I recently wrote a mercifully short tale for my substack that was from a horse’s point of view. Sounds cutesy and twee, right? Except that horses think normal things like plastic bags are actually predators about to eat them, and are otherwise very focused on eating. It was surprisingly difficult to get a coherent narrative out of a creature whose thought processes mostly consist of, ‘sleeping peacefully- run away from the evil plastic bag!- oh, there’s food; never mind. OMG, there’s definitely a snake under that leaf- run away!’ and so on.

Human points of view aren’t always easy to write- I’m currently discovering that Mean Girls are incredibly difficult to write convincingly- but at least we’re all working with the same set of senses, and most of us are smart enough to understand things like object permanence- it’s unclear whether horses do- and the passage of time- for a horse, time is mostly measured in, ‘how long since it last ate?’

When I mentioned the subject to my other half, he regaled me with his experience in writing non-human POVs, only his was an amoebic alien that didn’t really have eyes or limbs, and mostly experienced the world through ‘tasting’ objects with its pseudopods. That’s an extreme example, and I’ll note for your interest that he wrote that type of character once, as a challenge, and never again.

We’re all so used to using human senses and human language to convey a story- and the readers are used to reading it- that anything else is jarring and weird. But there are ways to make it work, and the limited audience will greatly enjoy the result.

The first thing to consider is, what senses are available to your character? This will dictate a lot of the language and description available to you. It’s nonsensical to wax poetic about the pretty pink and orange sunset if your character is colorblind. On the other hand, an excellent sense of smell or taste will send your description off in another direction.

Your character’s level of intelligence and perception is also important. Anyone who’s ever tried to write a child or a genius knows they’re difficult in different ways. The child has a smaller vocabulary and less context for whatever they’re seeing; a genius might have too much vocabulary and context- or they might wander off to pursue their own narrow interests at odd times.

… wait, children and geniuses do that.

Anyway. Write to your character’s level of intelligence. If they don’t understand time the way humans do, that’ll affect your description of an event and the grammar you use to write it. English has a lot of different ways to say when something happened; you might have to remove some of those more complex tenses from your toolkit if you’re writing an animal POV.

Aliens who have the technology for interstellar travel aren’t going to be stupid, but they might not speak anything resembling a human language. Translating their pheromonal signals into a coherent narrative would be quite a challenge. My opinion- worth exactly what you paid for it- is, the shorter, the better. Just like writing accents, it’s very easy to put in too much of a good thing, and if the readers have to ‘translate’ an entire novel into something they understand… well, you’re going to have a very limited audience for that.

I got a lot of mileage out of occasional odd phrases, to add verisimilitude to the setting- a vehicle became a small black box that the human lives in; a bucket of brushes became ‘teeth that the human holds in its front feet.’ That requires a bit of brain twisting, and looking at the world through your character’s eyes. Do they have any reason to know what a car is? Or that the human lives somewhere else and uses the car for transport? Does the character understand the concept of ‘somewhere else’? If they don’t have any reason to understand a particular concept, you might have to reach for clever or unusual phrasing to show what they do understand.

My story from the horse’s mouth can be found here. Fair warning, most of it is paywalled, but the part that isn’t, should be enough for you to see some of the things I’m talking about.

I can’t be the only one who’s written from a weird, non-human point of view, so sing out- what’s your experience with this toolkit?