Today I have the pleasure of presenting you a guest blog post from author Terry Persun, talking about shamanism in his work. Take it away, Terry!

Writing About Shamans

by Terry Persun

After years of studying Native American cultures, medicine men, shamans, conscious dreaming, and drum journeying, I’ve begun to write more about the subject in my fiction. My first entrance was my fantasy novel Doublesight, where the main characters are shape shifters who can only shift into their totem animal. Every “magical” element has to have limitations, and I found that shape shifters who can transform into any shape they want were just too easy. For example, turn into a grizzly bear if you have to fight a human and slip into the image of a mouse if you want to sneak under a door. The characters in “Doublesight” don’t quite have those options.

The difficulty, of course, is to take on the role of the animal, both physically and mentally, without it reading fake. Who am I to understand how an animal might think? Who am I to understand how a human who has shifted into an animal might think? And who am I to understand how human-only characters would feel about the doublesight?

Well, the truth is that, as a writer, I not only had the ability to write about these things, but the obligation to give them a lot of thought, to be consistent, and to explore the subject to the requirements of the novel. Even more important was the fact that I got to explain the physical shift, the mental state, and the emotional state of my characters as deeply as I wanted. I got to explore the yearning a doublesight goes through before shifting into their animal image, as well as the subsequent yearning to shift back. In the novel, animal and human are in an almost constant battle.

Since my main character was shaman-like more than magical, it was a great opportunity to play with more than one realm of existence and how the realms overlapped. The most difficult part of “playing the shaman” in a book like “Doublesight” was keeping the reader in a stable place. I felt that if the reader wasn’t sure where they were, then they’d back out of the story. They wouldn’t be able to suspend their disbelief. Which meant that the reader might stop reading.

Writing about a shaman was a balancing act between coaxing the reader into another world altogether, and allowing them to know where they were at all times so that they did’t become confused. My feeling was that, as a writer, it was my job to convince the reader that what I wrote down was the truth in some way. Even when it comes to writing about shamans, what happens must appear completely plausible within the constraints of the world created. I’ll let it up to the reader to let me know if I’ve succeeded.

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Terry Persun writes in many genres, including historical fiction, mainstream, literary, and science fiction/fantasy. He is a Pushcart nominee. His latest poetry collection is “And Now This”. His novel, “Cathedral of Dreams” is a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year finalist in the science fiction category, and his novel “Sweet Song” won a Silver IPPY Award. His latest novel is, “Revision 7: DNA”, a sci-fi thriller. Terry’s website is: www.TerryPersun.com or you can find him on Amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/Terry-L-Persun/e/B004NV8Q4Y/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

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