Corrupt government got you down?
Feral billionaires hurting your motivation to write?
Have you considered writing about your frustrations using animals to cover your thinly veiled warnings about the dangers of totalitarianism or fascism or even capitalism? Your main characters don’t have to be animals, of course. Just make sure your world is populated by sentient non-humans living in a definitely-not-yours-no-way-it’s-totally-fictional world.
Here are some options that you are free to adopt as your own:
- Root vegetables represent the working class while junk foods symbolize the ruling class. The junk foods desperately want the root vegetables not only give them money but also think they’re really cool. If you want to be absolutely wild, consider putting a stale Cheeto in charge!
- A rogue blob of cheese (might I suggest daralagjazky?) scoots into a different cheese’s shelf-space at a grocery store. Other cheeses have extensive dialogues about the invasion.
- A bunch of furniture in a bedroom thinks it has been enjoying a democratic society, but they eventually realize that the headboard (see what I did there?) has seized the tools under the bed and is using them to dismantle all the other furniture.
- Household appliances, including a toaster, live in harmony. When a new appliance, self-described as “smart,” arrives, it puts strict rules in place about how the other appliances are to be used and operated. This new device withholds the other appliances’ basic functionality unless its needs are met.
- The wind is a pushy little bitch to all the other “elements” until fire rises up and burns the whole fucking thing to the ground.
For your reading pleasure, may I recommend:
- Animal Farm – George Orwell (check out the SparkNotes)
- The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling (available on Project Gutenberg; here’s an analysis)
- Watership Down – Richard Adams (check out this political analysis)
- The Plague Dogs – Richard Adams, because he wasn’t done traumatizing me after Watership Down (check out this literary review)
Now, remember: fiction is, of course, NEVER rooted in reality. All characters who resemble anyone living or dead, is juuuuuuuuust a coincidence.