What organizes fiction is conflict—and only characers experience conflict, [so find] the dominating human conflict in your situation.

—Stephen Koch on how to find your story when writing.

I realize, reading this, that one thing that makes J. M. Coetzee’s work so unusual, and so powerful, is his understanding and depiction of humanity as decidedly unspecial.  Rather than anthropomorphizing non-human “characters”, he depicts humans as merely creatures like any other.