, while Anna snoozed away unconcerned. 

When I first brought her to my place, we didn’t leave my bedroom for a week. Nobody but us. I don’t think she ever stopped thinking that was how the world was meant to be shaped. Two girls and a big red bed and a thousand autumn crows to watch outside a high window. 

Anna was extremely particular about water. She would not touch a glass if anyone else had drunk from it this decade, or if it was a little too warm, or a little too cold, or the glass wasn’t clean enough, or if the pipes weren’t, or it had sat too still for too long, or if one of her hairs had fallen into it, or if the moon was in Scorpio, or if the local news had upset her. She would stand primly next to the glass cabinet, her spine as straight as a finishing school headmistress, and sigh her most plaintive, melodious sigh until I found the perfect pristine glass hiding in the back where no one had ever touched it, and filled it with the freshest of all possible tap water. The champagne of tap water. When I heard that sigh, I used to tease that Miss Anna needed her bubbles. 

She had about twenty different sighs, all fine-tuned to communicate clearly, efficiently and, though you won’t believe it, artistically. There was the bubbles meow. There was the my house does not sparkle, and therefore I am morally compromised sigh. There was the I want to be snuggled but I am too fat and/or refined to do the settling-in, please arrange yourself around me sigh. There was the I am starving to death because the world is cruel and not everything is made of food you’re doing this on purpose, pantry sigh. There was the leave me alone I’m in a mood and considering the socio-political implications of public funding for the arts sigh. There was the why did you have to get a cat/dog/chicken/hobby was I not company enough sigh. There was the polite may I come in sigh. There was the less polite the current situation is displeasing me please make it die in a fire sigh. There was the I want to go outside but I am afraid because outside is lava sigh. There was the late night long dark teatime of the soul sigh. There was the love me sigh, the I don’t care how heavy I am I need to be all over you right now or the world will literally end sigh, the one she mostly saved for me, accompanied always by a fond bonk of her giant head against my giant head. 

Whenever I was sad, she knew. She always knew. She’d appear from whatever dimension girls occupy when they are alone, sigh her I know, everything is hard, but I am easy meow, curl up beside me, and put her pale hand on my chest.

When she got sick, she never let me know. She just got a lot more insistent about needing to be next to me, no matter what I was doing. I thought we were having the best time together for those last few months, that somehow at thirty-eight years old, we’d found a whole new level of closeness no one else knew about. And when she got really sick, when I left for France and came back to a girl who’d lost a quarter of her body weight and the light in her eyes, I thought she had just gotten afraid because I was gone, the way she always did, refusing to talk to me for exactly two days after I returned from any business trip, seeking me out and then turning her back on me and showing me her lovely spine so I’d know how mad she was, and stopped eating or drinking. I wrapped her in a quilt and held her and fed her like the baby I’ve never had for eight days in the library while I finished a writing a vastly overdue novel and we watched every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation together, because I’ve always found it soothing and she’d never seen it before. It’s a future she would have loved, full of alien trilling and impeccably clean spaces and the purest of water available at the perfect temperature with the slightest sigh. 

Anna held on for eight days. She even gained weight, got the brightness back in her eyes, smiled against me and faintly, weakly, touched her head to mine. She held on exactly as long as I stayed with her. But I had to go to an industry show in New York, the biggest of the year, booked in months ago, I couldn’t cancel. She wouldn’t go while I was there. She wouldn’t leave me. Whether she just wanted to stay as long as she could be held by me or she couldn’t bear the thought of both the doctor and I holding her at the same time or she knew I couldn’t handle seeing her die, she clung to every second that she could get with me with the steeliest of stiff upper lips. When my flight took off, she was still very sick, but she was herself. When it landed, she was fading away. 

When she died I was standing against a glass wall in a convention center in New York, desperately leaning into a bad cell signal. They held a phone up to her ear. I told her she was going to that Sims house where it was just us, and infinite dinner, and no exercise, and no one else forever. I told her to think about Captain Picard and how annoyed he was by everyone, just like her, just like me, just like us, think of the stars and those long, spotless halls and plastic as far as the eye could see, and me holding her forever, which is all I ever wanted out of this horrible stupid life. I know, darling, everything is so hard, but I am easy, and I love you, and it’s just two girls in a big red bed now, just like you wanted, for always. 

She was wrapped in my old college sweatshirt and she could hear my voice. Maybe, in the fog of her last moments, she thought I was there, just out of sight. She lifted her head and sighed when she heard my voice. And that was all. 

I met Anna the day I got married to someone else. One of my dearest friends introduced us. I saw her and my fate was sealed. Just like that. She died the year I got divorced. Any cosmos that pretends like it can go on without her in it is a dirty broken liar and I hate it and want it to burn.

See? 

Goodbye, Toby. Goodbye, Anna. Nothing in this world will ever be as good as you.