Why I Wrote a Story Narrated by a Dog

The first line of Riverspook is about a smell. Not a sight. That was the decision that made the whole book possible, and I didn’t arrive at it on purpose so much as back into it after everything else failed.

What the book actually does

One clarification before the craft talk, because the title of this post oversimplifies. Riverspook isn’t narrated only by a dog. Most of it is, in first person, present tense, from inside a black Lab called Red. The rest cuts away to the humans—the breeder who wakes to find five of her litter gone, the man who left the latch unengaged, the veterinarian who reads the tracks. Two nervous systems, two vocabularies, one morning.

That structure was the answer to a problem I couldn’t solve any other way. The survival half of the story has to be inside the animal, because nobody watching from outside a forest can tell you what being lost in one is like. The consequence half—the licensing, the liability, a business that could end over this—can only be understood by an adult who knows what is at stake. Neither point of view can carry both.

What changes when the narrator is a dog

Three things, and they turned out to be most of the craft of the book.

Scent becomes plot. A sighted narrator walks into a room and reports what is there. A scenting narrator walks into the same room and receives the last several hours of it, roughly in order—who came through, how long ago, whether they were afraid. Information a human character would need a whole scene to discover arrives in a single breath. That is enormously useful, and it is also a problem, because it makes withholding hard.

Vocabulary shrinks and the world gets bigger. Red has words for what he has met before—songbirds, the raccoons that raid the garbage cans, the humans who feed him. He has no word for the thing outside the fence, and he never acquires one. His sister reaches for wolves and bears as guesses, which is exactly what a frightened young animal would do: grab the nearest available noun and get it wrong. Everything Red cannot name, he has to describe instead, and description is where the reading pleasure lives.

Dishonesty becomes almost impossible. Dogs don’t perform stoicism. Nobody genuinely inside an animal’s head can write him being brave and mean it as a pose. He is either afraid or he isn’t, and if he acts anyway, that is courage rather than a personality trait. That one distinction ended up carrying the book’s whole moral argument.

The hardest technical problem

Nobody in this story has a name. They’re too young. Karen says the real names come when they go to their forever families, so for now she tells them apart with small dabs of colored paint on their heads, reapplied every week. Which left me with a narrator who could not say his own name, referring to seven siblings who could not say theirs, in a book that needed the reader to keep all of them straight.

The paint solved it. Red, Blue, Brown, Green, White, Orange, Purple, Violet. It reads as a naming convention, and it is also literally what is on their heads. Red says the mark feels as much a part of him as his black fur, and that line did more work than any amount of explanation would have.

Two things about the names outside the story

Riverspook is dedicated to Ridley—a chocolate Lab, a loyal friend, gone too soon on New Year’s Eve, 2017. A small note for anyone who reads the acknowledgments and gets confused: my editor is Elizabeth Ridley. Different Ridley, entirely unrelated, both real, both in the book. I’d have changed one of the names if either of them had been fiction.

And Riverspook is based on a real place. Karen Waltman built it, she let me put her in the book, and she is the reason Jetson came to our family at all. Neither this novella nor the novel it leads into would exist without what she made there.

READ RIVERSPOOK FREE—the novella that leads into Jetson’s Journey