For those who are interested in writing docufiction themselves and don’t want to repeat my old mistakes, here you have doucufiction writing 101:
Conflict:
Docufiction is ultimately fiction.
All fiction follows the same template. There is a character who really wants something and has difficulties getting it.
You might not believe it, but Dinosaur Planet, Dinosaur Revolution and the Walking With… series all follow this template. In Dinosaur Planet, it’s obvious who is the main character because they all have names, but even the Walking With series follows the template.
In episode 1, the main characters are the Coelophysis pack who have to survive the dry season (the Postosuchus is the deuteragonist). Episode 2 had a Diplodocus who had to grow up. Episode 3 had a group of Ophthalmosaurus trying to give birth to and raise their children (though the Liopleurodon was also arguably a protagonist). Episode 4 had the Tropeognathus/Ornithocheirus male trying to find a mate. Episode 5 had a Leaellynasaura clan surviving winter. Episode 6 had a female T. rex raising her young.
Walking with Monsters usually had extremely simple plots which worked because their story segments were usually so short. In the Cambrian segment, for example, the only conflict is a bunch of Haikouichthys eating the Anomalocaris. Though, you could argue that the first segments had the „war“ between vertebrates and arthropods as their over-arching plot.
You should establish your protagonist’s problem as early as possible and resolve it in the end through either success or failure. This also means that if you want to include more than one time periods, you should either start a new story or use the prologue and epilogue for that.
A generic struggle for survival is a bad problem because it cannot be resolved. Surviving a specific season is much better.
Other stock plots include:
-Moving to a new location because of a drought or something.
-Raising young.
-Growing into adulthood.
-Finding a mate.
Ones that involve traveling are good to use because they allow you to introduce many ecosystems and animals.
Whether the protagonist fails or succeeds should be something they can control. The T. rex Mom in WWD did not fail to raise her babies because of the asteroid (she would have failed anyway, but at this point, we did not know when it would impact), she failed because she lost a battle to an Ankylosaurus.
It’s fine to include multiple protagonists (Alpha and Dragonfly from Dinosaur Planet, anyone?), though they should have something to do with each other. „Rivalries“ can be made believable if the biodiversity is not that high, if the setting is an island where everyone runs into everyone or if both animals are moving to the same location.
You can also have subplots which only last one scene, especially if you are writing in omniscient.
There are a few differences between animal fiction and human fiction. In animal fictions, your protagonists don’t have to be individuals. Walking with Dinosaurs did fine with using groups. Animals tend to have simpler motives than humans, so it’s more believable with them to have a group of which all have the same motive.
Likewise, morality is less important in animal fiction as your target audience will understand how instinct-driven animals are. Though, if you want to portray an animal sympathetically, you will sometimes have to rationalize its behavior. That’s why the Dimetrodon mommy eating her hatchlings in Walking with Monsters was explained as weeding out the weaker ones.
Why I got this first point wrong:
In my old LBM scripts I often just wrote a bunch of scenes which had nothing to do with each other. That’s because I did not understand the difference between a documentary and docufiction. When you see a documentary about the Great Barrier Reef, they tend to show you all the footage they got during their filming session while the narrator says something about each scene filmed. It is very difficult to replicate this sort of footage in docufiction (especially if you have no CGI and only prose).
Humanizing your animals:
It is not necessary to give them names or to assign genders to them (it’s fine for the narrator to call them „it“), but you can do so. You should avoid making them as human as the Dinosaur Revolution animals, unless you want your work to be as goofy.
Use omniscient narration:
Should go without saying. Sure, it can be fun to write through the eyes of an animal, take this chapter written through the eyes of a dog for example:
parahumans.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/interlude-4-2/However, in a docufiction, you want to educate the reader and for this, your narrator needs to be smarter than an animal.
Omniscient allows for head-hopping which is often what you want to include smaller subplots. You can also use it to pause your story and explain the science to the reader. Make sure you establish relevance though. Inostrancevia is a cool creature, no doubt, but if your reader has never heard of it before, you’ll need to justify you reader why you just spent three paragraphs on describing it. You have to make it actually do something more than just stand int he background.
Also, don’t sound like an academic paper. You will never be as informative as one, so you should make up for that by being interesting. Use active phrasing, varied sentence structure, vivid vocabulary and good metaphors (it is scientifically wrong to describe a Triceratops’ horns as „rapiers“, but you can do so anyway). Avoid melodrama or confusion though.
Describe obscure animals:
As a rule of thumb, the shorter the Wiki-page for your animal, the more you have to describe. It of course also depends on your target audience. For a general audience, anything more obscure than Tyrannosaurus or Smilodon must be described. For a Carnivora/WoA audience, you don't need to describe what a Utahraptor looks like (though some Carnivorans know more about dinosaurs than others).
On behavior/body language:
You will not get around researching this. Unfortunately, we often know very little about how extinct animals behaved, you chances are you will have to model them off extant animals. Briefly explain what the body language means and justify your choice. You don’t need to explain why a scared animal retreats though. Once you have established the body language, use it to convey emotion when applicable. It is better to make your carnivore roar than tell us it is angry.
Coloration:
Again, you mostly have to make it up. Think a moment what makes sense from an evolutionary perspective (no bright colors for ambush predators!). If you have multiple choices, you can use color to evoke emotion. That’s why Dinosaur Revolution made its Torvosaurus black and red. Don’t overdo it, though. Save the scariest colors for your apex predator.
About using bringing a scientist back in time:
You can actually do it with not as much baggage as I thought. Chased by Sea Monsters did not explain how time travel worked as that was not the focus of the story. However, your scientist should still be a cool guy like Nigel Marvin, otherwise, he’s just a framing device to tell your story. He should also be motivated. Marvin’s motive in Sea Monsters was to find out what is the deadliest sea an issue which got resolved in the end.
The more the time travel actually does (e.g. bringing animals from multiple time periods together), the more you have to explain how it works. In particular: Why are there no paradoxes and why can’t you just use it to solve every problem in the story? Otherwise, you end up like Prehistoric Park where Nigel has several problems (like saving the Smilodon cubs in time) which could be easily solved through time travel.
