You Want to Be a Better Writer? Observe Chicken Behavior

Chickens exhibit a wide range of behaviors that are vital for their well-being and survival, including foraging, preening, and complex vocalizations. You are a writer, and like a chicken, require certain conditions.

Yours include having a complex existential experience, and also, of course, foraging and preening. You struggle to feel like what you do matters because sometimes you mistakenly rely on external validation for your sense of self-worth as an artist. You are not some kind of superhero with extraordinary abilities, an interesting backstory, and a special outfit that you can change into when you need a boost.

As much as you sometimes wish you didn’t, you need people and care what they think. Sometimes you work so hard and so long on something, and even if that thing it published, it can feel, late at night or when you’re trapped in an endless doomscroll, like you might not exist, like the thing you wrote and sent off into the world in good faith got lost out there in the void.

You think maybe nobody wrote your book. You think at least the chicken got to cross the road.

Chickens can sleep with one eye open to mind any predatorial foxes, raccoons, weasels. You had a rooster once who liked to snuggle, his pale pink lids would drop slowly down, down. He was so warm against your chest, his white feathers and red comb like silk and wax. The comb helps to regulate body temperature and reminds you of a human ear. When you think about your book, the one nobody wrote, your ears get hot.

Chickens don’t love to share. That some chickens pick on other chickens is not surprising, especially in captivity. If let free to range on abundant greens and especially fresh yellow dandelions, chickens don’t squabble much over territory or scraps. You wonder why, when writers get together in groups, they are almost always indoors.

Chickens are descended from avian dinosaurs. They possess tetrachromatic vision. You assume this means not only can they see better than you, but they also carry wisdom in their genetic material that both predates and surpasses your own inheritance. You wonder why they are cooped up, while you are free.

You open the gate of the chicken yard. An eager chicken runs straight for the road, gets run over by a passing car. You remember that chickens are not all that smart about certain things. You think about how you keep writing, sending work out into the void, the faint echoes that come back, and it suddenly strikes you as a similar impulse.

Chickens don’t give a damn about money. But you do. You write for both the wrong and the right reasons.

Have you ever seen a chicken grovel, or turn their head away? They do it to demonstrate submissiveness, to avoid conflict. Sometimes writers sacrifice things they care about, hoping for greater freedom, returns at some unknown point in the future—ideas, intellectual property, values, titles, opportunities, personal needs wants wishes desires whimsies beliefs. Dreams.

Chickens are flock animals. Writers vary according to constitution, but nobody makes it on their own. As much as you hate to admit it, you’re a flock animal, too.

Let’s talk about voice, the media, crowing at the dawn. Your voice, the voice of your characters. Let’s talk dialogue. Are you you or a caricature of you? Do your characters feel real? Do you feel real? Are you real? Did a chicken actually write your book, or was it nobody?

Tell me, in your most authentic voice, but make it sound good (weird, smart, edgy). You attend the book launches, the readings, the podcasts, the conferences, the festivals.  You set up meetings.

Yet somehow the paper trail (receipts, petty embarrassments) and the footage—evidence that you exist—only make you feel more invisible. You split, persona and witness, a chickenshit version of what a real writer should be. They say each victory should be celebrated no matter how small. Cock-a-doodle-doo, writer, no matter the hour. This time with feeling.

Which brings you to the chicken species’ most-valuable characteristic according to human consumers (though not vegans, you presume), which is the laying of eggs. To produce, chickens need to eat. A lot. Chickens graze all day long. That is what they do when they are not roosting.

When the writing is going well you often forget to eat proper meals, grazing from the cabinets. Your food as a writer is not food, it is material. You need to read and watch movies and live and get obsessed with things in the same way chickens are obsessed with food.

Remember the story about the goose who laid a golden egg? Writer, you understand. If chickens don’t get enough sunlight, like sometimes in the winter, they either stop laying or the shells of their eggs turn flimsy and soft.

Chickens are not completely flightless, but they only fly when it really matters. Chickens bathe in dirt. If you bury your books, the ones nobody wrote, in magic dirt, they will sprout. A great tree will grow from those sprouts that will shade all the world’s chickens on the forthcoming hotter than hot days.

Writer, you have had dreams in which you could fly. Writer, tend your eggs with care. Writer, you may not be descended from dinosaurs, but that doesn’t mean you won’t eventually exist.

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City of Smoke and Sea by Malia Márquez is available via Red Hen Press.