Special feature: hakuchou's Guide To Writing Winged People

[booksofafeather]

Introduction

I decided to create this guide to writing winged people after reading many novels and helping charcoalfeathers with her novel as an advisor. During this, I thought of many issues that commonly happen when writing winged people and many things that are often forgotten. So, I decided to make this guide for writing them.

Important! Please remember that this is only one person's opinion! Like any guide to "writing this type of person" I am only one person who can't speak for everybody. These are ideas only! If your experience is different then please tell me and I will be happy to accept your thoughts and add them into this guide.

Also, this guide will only talk about bird wings, not bat wings, dragon wings or insect wings. I don't know enough about those sorts of wings. m(_ _)m So, if somebody is those species, please help the guide to be better and give your thoughts!

Warning: this might have some triggery content for mentions of cruelty to birds/wings.

1. What species?

Okay! So you decided you want to have winged people in your story. Well, the first thing to look at is "what is your species that you invented like". Please, take some thought about this.

If you are putting bird wings on a character, then you might consider that they have some bird genes, or instincts, or aspect to their personality. It's not always the case and maybe you are just writing angels that don't have that connection. But, for almost anyone with wings, you might at least use a bird metaphor or have some kind of kin feeling with birds, once in a while.

So, decide what level of connection they feel to birds, if it's a little, or not at all. Or if they have connection to other creatures too. Then, please look at that species that their wings are of, its habits, habitat, diet, and other things. You might find some ideas to put into their personality. Or, if they don't have a personality like that, maybe they will feel a special connection with birds, like birds are their family. Remember that winged people understand the sky and few other people do. So, your characters might feel bonded to those who also understand. Of course, if you're just making up your own thing that's okay too, but it's one good way to create a winged person that feels realistic.

2. Emotional expressions

Okay, now let's look at how wings express themselves. Many people forget this! A wing is not just dead weight. It is living and moving and may even have a mind of its own. Wings express themselves just as we use hand positions, sitting positions and face expressions to show our feelings. You can make up endless body language for wings, it's only limited by your imagination. Maybe you can even use wings for a full language. But, at least have some basics.

Your winged people might not be based on birds. But, if they are, a good way to do the emotions is to learn how birds react. Also, remember even if they're not based on birds, if their hairs react like humans do then feathers will react in those same ways, so some behaviours like fluffing are inevitable, and don't change even if you don't have other bird instincts. Unless the wings are truly magical, or alien things designed completely differently from bird wings then they will respond in this way, of course if your character doesn't have human emotions or human nervous impulses then that changes things too, but generally, it's this way.

- In cases where the human hair on the body stands up, the feather shaft will too. These are conditions such as: cold, strong fear, anger, deep pleasure. Any time you get "goosebumps" the feathers will puff out. (Instinct, can't be changed if the body is like a human's.) A bird can also puff feathers out on purpose, for a threat display or to preen under the feathers. Except in cases of fear or threat, exposing the wing this way is a sign of trust. (This is an emotional behaviour and might be different depending on the purpose.)

- When a person is shivering, the shiver will clearly be shown in the motion of the feathers, which are very sensitive to motion being very light. If a person with feathers is trembling then it's very easy to see.

- In cases of shock, being off balance or being startled, wings flapping is a common reaction. In shock, often a "half-flap" so the wings don't stretch out fully. In balance, the wings usually stretch out fully. This is like flapping your arms, it's instinct mostly. Flapping or spreading wings can also be used as a threat display or to show anger deliberately. Spreading wings is also a show of trust (it sounds like a contradiction but it depends).

- Wings can also tuck over yourself, or over others as an emotional gesture (like a hug or blanket). Remember that feathers are very warm, they have an insulation effect so your own wings can make a very good blanket! Wings can point and show direction in the same way as arms too. Although, it's easier to use your arms.

Remember that holding the wings out is like holding your arms out, it gets tiring. Mostly wings will stay tucked just like you don't hold your arms rigid all the time.

3. Daily activities and lifestyle

Think about these things when creating your winged characters or species:

- What is their diet? If they live in a human world, what will they think in response to seeing a world where we eat chicken and turkey legs and wings? (Maybe nothing... some birds are carnivores. But it depends on the species.) If their society is based around them, not around humans, they might have a different natural diet for the culture too. Perhaps in their culture it's horrible to eat birds. Or, grains and fruit and fish are very common. For flying, you need much high-energy food so maybe that affects eating too.

- What is their hygiene ritual? Wings are hard to care for. For a water bird especially, or those living in cold weather, the oil that is put onto the feather might be important for warmth. Feathers also have to be zipped (this means the barbules, or individual feather strands are closed together like a zipper on clothing) to work right. You do this by preening, birds use their beak but you can use fingers too. If a feather is too damage it can affect flight too. Plus, feathers take time to dry, and they are hard to clean under. For a person with human arms, difficult to reach too.

- What is their sleeping position? Remember birds don't sleep on their back. Unless they want pulled and ruffled feathers your bird people don't either maybe. With large wings a human bed is not always suitable. A hammock or fluffy nest of pillows might hold their body shape better by supporting the limbs on all sides.

4. Wings are limbs

This seems obvious but people forget it! A wing, at least of a bird type, is a limb. By limb I mean it's like an arm or a leg... this seems obvious too but it merits reflection.

If you are human you probably have two arms and two legs. You are used to living life that way and you operate in a world that expects four limbs. If your winged characters exist in a world for humans (population is mostly human), then, please, consider that your character is a six-limbed person in a four-limbed world. This will affect how they get around: where they can sit and stand, what kind of cars they can use, and many other things. If your winged characters exist in a world where they can have a part of society for themselves, then, please, consider that your character is a six-limbed person in a six-limbed world. It might look very different from a human, four-limbed world.

Having six limbs affects the position you can be in comfortably... it affects how you might hold or touch someone and what range of gestures or body language your culture can develop (see 2, "Emotional expressions")... it affects what is okay for you to do (wear a backpack? Go to paintball? The paint might damage your feathers...). Also, wings are a delicate part that must be taken care of very carefully. So, a character might be uncomfortable with casual touching of wings. Wings can also be sensitive to magic or energy and they are sensitive to the movement of wind since the individual feathers' moving can be felt. Please remember this.

Please look at how wings are constructed! On sites like Deviantart you can find many "wing tutorials". This will show you exactly how wings work for the drawing of wings, which will also be good for the writing of your story, since you need to know how your character can reach and bend with her limbs and where it is comfortable to sit, stand and lie. There are many "how a human shape with wings might look" tutorials too. Of course your characters may vary, but try and be realistic please ^v^ A flying person with wings will need more chest muscles and bigger breastbone for example, to support flight.

5. Wing growth

Please now also consider the path of wing growth. Do your winged people have wings from birth or do they grow them later? Most people don't do this in a way that looks wrong, because there is no way to get it wrong really. You design it how you want to. However, please think of some things.

- Wings will change balance when they suddenly appear.
- Suddenly growing a new body part takes lots of energy and might be painful.
- The day when a character gets their full wings might be a rite of passage and celebration.
- Examine feather growth patterns to know how long it takes to molt and grow feathers.
- Wings don't usually start out in their final adult colours. Wing colours might be important to a character, for example, having your final colours might be a marking of being adult that is long waited for.
- Wing colours can show the sex of a bird or person. So, the story of "girl disguises herself to go to a boys' school" might have an interesting twist.

6. Flight

Now to the fun part! Flying is an important part of life for any person who has wings or a connection to birds. Even if they can't fly, and especially if they can't fly, it's probable that there will be a longing for flight. Spiritually, humans throughout the ages have been longing for flight and it is part of the universal human dream. So I don't think I need to explain how it feels to you. If you are thinking about writing this story, you probably want to fly too... so, take all those feelings and channel them hard into the story to make a very beautiful depiction of this feeling. Your readers will read your story because they want to fly too! It should be inspiring!

But, it's also important to note that even people who can fly will long for flying. It doesn't go away just because you have wings. Of course, you now have a way to fill the longing. But a bird-person won't like to be trapped in a space where they can't fly. And if they don't do it for a while maybe they get irritated or stressed. Flying is an important emotional need. You can't just turn it on and off.

Flying is also instinct in birds. A bird doesn't have to be taught to fly, they know how to do it. We say "baby birds learn to fly" but actually it's not true, the flying is an instinct that comes at a certain age. Maybe your character is a teenager and just begins to feel that instinct as you start the story....

If your character is going to fly, you have to think about how big is the wingspan for flight. A wingspan for a human's flying without magic or hollow bones needs to be large. The largest flying bird in Earth history was Argentavis magnificens which is similar to a flying person's weight, its wingspan was thought to be around 23 ft and it weighted 150 pounds. A person with that wingspan can't fit in a normal car easily, please note ^^ This sort of wingspan is only built for gliding, not a lot of flapping. There is some flapping available but it's not powerful. It mostly relies on the gliding.

Of course, with magic you can do many things, but don't make it too ridiculous please ^^

Also, without magic, it isn't possible to take off straight from the ground. A human-sized flier is simply too heavy. Of course maybe your characters are small fairies or sprites, then they can fly off the ground easily ^^ Or, they are incorporeal. But if that's not the case, they will need to fly differently.

Try observing birds and see how they fly. A small bird can immediately fly off when they are startled and fly straight up. A larger bird has to take a run. For a great gliding bird such as your winged character, they will probably need to fly as a hang glider does. They sink before they soar. Going off a cliff or a hill or treetop, with lots of clearance below so they don't get caught on objects, is the best way.

If you really want to know some complex things about flight, this and this page are great! (Warning: these links have pictures of removed mounted bird wings.) But it's very detailed. You don't need that much detail, but if you really want to explore the issue it's good to read.

7. Other instincts

It's optional, but it adds detail that winged people reading your story will appreciate ^^

The mind of a person with six limbs, designed for flying is different from a human mind. A mind that is designed for flying wants to fly. It's also possible that this mind has other instincts that are less like humans and more like birds, or have more of a magical aspect depending what kind of character you are creating. Maybe these will include....

- magnetic sense of compass direction
- "homing sense", this is different from directional sense! Directional sense does not tell a homing bird where to go. Imagine I took you to a strange place on the other side of the country and told you to get home, and you have a compass. Knowing where north is will not tell you how to get home if you don't have directions, because you don't know where you are! Birds have been blindfolded and taken to strange locations and then released. They always still know how to get to their breeding ground which is often one specific small place. This might be experienced as "feeling drawn to a specific home place".
- migration, or feeling a need to seasonally migrate, or be in a particular type of environment at times of the year or all the time (tundra, forest, water, etc.)
- nesting behaviour
- some partnership actions (some birds mate for life, others don't)
- feather plucking or over-preening in stressful times
- compulsive behaviour
- "feather sense", using the motion of the feathers to tell things like wind direction or very subtle air pressure change

There are also some other things that a bird-person might feel. If they have an ancestral memory connection maybe they will feel the pain of many birds around the world. Bird smuggling for pet shops is a money-making trade and the birds can be treated very badly. Often, to get the babies, trees are cut down too destroying the environment. They are noisy, wild and difficult to care for so their owners might abuse them. In other parts of the world bird species are becoming extinct for deforesting and other reasons. Can your character hear the cries of their species?

8. Cruelty

Of course when we write stories we want to include a sense of conflict. So, often cruel things happen to the characters. Often people just put in a cruel event for a sense of drama without thinking about the consequences, which makes that event feel very cheap. When you want to put in a cruel event happening to your character, please think about how it will affect the rest of their life. Then, you can write a realistic story.

I'll start with the first thing, losing wings. This happens to characters in almost all stories that involve wings. At some time, you know that a person will have their wing cut off or the temporary magical wings will "fall off" or "disappear". It's used too much without a sense of what that really means. If a character is born winged, they have six limbs, and to lose a wing is like cutting off your arm. That person is disabled now and they have to learn to get around the world differently, plus they might be very bitter and angry, or sad and grieving, or any other reactions that people have to getting a disability. They don't just "turn into normal humans" if their wings come off! That is the one thing never to do. You will make people so mad. It's like saying, "if you cut off all a human's limbs they will turn into a normal snake". A human is not a snake and a winged person is not a normal human (or might not be human at all), so please don't think it can be "okay" if they have the normal human number of limbs. One big difference is they can't fly. The longing could possibly drive a person mad, or at least, they might not be the personality they were before.

Often a character will have wings temporarily due to magic and lose them later. Then, the adjustment might be less depending on how long they had the wings, and how much they enjoyed having them. But remember that flight is a dream that humans have always been seeking. To have that, and have it taken away is a big emotional toll. Your characters will remember the experience of being able to fly and they have been changed by it forevermore. From just one experience of flight and having that taken away, your character might have troubling dreams, nightmares and thoughts, and the longing probably never leaves. Even someone who hated having the wings might miss the flying, there are few people who truly hate to fly on their own wings.

Plus, in both types you might have phantom limb pains, or feelings of body dysphoria (their body is all wrong now), or balance problems.

Please please don't use this casually! If your story has magical wings that disappear at the end of the story, ask if you really need to do that and if the character can ever really go back to normal life having been changed that way. Too many people think "everything has to return to normal at the end of the exciting adventure". But, that's just a trope. And it is done too much and with too little consequences. So please don't use it, unless you really have to! This goes double if your character is someone who always dreamed of flight and then gave it up happily at the end of the story because they found something better after all. No, no, no! Please don't use that plot! That is cheapening people's dreams. Think of the thing in the world that matters most to you, and imagine someone wrote a story where you realise you could have something better and that thing that matters to you is just a silly daydream. Think of how angry you would feel if someone did that to your dream. Then, see if you really want to write this story.

Sorry about the ranting m(_ _)m But that makes me really angry.... Well, onto the rest of things.

There are other ways you can be cruel to your characters without cutting off a wing. Some of these are also very bad and some are less bad, but all of them can be painful emotionally, or physically. Also, some people do these things and don't even realise they are painful! The wings are often the focus of a winged person's identity so damage here can be very humiliating, please remember that.

- Binding wings to keep them from growing. This is common in stories and is almost as bad as cutting off a wing. You are forcing the person to have deformities. They might not be able to fly, probably can't fly unless magic is used to heal them because a wing is a precise part of the body. By precise, I mean it has to be exactly as it is or it won't work well. Some stories use this well for a painful effect, but please consider the serious nature of this cruelty.

- Breaking wings. Of course this is obvious. A broken wing can often heal okay for flying, but it will be very painful and humiliating.

- Plucking feathers. This doesn't seem very bad but the person will not be able to fly for a while if you take too many. By plucking, it's possible to damage the shaft where the feather grows, so sometimes they don't grow back. Also, if you pluck a blood feather (still growing feather), there will be a big bleed. Don't have any character pluck feathers casually! It's a big deal to do it, even if they do it themselves. It should mean something.

- Cutting feathers. Often, cutting the flight feathers is done to pet birds to keep them from flying. It can keep winged people from flying too, and probably it's the easiest way to keep someone on the ground, but I never see this in stories. It's the least harmful because feathers will molt and grow back and it doesn't damage the feather shaft. But it's still a cruel thing to do to someone.

- Emotional threat. Even a threat of cutting off the wing or cutting the flight feathers can be emotionally painful. Touching the wing without permission if you're not trusted can be too. A wing is a vulnerable and precious part, remember. It's possible to feel very emotionally invaded by wing touching, depending on what the mind of your winged character is like.

If you are going to write a story about a winged person, remember that you don't have to hurt the wings at all! Of course if someone is going to attack them, the wings are an easy target. But, if your character is not in a war or a fight, there's no need to hurt wings. Don't do it just because you think you have to, and please always make it a big deal when you do it. Even an accidental hurt might make someone start panicking. But a story about winged people where people's wings don't get hurt is a refreshing change of pace.

9. Other details

This is the place for your imagination! The details are only limited by what you can think of. Please, don't feel limited to what I said here. Instead, look at birds and look at other stories of flight and be creative!

If you want some more help, this is a wonderful post about what you should be thinking about when writing winged people. It's even more detailed than mine. Please, read the comments too as there are more helpful thoughts there.

10. Final thoughts

If this feels like a lot of discouraging details, please, don't lose faith! You don't have to put every detail in the story for it to be good. This is only an example of things you should think about, but if you didn't think about it or you feel like the detail doesn't go in your story, you don't have to use it. I just say these things in hopes that people will be more considerate of their winged characters, and not just write them thoughtlessly.

Please, have a great time writing your story and thank you for reading my guide! ^v^ I hope it helped!

Thank you very much to charcoalfeathers for creating a beautiful story and helping me to have words for many of my thoughts. m(_ _)m