After ten years of work, Crown of Crows is finally complete. It’s a feminist reimagining of Narnia, but today I want to talk about a specific craft challenge that dominated the writing: how do you write real animism?
For me, as a Druid, animism is not just an aesthetic or metaphor (though I wholeheartedly endorse both). Animism is reality. Trees, stones, bears, and rivers are actual persons with agency, not (only) symbols of nature or spiritual beings.
Beyond my philosophical and spiritual commitment, then, I wanted to portray true animism in this book. And that created specific, thorny writing problems that required concrete solutions.
The Problem: Making Non-Human Persons Actually Non-Human
Most fantasy treats talking animals as humans in fur suits. They think like humans, speak like humans, and want human things. Think of how powerful and evocative it is when fiction portrays truly foreign cultures. Real animals are a step even further beyond.
This is true even in excellent fantasy such as Watership Down. And Narnia falls into this as well, though Lewis does draw a distinction between Talking Animals and dumb beasts. Mrs. Beaver runs a household, Reepicheep has human notions of honor, and the animals at Cair Paravel are courtiers with paws. Meanwhile, the non-speaking animals of Narnia are hunted, farmed, milked, and fished like any other natural resource.
But if you take animism seriously, you can’t do that. A bear is not a human. A bear thinks differently, values different things, communicates in fundamentally different ways. How do you write that while still making them comprehensible to readers?
Here’s a specific example from the Bear Seer scene in Crown of Crows. In this scene, protagonist Queen Sarah has arrived at a bear den, the Cave of Midnight, alongside her human companions Gilly and Dean, and her nonhuman companions Gehwa (a unicorn who uses human speech) and a crow (who does not). Sarah realizes that somehow she can communicate with the bears and crows, but no one else can.
Technique 1: Communication as Physical Act
When my protagonist Sarah first encounters the bears, I needed to establish that she isn’t using telepathy or magical translation. She’s actually making bear sounds:
“When you speak to the bears, I hear growling. When you speak to the crow, I hear… well, I will call it crow song, to be polite.” …Sarah’s throat did feel sore and scratchy. Had she been growling and squawking without realizing it?
This does two things:
- Grounds the magic physically – there’s a bodily cost to cross-species communication.
- Creates dramatic irony – Sarah doesn’t even realize she’s doing it, which makes it more visceral for the reader.
Technique 2: Words “Drop Into” Mind Rather Than Being “Heard”
The bear communication itself had to feel different from human speech:
“And it made an extraordinary noise. It was a series of grunts, rather like a ‘Hmmph hrrrumh mmmrrfph’, but the grunts were punctuated by popping and clicking noises made by its tongue and teeth. And words dropped into Sarah’s mind: Welcome. Welcome Queen. Welcome friends. Here is called Cave of Midnight.“
The bear is making physical sounds (grunts, clicks, pops), but meaning arrives in Sarah’s mind non-linguistically. It’s not translation—it’s direct apprehension of intent.
Compare this to how humans speak in the scene: they use complete sentences, complex syntax, subordinate clauses, and so on. The bears don’t. Their communication is:
- Predominantly short, simple statements
- Heavily context-dependent
- More like poetry than prose
In the book, the bears have their own language, but it has the structure and sounds of a language that bears might actually use.
Technique 3: Bears Have Different Concerns Than Humans
This is where animism becomes plot. The Cave of Midnight isn’t a bear den. It’s a sacred space:
“Always there is food outside… Cave of Midnight not for eating.”
“Then what is it for?”
“For seeing. An-t-Ahr has two places: high place, low place. High place is Sí Anahr. Low place is Cave of Midnight… At Sí Anahr, make justice. At Úaff na Mianníeh, see justice.”]
When I wrote this, I had to ensure that the bears were not just a convenience store. Sarah needs food and shelter. The bears provide some shelter, but barely any food, because bears don’t store food in caves. It spoils.
And the cave serves a purpose that has nothing to do with Sarah. It’s a place for “seeing justice” through the under-stars (constellations visible on cave walls). The bears let Sarah stay, but they’re not running a hotel. They have their own concerns.
Technique 4: The Seer as Genuinely Other
The Bear Seer was one of the more difficult characters to write. She needed to be:
- Comprehensible enough that readers could follow the plot
- Alien enough that she felt like a genuine non-human intelligence
- Wise, but in a bear way, not a Gandalf way
Her speech pattern reflects this. She speaks in fragments, riddles, and cosmological pronouncements:
“No future… Many summers ago, there was future. But future… diminished. Ebbed. Stars only now sing: death. Ending. Dust.”
For each of her utterances, I had to write it out in full, syntactic English, and then brutally whittle away everything that didn’t sound like a bear. Otherwise she would feel too human. I had to trust that readers would tolerate ambiguity, and meet her closer to where she was. Not understanding everything the Seer says enhances the sense that she’s thinking inhumanly.
She’s not being cryptic to be mysterious. She’s speaking plainly for a bear who reads cosmic patterns in cave stars. Of course she sounds weird to humans.
Technique 5: Practical Problems Create Dramatic Tension
One unexpected benefit of taking animism seriously: it creates constant practical problems that drive plot.
Sarah can understand everyone (though she doesn’t know why yet), but that means she has to act as interpreter. The crow can’t understand bears, or vice versa. Gilly, Dean and Gehwa can’t understand anyone. This creates:
- Confusion and miscommunication
- Power dynamics (Sarah controls information flow)
- Delays while people catch up
- Comedy. For example, the crow gets bored not understanding anything and starts demanding food during a spiritual moment.
These aren’t “worldbuilding details.” They’re active obstacles that shape every scene.
Similarly: Gehwa the unicorn eats starlight. The bears have winter stores but almost no food. No one can build a fire because there’s no ventilation. These constraints aren’t inconvenient—they’re generative. They force creative problem-solving and reveal character.
What I Learned
Writing genuine animism is an example of that old writing adage: limitations are better than convenience.
Every time I was tempted to make the non-human characters more helpful, more comprehensible, more human, the story got weaker. The bears became actors. The magic became a plot device.
But when I leaned into the difficulty—when I made Sarah work to understand, made her negotiate on the bears’ terms, made her accept that she’d never fully grasp what the Seer is seeing in the under-stars—the world came alive.
The bears stopped being “bear characters” and became bears. With their own language, their own sacred spaces, their own relationship to death and justice and the cosmos.
That’s what animism means in fiction. Not everything can talk to you on your terms. You have to learn to listen on theirs.
Crown of Crows Available
The book is now available on Patreon and on Amazon. The first three chapters are free on Patreon as well.
And if you’re working on similar challenges—trying to write genuine Otherness, trying to make your fantasy worlds feel truly alive—I’d love to hear what techniques you’re using. Drop a comment or find me on Mastodon or Bluesky.
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