Douglas Green on the Unique Stories of Dogs

by Douglas Green

No less a storyteller than Leo Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  As a family therapist, I generally agree, but only because I’ve never once met a fully happy family – and the happiest and least happy I’ve known have all been deeply unique.

But what would old Leo have said about dogs?  We have the image of the ‘bouncy, floppy-eared pup,’ cheerful and loyal, with a tongue hanging out in perpetual dumb grin.  And maybe such pooches have lived a continuously happy and secure life, never impounded or abandoned or threatened or injured or terrified or beaten. 

However, as with families, I have never met this dog.

The most secure dog I ever knew was a three-month-old I found in a pound.  One of hundreds in an overcrowded room for only four days, she had already developed a reputation and a nickname, “Knucklehead.”  She was confident, playful, and overwhelmingly loving, and would take charge of and change my life forever (and become the basis of my book The Teachings of Shirelle).  But even so, her traumas showed.  Any time water lit onto her, from a slight rain or shower head, she’d shrink down at the sensation.  I guessed this came from being sprayed off in the pound.  And then there was her terror of being left in any institution – from the most luxurious doggy day-cares to the kindest veterinary offices.  Early imprisonment, it seemed, had left a permanent mark.

Another pup I adopted didn’t appear to have enough brains to remember bad experiences, but spent his 18-year life terrified of being put inside cars.  The fact that young Ygor had been found alone in rural Kansas (and that he was quite a homely mutt) made it easy to determine that someone, unhappy at his birth, had tossed him out their passenger window somewhere outside the Wyandotte county limits.

The truth is that all dogs have brains not that much smaller than ours, and absorb experience, good and bad, in much the same ways we do.  And what the brains sort those experiences into is what we call stories.  While we surpass them in our abilities to interpret – and misinterpret – those experiences, every dog’s life, like ours, becomes a collection of tales of triumph and failure, love and betrayal, beauty and horror.

The great dog novels tell such yarns.  Lassie’s journey is no less harrowing or heroic than Jason’s.  And Buck’s trek to his wild call is as epic as those of the Joads or Bagginses.  Of course canine epics cover less time, given dogs 1/7 lifespan.  But because we share their feelings and cares, their tales ring powerfully in us.

 We psychotherapists work with our clients to figure out what stories they tell to themselves (“I’m a failure,” “No one can ever love me,” etc.) and hopefully to help rewrite them (“My few successes could lead me to triumph,” “I can find the love I’ve never known”).  But we have the advantage of these humans verbally relating their histories.  Dogs can only give us evidence (as with my dogs’ fears of water and cars).  Or can they?

 A few years ago, I adopted an adult rescue dog.  Instantly, she started revealing her past to me.  A story I’d known included abandonment, but which developed into much more. 

While Aria craved contact, she would sit yards away from me, as someone must have taught her to (along with her perfect housetraining).  She wasn’t big or particularly fast, but proved the best hunter I’ve known, from her streetwise ability to lie still for hours awaiting prey.  She cowered from people, but would bark at any dog on sight – apparently not intending to create a fight, but out of fear, to prevent one. 

And then, the first time we took a leashed walk, she lunged at another dog.  And the second she realized I was displeased, hit the ground on her back, pulling in all four paws, blinking quickly, begging me not to kick or whip her. 

No storyteller ever wove a clearer tale. 

For the next year I worked to fill in the missing chapters. Her mixture of fear and love, her trust in only certain strangers, her constant desire for security, even her goofy joy in  yowling along with humans – these were her truth, her essence. 

Doing so accomplished two things.  First, it brought us closer together. As any good therapist can tell you, curiosity about someone builds their trust and openness. The dog felt my interest, my empathy, my fascination about her.  Qualities she wasn’t used to.  

And secondly, this work resulted in the plot of my second book, A Dog of Many Names.  A sort of 21st-Century Jack London novel, about Aria’s earlier life and adventures.

But how exactly did this process occur? Dogs have stories. But when we translate them from the dog, are we just imaging what might have happened? Or has that pooch actually told us, intentionally, what they wanted us to know?

Or, in other words, did I write this book, or did she?

Returning to the master, Tolstoy once recommended to a beginning writer, “You should only write when you feel within you some completely new and important content, clear to you but unintelligible to others, and when the need to express this content gives you no peace.”

Well, okay, that describes my experience.  But was that urgent need my own hunger to write, or was it…? 

Dogs have stories. Maybe more interesting than we even surmise.

Douglas Green has turned his talents to many areas — he directed the 2000 film “The Hiding Place,” wrote the fan-favorite inspirational memoir “The Teachings of Shirelle: Life Lessons from a Divine Knucklehead” in 2015, and spends his days working with teens and children as a psychotherapist in LA. Doug’s latest project, inspired by his dog, Aria, is A Dog of Many Names., a courageous story of survival about an abandoned dog forced to fend for herself in the California wilderness.

(Don’t Always) Write What You Know

by Jessica Vitalis

Virtually every writer has heard the sage advice, “Write what you know.” But what does that mean, really? 

Sure, I could probably spin a yarn or two about raising teenage girls, or my lifelong fear of mice, or the time I was an exchange student in Germany, but honestly, I don’t see the market banging down my door for these stories.

 That explains why, when I set out to become a published author more than 14 years ago, I decided to begin with a memoir. Titled Bank Robbers, Spirit Guides, and a Little Slice of Heaven, my query got a fair number of requests from agents, but it didn’t go anywhere. And no wonder — I had no idea how to write a novel, much less a memoir! 

Undaunted, I began studying craft and turned my attention to writing something else I knew: book two was set in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where my mother had opened a gift shop. Once again, the story didn’t quite work. But I wasn’t ready to give up. 

My third manuscript featured a child who traveled the country on a renovated school bus and it was –– you guessed it –– inspired by a portion of my own childhood. It won’t surprise you to know that my fourth and fifth manuscripts were also inspired by real-life events.

But something interesting happened while writing my fifth story: Not only had my writing improved dramatically, but I also allowed myself to explore the fantasy genre for the first time. While the story was still inspired by a real trip I’d taken, I finally let myself depart from the contemporary, realistic stories that made up the fabric of life as I’d always known it. And guess what? This story worked. Or very nearly, anyway.

 By the time I started my sixth manuscript (another fantasy), I realized that I’d found my stride — my voice as an author, as a storyteller. And it wasn’t because I wrote what I knew. In truth, my debut novel, The Wolf’s Curse , was inspired by the narrator Markus Zusack’s The Book Thief. It could be argued that my debut novel is the exact opposite of anything I know: I’ve never lived in renaissance France; I’ve never been a carpenter (or a wolf); and I’ve certainly never met the Grim Reaper.

 And yet, The Wolf’s Curse is probably more quintessentially me than anything else I’ve ever written. Because I let myself play with language in a way that I’d always been too scared to do. Because I let myself play with voice in a way that was more fun than I’d ever had. Because I wrote about themes that I care about deeply –– about loss and grief, about belonging and traditions, about socio-economic injustices, about hope.

 That’s not to say that writers shouldn’t use inspiration from their own lives. Author AJ Sass wrote a wonderful novel about ice skating based on their own passion for the sport. Rajani LaRocca penned a novel in verse that harks back to her childhood in the 1980’s, and the calls for #ownvoices stories are stronger than ever. 

But hopefully my (very long) journey can serve as a reminder that writing “what you know” doesn’t always have to be literal. It’s a missive to bring to your writing your own world view, your own way of thinking, your own fears and passions, and to write the story that only you can tell –– exploring familiar themes based on everything you know, and maybe a little you don’t.

Jessica Vitalis is a Columbia MBA-wielding writer. After leaving home at 16, Vitalis explored several careers before turning her talents to middle grade literature. She brings her experience growing up in a nontraditional childhood to her stories, exploring themes such as death and grief, domestic violence, and socio-economic disparities. With a mission to write thought-provoking and entertaining literature, she often includes magic and fantastical settings. As an active volunteer in the kidlit community, she’s also passionate about using her privilege to lift up other voices. In addition to volunteering with We Need Diverse Books and Pitch Wars, she founded Magic in the Middle, a series of free monthly recorded book talks, to help educators introduce young readers to new stories. An American expat, she now lives in Canada with her husband and two precocious daughters. She loves traveling, sailing and scuba diving, but when she’s at home, she can usually be found reading a book or changing the batteries in her heated socks.

NYT Bestselling Author Emily Colin On Writing YA

Given that your career as an author began in women’s fiction/romance, why did you start writing YA fiction? What caused your interest in this younger audience?

I started writing YA because I was reading so much of it — especially Leigh Bardugo, Marie Lu, Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Tomi Adeyemi, and lots of other fabulous authors. I found myself drawn to the extremes that YA fiction naturally embraces — first love, first kiss, first breakup, etc. — as well as the emotional highs and lows that teenagers experience. (I just reread that last sentence and realized that it includes a horrible pun. But you know what? I’m leaving it. You’re welcome.) The more I read, the more I felt inspired to write a YA series of my own — especially after attending YALLFest in Charleston, which was just amazing! Much like my adult books, my YA series features love stories with supernatural twists. If it’s got lots of kissing and a hint (or more) of the paranormal, I’m all in! 

What were the inspirations behind writing the Seven Sins series?

I was inspired to write this series for a couple of reasons. When I started writing Sword of the Seven Sins in 2015, I was deeply disconcerted by America’s political situation. I expand on this below in greater detail, but in a very real way, writing the series offered me a creative way to cope with the anxiety that the 2016 election fostered. I was also inspired by the idea of a society ruled by the Seven Deadly Sins. Lust, pride, envy, greed, wrath, gluttony, sloth … so many of these represent the extremes of human behavior. What would happen, I wondered, if these were turned inside out and used against people? What might such a society look like? What if love was forbidden, lust was a death sentence … and my two main characters fell hard for each other? And so Sword of the Seven Sins was born.

Did the political situation in America at the time you were writing the book play into the story, and if so, how?

Definitely. Back in 2015, everyone kept telling me Donald Trump couldn’t win the election, but I believed he could — even worse, that he would. And the more I thought about it, the more I kept spinning what-if scenarios: What if he wins? What if he wins, and he’s really a puppet of the Russian government, because of their shared business interests?

What if the white supremacists who despise Barack Obama believe they can elect Trump as their candidate, and then further their agenda of ignorance, hatred, and violence? (As a Jewish woman, this hit home on a personal as well as a moral level.) What if those supremacists try to stage a coup? What if the coup is successful, and then our country splinters into mini-strongholds that use religion to control their inhabitants? That’s basically where my mind went — and as I said above, I used the series as a sort of creative therapy to work through my anxiety. I will say that I began to feel a bit like the prophet Cassandra, as more and more of my worries began to materialize. I think I should’ve decided to write a book about margaritas, chocolate fondue, and afternoons by the pool instead.

Why did you decide to write the prequel novella and short stories set in the Seven Sins universe? Has that changed the way you decided to tell the story?

I originally decided to write the prequel novella because my publisher suggested it — and I had so much fun with it that it spawned an idea in my mind. I’d been reading Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunter short story collections, and I thought — why can’t I do that with Seven Sins? It’ll give me a way to deepen the world of the series and stay in touch with readers between books, and then maybe I can bring all the stories together as a collection. I pitched the idea to my publisher, they agreed, and here we are! 

In terms of whether it’s changed how I decided to tell the story — I think it has, in the best possible ways. It’s given me insight into minor and new characters that I might not otherwise have had, which in turn has influenced what I wanted to do with Books 2 and 3. It’s been a lot of extra work — but so, so worth it!

How, in your mind, does character development and experience play into the creation of a naturally intense story?

Absolutely. When I teach writing, I always tell my students that before they do anything else, they need to understand their characters’ goals, obstacles, essential wounds, and true needs. If the goal is strong enough, the obstacle large enough, and the need powerful enough, then the story will naturally be intense — no matter what genre you’re writing. Readers will want to know what happens, because you’ve set up the characters’ arcs so clearly. Before I write a word, I make sure those elements of any book I’m working on are as sharp as they can be. Then I interweave the plot with each characters’ goals, obstacles, wounds, and needs — and the intensity bleeds onto the page.

As a mother, editor and writing teacher, how do you balance your time? Are there any productivity hacks that you’ve learned over the years?

Oh, gosh. This is a tough one. I think the most important one I’ve learned is to know myself well. For instance, I will never be a member of the 5 AM Writers Club; I’m completely dysfunctional at that hour. Likewise, I can edit well late at night but not write creatively. So, I don’t try to force myself to do those things. I’m part of a fabulous group of writers who sprint every morning from about 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., and that’s been key for me — setting time aside when I’m accountable to others, and giving myself permission to focus on my work. We set timers in 30-minute increments, and I don’t let myself do anything else during that time — check email, scroll through social media, et cetera. That’s made a huge difference. I also keep a calendar of all of my projects, including writing, teaching, and editing, so I have a realistic sense of what’s coming up and how long it will take. And I force myself to build in time to exercise each day. Sometimes I have to convince myself to take time away from my work — but I discover I’m far more productive once I take a walk and then sit down again!

What’s your idea of a perfect day?

Well, first I wouldn’t have to wake up early. That is the worst. Then, when I finally got up, I’d discover that my boyfriend went to the coffee shop and got me a mocha & a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon (in this scenario, the pandemic’s over, so I don’t have to worry that he’s putting his life at risk to caffeinate me). I’d sit on my back deck, watch the turtles splash about in the pond, and chow down. Then, I’d go inside and do some yoga (I adore Yoga With Adriene — she’s just the best). Post-downward-facing-dog, I’d sit down and write. Inspiration would’ve struck, so the words would come easily. Two beautiful, mystical hours later, I’d take the dog for a walk with my son. Then — again, in a world with no pandemic — I’d meet a friend for lunch and browse at a bookstore afterward, where I’d find an amazing novel that I never knew I needed until I held it in my hot little hands. Then I’d come home, read a bit, make something really yummy for dinner, and settle down with my favorite blanket and my boyfriend to watch Netflix. Boom! Best. Day. Ever.

If you hadn’t become an author, what would you have done instead?

Well, I spent many years working at a nonprofit that provides multidisciplinary, free-of-charge arts programming for youth in need. I was, and remain, extraordinarily passionate about that cause; I truly believe that art has the power to change and save lives. Just look at how all of us have turned to stories and movies during the pandemic! 

I challenge any politician who defunds the arts and claims that they don’t matter to take a close look at how most of us have managed to hang on to our sanity during these challenging times. Stories, music, art, and other creative pursuits have sustained us. Okay, getting off my soapbox now! Anyway, after that I worked as a community engagement specialist at a performing arts center that hosted national acts and touring Broadway shows. I loved that too — the sense of connecting the community, especially underserved populations, with the incredible, transformative power of the arts. BUT, in college, I studied dolphins at Duke’s Marine Lab, and then I took a semester off and interned at the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys. There’s something so restorative about being out in nature for me; I think if I hadn’t ended up working in the arts, I would’ve loved to have a job that enabled me to travel to beautiful places and help to keep them safe for future generations, including working with the animals that call those places home.

Where do you get your ideas?

From everywhere … really. A line of dialogue in a movie, which spawns an entire plotline in my head. A beautiful painting, wondering what went on before and after the moment captured on canvas. Conversations overheard (sorry, person next to me at the coffee shop!). Sometimes, I write down lists of disparate things that are fascinating to me at the moment, draw lines between them (Oh, look! Running a truffle shop and a crime heist!) and then pose a what-if question. What can I say … the inside of my head is a messy place.

What do you do when your ideas won’t come?

Weep? Rend my garments? Just kidding. Here are my go-tos: Taking a walk, doing yoga, talking with friends, listening to music (every book of mine has a playlist, which helps me drop into the mood of the story), taking a shower (that’s where I have my best ideas, alas), and engaging with other art forms (reading, watching movies or shows, going to museums — when such things were possible). The more I try to force an idea, the more elusive it is … so I do whatever I can to relax and open myself up to the world around me!

EMILY COLIN’S debut novel, The Memory Thief was a New York Times bestseller and a Target Emerging Authors Pick. She is also the author of The Dream Keeper’s Daughter (Ballantine Books). Her young adult titles include the anthology Wicked South: Secrets and Lies and the Seven Sins series, both from Blue Crow Publishing, as well as the anthology Unbound: Stories of Transformation, Love, and Monsters (Five Points Press). Regardless of whether she's writing for adults or teens, all of her books feature love stories and supernatural twists.