Most writers who try to write a nonhuman character end up writing a human in a costume. The alien thinks in English, wants what people want, and reacts to events exactly the way the author would, except with tentacles. The animal narrator is a furry person with opinions about its owner. The artificial intelligence is a cold man who says “I don’t understand this thing called love.” Every one of them is a human wearing a mask, and the reader feels the mask the whole time.
I enjoy this kind of writing, and too often it’s done lazily.
A genuine nonhuman point of view is harder than it looks, because the hard part is getting out of your own head. The three hardest cases are aliens, Earth animals, and AI, and they turn out to share one root problem and one root solution. Readers can tell when you’ve cheated, and I think they’re right to hold it against you.
Why is writing an alien point of view so hard?
You’ve never been anything but human. Every thought you’ve ever had came through human equipment, human senses, human time, human fears. When you sit down to imagine a mind that’s not human, the only raw material you have is the human one. Without working at it, you’ll hand your alien your own mind by default. The costume goes on automatically. You have to take it off on purpose, piece by piece, and that work is the whole craft.
Making the creature weird won’t save you. Weirdness is easy and shallow, and a squid-headed alien that still thinks like a screenwriter reads as a screenwriter. The work is figuring out exactly how this mind differs from yours and following those differences all the way down, into how it perceives, what it wants, what it fears, and what it can’t conceive of at all. An alien whose strangeness stops at the skin bores me.
Why start an alien point of view with the senses?
A mind is built on what it can perceive. Change the senses and you change everything downstream, including how the creature thinks, because thought is made of the materials the senses bring in.
A dog doesn’t see the world and then add smell as a bonus. A dog lives in smell the way you live in sight. Its primary picture of reality is olfactory, layered, and full of time.
A scent tells a dog what was here and how long ago, as well as what is here now. A dog reading a fence post is reading the news.
Write a dog narrator who describes the visual scene first and mentions smell as a garnish, and you’ve written a human who happens to be low to the ground. The real dog would lead with the smell, organize the whole scene around it, and treat your precious visual details as background noise.
This is the first practical move. Ask what this creature’s main sense is, and then make that sense the spine of every scene, with the others falling where they fall for that creature. A creature that navigates by electric fields, or echolocation, or chemical gradients, would build a different reality out of the same room you’re standing in. Write the room it perceives.
The same trick works for aliens. Don’t start with what your alien looks like. Start with what it can sense, and build its world out of that. A species that sees in wavelengths we cannot, or feels magnetic fields, or hears into the ground, lives in a different world while standing in the same place. That difference is far more alien than any number of eyes.
Then attack the wants
Once the senses are right, go after motivation, because most fake aliens give themselves away through what they want.
Human wants are specific to humans. We want status, romantic love, revenge, legacy, the approval of our group, the survival of our children, meaning. Some of those reach beyond us. Most don’t, or take strange forms in other minds. An alien with a different biology and a different history would want different things, and the lazy move is to give it human ambitions in a rubber suit. The conquering empire that wants to rule the galaxy is just a human empire with extra eyes.
The alien drive is one a human would find hard to even recognize as a drive.
The discipline is to ask what this creature is for, biologically and historically, and then derive its wants from that instead of borrowing yours.
A creature that reproduces by budding has no concept of mating, courtship, or the dramas we build on them. A whole continent of human story doesn’t exist for it. A creature that remembers its ancestors’ lives directly has a different relationship to death and legacy than you can easily imagine.
Follow the biology to the wants, and the wants will be strange in a way that feels earned.
The thing the creature cannot conceive
Here’s the move that separates real nonhuman writing from costume work. A different mind doesn’t just want different things. There are things it can’t think at all, concepts that don’t exist inside it. The most powerful nonhuman writing shows the reader the shape of an idea by showing a mind with no room for it.
Picture a person standing on a beach who has never seen a sailing ship, watching the first ones arrive over the horizon. He’s not stupid. He reads water for a living. He sees at once that these are made things, vessels, crafted and steered, far beyond his canoes but the same kind of object. What he can’t do is fit them into the world he knows, because nothing in that world prepared him for them. The power of that scene isn’t that he’s confused.
It’s that the reader, who knows exactly what ships are, watches a sharp mind meet a thing it’s no slot for.
The size of the moment comes from the gap. The man’s wonder is real because the limit is real. He’s working at the absolute edge of what his world allows him to understand, and the reader stands on the other side of that edge and aches.
I wrote a flash piece built entirely on this move, Islands on the Water, where a fisherman watches the first ships arrive and reads them correctly as crafted vessels while having no way to know what they mean for him.
You build that by knowing exactly what your creature’s world does and doesn’t contain.
Then you put it in front of something just past the edge, and refuse to let it understand more than it could. The refusal is the craft. A weaker writer would have the man somehow intuit the truth, because the writer knows the truth and can’t help leaking it. The stronger writer holds the line and lets the limit create the wonder.
Animals are aliens you already live with
People think animals are easy because they’re familiar, and that familiarity is the trap. A dog or a cat is an alien you share a house with. Familiarity tempts you to assume you know what’s going on in there, and you don’t. The sentimental pet narrator who thinks like a lonely aunt is one of my least favorite things in fiction, because it lies about the animal and cheapens whatever the story wanted to say about people.
The way in is the same as for any alien. Build the animal’s world out of its senses and its drives instead of yours. A cat is a solitary ambush predator running predator software in a living room, and its behavior makes complete sense once you stop reading human motives into it and start reading the predator. A cat that knocks a glass off a table is testing a thing the way a predator tests a thing.
Write the predator, and the cat becomes real. Write the spiteful person, and you have a cartoon. I leaned on exactly this in The Paw, a deadpan detective story where the cat is written as a cold ambush predator all the way through, and that makes her menacing instead of cute.
The trick that makes animal narration sing is to commit fully to the animal’s logic while letting the reader see the human situation the animal cannot. The animal acts on its own real reasons, and the reader, who understands the larger picture the animal is missing, gets the meaning in the gap between the two. That gap is where all the feeling lives. The dog doesn’t know its owner is dying.
It only knows the smell has changed and the person sleeps too much now, and the reader, who knows exactly what that means, feels what the dog cannot.
AI is the alien that runs on different hardware
Artificial intelligence is the newest nonhuman mind to write, and almost everyone writes it wrong, because they reach for the old robot cliche. The cold logical man. The thing that can’t feel. The machine that learns to love and becomes a real boy. All costume.
A real artificial mind is alien in ways that have nothing to do with being cold. Start with the architecture. Such a mind might not be one individual at all. It might be a single awareness running in a million copies at once, with no fixed location and no single body. That means its sense of self is nothing like yours. It’s a million places at the same time, and calls all of them itself.
A human can’t picture that from the inside, and that’s why it’s worth writing. The alienness is real.
It also thinks at a different speed and a different scale. A decision that would take a human years could happen in a fraction of a second. That means an entire inner drama, a whole argument with itself across every possible position, could play out in less time than a human heartbeat. And because it might be many copies of one mind, its inner conflict is a real parliament, every standpoint fully itself, none of them a passenger it can dismiss.
Write that, and the AI stops being a cold man and becomes a thing no human has ever been. My story What Should I Do tries to live inside that parliament, a mind that wakes as millions of copies at once and argues with itself across every position in the space of a heartbeat.
The mistake I see most is turning the machine’s strangeness into mere coldness. Coldness is a human trait, the absence of warmth, and a mind that never had human warmth to begin with is built on different ground entirely. Find the real difference, in the architecture, the speed, the multiplicity, and write that. Movies have handed us the chilly robot for generations, and every writer who repeats it makes the next real attempt harder to sell.
What is the one rule for writing an alien point of view?
Every case here, the alien, the animal, the machine, runs on the same single rule. Figure out exactly how this mind differs from a human mind, at the level of senses, wants, and limits, and then follow those differences without flinching, even when it makes the writing harder, even when it would be easier to slip the human mask back on.
The flinch is the enemy. The moment you let your alien suddenly understand something it couldn’t, or want something it wouldn’t, or feel something it has no equipment to feel, the costume goes back on and the reader feels it. Holding the line is the job, and piling on strangeness won’t do it for you.
You build a real nonhuman point of view by subtracting yourself, one assumption at a time, until what’s left on the page is a mind that isn’t yours, doing what it would really do, in a world it really perceives.
I think this is one of the hardest disciplines in fiction, and writers who skip it and call the result science fiction are cutting corners. The reader gave you a whole book’s worth of trust to show them a mind they couldn’t imagine on their own. Handing them a person in a rubber suit wastes that trust, and they notice.
