Is it anthropocentric to write non-human point-of-view characters?

A few weeks ago, I had a short conversation on social media that touched on why I only rarely write the perspectives of non-humans. I’ve thought about this before, but I had sort of forgotten about it, so I’m revisiting it, and I decided it might make a good topic to share on the blog.

And if you think the first line is a mistake, it isn’t.

Oh, it depends on the world you’re writing and the flavor of the world-building. Among my many stories-in-progress, I have one that’s set in another, very different world where there are no humans, and in fact there are no very human-like species at all, and in that one I’m writing non-human perspectives.

But there’s a reason I don’t write very much non-human perspective in my main universe, Areaer, (yes, all right, I write some elves, but the fact is, the elves are more like humans than you know, though perhaps you do know if you’ve read Children of the Dryads – or, depending on how many years down the line you’re reading this, others of my books as well).

To sum up the vibe behind the magic and world-building of Areaer as succinctly as possible, Areaer is “an imagination of this world as I believe it might be if we saw it more clearly, an imagination that I hope is true as far as it goes.” It’s not an alternate earth, it’s not analogous to earth: but it’s a way for me to think about what I see, here.

Would I, could I, write the perspective of the Earth herself? Write the point of view of the hurricane? Write the story of the heart of fire on which the lands float, or the Sun that shines down life from beyond the highest winds?

Fundamentally, our experience, our perspective, is always going to be human-centric. That’s almost true by definition. If you turn your head around, you simply are in the center of what you can view. And human experience is the only experience we really know.

I have to be careful here, because so much of what I’m saying can be taken in so many ways that aren’t what I intend. For example, human experience is far wider, and far more diverse, than I think anyone is really aware. We think and experience the world in such different ways. Do any of us really know how different? What love, and pain, and death mean to others? How even our closest friend experiences happiness, or if the colors we all see are really the same – or how different they might be?

Nonetheless, we can communicate. And from that base of communication, we can gather that there is a great deal of common ground in our experience of the world. It might not be the greater part of it. It might not be what we think is. We might embrace language and communication, and so lean more into the common experience, and less into the different things we might experience if we thought differently. But there is a lot of common ground, even if there’s a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding, too, and even if there’s more uncommon ground.

It seems to me that what’s really human-centric – and even worse, what’s really centered around the worship of a particular and very narrow aspect of human thought – is to assume that everything else thinks like we do, or else isn’t personal or is of lesser value, is just a thing.

It seems … narrow-minded … to assume that other perspectives, that other personal perspectives, are such that we even can write or understand them – or else, if we cannot, that they are of lesser significance.

And it seems to me that these assumptions feed each other. If you think that everything that’s personal thinks like a human being, or at least in a way that a human being can comprehend, relate to, or convey, then when you discover that something – say, a tree or a dragonfly – doesn’t think in a way that you would even call ‘thought’, then it’s easy to assume that means it’s not personal, that it doesn’t have value. That it doesn’t have its own story to tell, its own perspective in which it is the center. These can be reactionary beliefs.

I’m not saying other people shouldn’t write non-human perspectives. There’s room in this world, and in art, for a million approaches to life, to story-telling, to communication, and to empathy. That diversity is what brings art – life – alive.

I’m just sharing what’s probably only one part of why I write the stories I do, the way I do. Why I have non-human characters and actors in the world, but the vast majority of the perspective is always human.

We can’t help but have a human perspective, our own perspective. And we shouldn’t feel guilty about the fact that our perspective is, inherently, human-centric, even self-centric. That we will always be a sort of center to our experience. Otherwise, we wouldn’t even have a place from which to see other beings.

But we can acknowledge that they exist. That they are a part of our world, and that to themselves they are the center, even if we can’t get close enough to them to even glimpse what that perspective looks like.

We can respect that perspectives other than our own are real.

That’s why I don’t write the dryads or the dragons or many others as primary perspectives. That’s why there will always be a certain mystery around them. I doubt we will ever learn the history of the Pact or understand everything about it, because choices and experiences of the dryads that can’t be comprehended by human beings went into it. And that’s what you see in Areaer: there’s a certain human-centrism to a lot of what you see. You see the places where the humans are part of things, where they suffer or act, where they change the world or are changed by it.

But my hope is that you also get the glimpse of a sense there are other perspectives. There are histories and lives almost wholly unknown to humanity that affect the world they live in, and the lives they are able to live, too. And there are places and times where these histories touch: to a greater or lesser degree, they’re touching all the time, since they inhabit the same world. But, as humans, we have a clearer vision of the choices we make, the suffering and joy we experience, the love we know, and the things we get right and wrong, than we will have of beings incredibly unlike us, even if they are also incredibly close to us.

And, sometimes, we might even think we’re the primary actors, when someone else is, and we’re just in a place and moment to act alongside someone whose existence we can barely even comprehend. If that.

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