Going Places You Never Thought You Could

The title sounds like it’s one of my travel blogs, but in this case it’s not. Although it could be. I certainly have gone places I didn’t think I could.

But anyway, the inspiration for this blog came this morning as I was stepping out of the shower. So there I am, all naked and dripping wet and there is big Ben, waiting for me—standing on top of the door. Nicely balanced, if I do say so myself. He was actually able to turn around and give me a pained look when I asked him what he thought he was doing. When he leapt halfway across the room to the floor, it was with a cat-shrug as if it was something he has done every day. And maybe he has. Cats make difficult, naughty things look easy.

On a few other occasions I’ve found him busy knocking shells I’ve gathered from around the world off an ornamental shelf I have hung above my towel rack. You know—one of those shelves of mock wood that you hang from the wall. He has to get to this shelf by balancing on my towel rack. Thank goodness I’ve got both rack and shelf screwed into the wall.

But Ben’s absolute fearlessness, and his determination to get wherever it is he sets his mind to, reminds me of the permission we need to give ourselves as writers. When I was working on Ashes and Light, the romantic suspense set in Afghanistan, I had a dickens of a time getting started.

Each time I did, I stopped within the first 20 pages, because I just couldn’t get my head around where I was writing about. I felt if I didn’t know a place firsthand—hadn’t inhaled the spices, felt the grit on my skin, and almost broke an ankle on the uneven pavement—there was no way I could start. This begged the question: Could I only write about places I’d been? Could all those literary fiction pundits be correct when they said that I couldn’t write about a culture other than my own?

That’s a perspective that has slapped me upside the head a few times, and with which I heartily disagree, because if we can only write our own culture, then by extension, how can I write about anyone but me? (A fine idea for those narcissists among us, but….) So if I could reject the second hypothesis, then surely I could reject the first. The only thing getting in my way was my own ability to grasp the greatest truism of novel writing:

It’s Fiction!!

Yes, I had to do research. Yes, I had to recall my travels to parts of the world where Turkic people live, and to the mountains so like those around Badakshan in Northern Afghanistan. I had to find photo books and travel books and contact the Canadian military for information about the landscape. I befriended a local Afghani woman and picked her brain for hours about life as a woman in Afghanistan, attitudes towards woman, and folk stories and sayings.

After all that work and about 450 manuscript pages I still found myself hung up. There I was with my characters crossing a pass in the snow-bound Hindu Kush mountains and they and I were stuck. I couldn’t find anying describing the pass. I knew it was high. I knew it was rough. And Google Earth wasn’t exactly helping with accessing details of the militarily sensitive landscape.

That was when I had the epiphany.

It’s fiction.

It’s fiction and how many people are going to go to that tiny speck of earth to check whether my details are 100% true to life? Besides, in the Hindu Kush mountains, the landscape changes. There are earthquakes.

So knowing it was fiction, I wrote a fictional scene, in a fiction book, and you know, it worked.

I got down out of that imaginary landscape just as slick as Ben got off that door edge.