One of my secret obsessions is nature documentaries.
When I saw Blue Planet II was finally available on Netflix, I actually gasped out loud. As I started watching the new documentary, I wondered what exactly it was that made me love them.
Of course, the absolute beauty of the earth, the crazy antics of animals, and David Attenborough’s accent are all factors, but I began to notice that the best nature documentaries are actually a masterclass in storytelling. There’s a reason most people find Planet Earth more engaging than just looking out the window at birds in their own backyard, and I don’t believe it’s solely because of the exotic animals. Here are five things all writers can learn from nature documentaries and apply to their writing.
Give your character a clear goal
Regardless of what the animal is in the documentary, they have a clear goal. The bird needs to build a shelter. The frog is protecting its eggs. The caribou has to find food. From the get-go, we as the viewer understand what “success” means to the animal, even if we have never experienced it ourselves. This makes room for obstacles to occur, creating conflict and tension which keep the viewer engaged and the story moving along. If the documentary was just an extended shot of a bird sitting on its nest, most people wouldn’t stay tuned in for very long. When planning your story, your character needs a clear goal—even if it may change through the course of the story as the character grows, or if it’s an intangible goal like happiness or acceptance.
Don’t make it black and white
One of the hardest things about watching a nature doc is that in order for some animals to survive, others must die. That’s just the way the world works, but nothing quite hammers it in like a polar bear killing a cute baby seal to feed it to her cute baby cubs. Both sides have understandable motivations for 
their actions: namely, to survive.
When writing stories that have an antagonist, they need to have a clear motivation. It may not be something as sympathetic as trying to survive, but it should be a good cause in their own eyes, even if the reader and protagonist know that it’s twisted. A character should never be evil or mean just for the sake of it. The best villains—the ones we love to hate—would think they are the hero of the story, and that’s what makes them come alive, instead of remaining flat, cookie-cutter bad guys.
Make your characters relatable
I, obviously, am not a tusked fish or a hummingbird or any of the other animals featured on a nature documentary. But the creators still make the animals relatable to us humans watching it by giving them very human-like goals associated with emotions we all know. Trying to protect your family, or impress someone you find attractive, or even decorating your home, are all things we understand, even if we haven’t done it in the same way the animal on the screen has.
In the same way, even if you’re writing fantasy, your characters’ goals and conflict can still be relatable if it boils down to a basic human emotion. We all know what it’s like to fail, even if the fate of the world has never been on our shoulders. No matter what your characters are going through, giving them emotions that we can all relate to will help your readers care about what happens to them.
Find the inherent drama, but also enhance the tension
Nature is full of drama, and the creators of the documentaries know how to capitalize on it. Seeking out a mate, evading predators, a long migration—all of these are necessary parts of many animals’ lives, and come with a clear goal and conflict. But the nature documentary doesn’t just show us an hour of a bird picking up sticks and weaving a nest. Instead, it edits together the most exciting bits—when it finds the perfect leaf, or when another bird tries to claim the nest as its own—to keep the viewer interested. Then it ratchets up the tension with tools like music, which we often don’t even realize is making the scene seem more dramatic than it actually is. Part of good writing is knowing which parts of your story to cut in order to draw the reader in to truly care. You can then use the tools at your disposal–things like word choice, sentence length, pacing, chapter breaks and more–to keep the reader hooked.
Don’t be too preachy
In the past several years, a crucial part of nature docs has been to show how climate change affects animals. Inferior documentaries do this by panning over the melting ice caps and having the narrator drone on about statistics of global temperatures and blah blah blah. Even for someone who cares about climate change, this gets a little old.
The best documentaries, however, are able to show the effects of global warming, pollution, or other problems by incorporating it straight into the story they’re already telling. Polar bears unable to hunt because the ice isn’t thick enough to hold them. Jungle cats forced to prowl the cities because humans have encroached into their territory. By focusing on a specific “character,” the story speaks for itself and conveys the magnitude of the problem in a far more understandable and relatable way than a narrator listing the decreasing thickness of the Arctic ice in the past decades.
If your book has a message, it is best conveyed through the story itself, not by the narrator or even a character giving a long, rambling speech that explicitly lays out what the theme is. That’s what non-fiction is for. In fictional stories, if you want to incorporate a message beyond the plot, the story itself should be answering a question and exploring the theme, and you should trust your readers to pick up on it without you needing to spell it out.
What media other than books have taught you about writing and storytelling? Tell me about them in the comments!
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Featured image by François Pierrot