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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48235
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48235
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

I think I might be rephrasing what @MarkBaker says, but perhaps stating it differently would be helpful, especially since he seems to have attracted some antagonism.

**You're telling a story. What is your story about?** No, it's not about "a cat chasing a bird". What's it about _at its core_? Is it about hunter and prey? Is it about the futility of chasing an unattainable goal? **What idea(s) do you want to express or explore?**

What your story is about defines how you tell it. When Seton Thompson wrote _The Pacing Mustang_, for example, he wrote a story about freedom. He recognised that freedom and an indomitable spirit in the mustang, and then he focused on it and exaggerated it. A real horse might stop eating, but it won't commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. **The story you want to tell is bound up with the character who tells it.**

Once you know what your story is about, you know who your character is - what kind of "person" your cat is. (Or vice versa - if you know the "person", you know the story.) From there, you'd need to add decoration to convince us that this "person" is a cat: the smell of things, the sensation of pouncing - all the physical attributes of the experience of being a cat. The senses your character has are those of a cat, and its body is that of a cat. Study cats, so you can transmit that realistically. But its emotions, its thoughts, its experience of concepts like "love", "responsibility", "freedom" etc. - those are human. They are merely wrapped up in a cat's body, presumably for the purpose of making some attribute sharper than it would have been otherwise.

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