Why our goldfish isn't famous

                                                  

We’ve had our goldfish for almost two years now (pictured). But I’ve never yet felt inspired to write a story or poem about her (or a play or article or novel or anything else). There’s a reason for this. She doesn’t do much. She swims around her bowl, in and out of the weed. Once a day she gobbles up some fish pellets. She looks sort of graceful gliding through the water. But that’s about it. That’s why our goldfish isn’t famous—at least not until just now when I published her photo for not being famous.

By contrast, I have written stories or poems about elephants, ostriches, crocodiles, bears, rhinos and anacondas. And once a very angry Southern Cassowary took centre stage. Much to the relief of my family, I have never owned any of these animals as pets. But I’ve seen all of them in zoos, and I have read about them in books and seen them in documentaries. They are all creatures of drama and pizazz; kids, it seems, love meeting them in literature.

Recently I finished drafting a little novel for kids. It’s a crazy story, which I’ll probably tell you more about in a future blog. It’s about a parachute and two bandits and a bank heist and a ten-tonne elephant and a group of kids in an otherwise ordinary town. But it’s a certain fish that I want to tell you about right now. You see, the boy in the story lives in an ordinary sort of house in the suburbs. They have a fish tank in their dining room with a fish in it.

Now, I could have made the fish a goldfish. After all, goldfish are the most common pet fish in the world and it would have helped depict the domestic scene of the boy’s ordinary life. But I wanted something more dramatic. That’s why I chose a Lion Fish. Let me quote the boy narrator’s own description of this real-life fish in the novel:

“You might not know what a Lion Fish is. That’s because a Lion Fish is really not ordinary. A Lion Fish is an exotic reef fish. It’s about the size of a small football and it looks amazing. It has large quills hanging all over its body which are poisonous. If you even so much as touch one of those sharp quills, you are in agony for a week. Nothing hurts as much as a Lion Fish quill! You never ever want to put your hand in a Lion Fish tank. But my dad wanted a Lion Fish, because it looked so cool in the pet shop, and because it’s great to be able to tell people you’ve actually got a Lion Fish.”

You see what I mean? The whole dramatic atmosphere is heightened simply because the fish is a Lion Fish. The very choice of this real-life creature has handed the story—ready-made as it were—a sense of intrigue, danger and possibility. If I’d chosen a goldfish, it would have done none of these things (no offense to the goldfish). A goldfish wouldn’t have left you wondering, or on edge. It would just have left you yawning. But with a Lion Fish … anything can happen and probably will.

And of course the ten-tonne elephant in the story does a similar job, on an even larger scale. What wonderful possibilities there are with a ten-tonne elephant! In fact, the elephant, I can let you know, becomes a key part of my very crazy novel. I guess the moral for writing these sorts of stories is: choose creatures that will add explosive action to your plot-line. Don’t go tame! Go wild. But I might tell you more about my ten-tonne elephant in another blog.