Writer’s block – Mystery, fantasy and romance at the dangerous ends of the earth

Routine, Flexibility and Permission (oh my)

By Karen Abrahamson | March 12, 2011

I broke routine this morning and slept in until almost seven a.m. The weird thing is, the cats broke routine, too, and let me. Usually they are right there, yelling, or pouncing on me (see here for a wonderful cartoon of the experience), or else Ben will go into the kitchen and bang cupboards or otherwise wreak destruction to get me up. After all, cat tummies are far more important than my beauty sleep.

But this morning they broke routine. Actually they’ve ‘broken’ routine for the past week or so, ever since the corner of my bedroom started to seriously collect things for my trip. Last night I actually began the task of inventorying and packing. I think I have them nervous. I think they know I’m going somewhere soon. After all, they’re far from stupid. But the simple act of letting me sleep is consistent with other behavioral changes they are showing. For example Ben actually managed to crowd onto my lap and fall asleep while I was typing yesterday afternoon, when usually he just plants himself on top of my desk and pushes everything else to the floor. He also made a point of sleeping on my lap last evening. Definitely things are up.

We all know cats have routines and heaven help us if we vary from anything that impacts their feeding, brushing or taking them for walks. (Yes, mine go for walks on leashes.)

Shiva wanting to catch a fly (2010) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

As writers we need those routines, too. For me it has always been a routine to get up at 5:30 and write for two hours before I have to turn to work. I’ve done that for the past ten years and produced about four books a year, until this January when I was ‘forced’ to give it up.

Okay, not forced. I chose to give up. There I was in the middle of manuscript revisions and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was over my head with work and preparing for this trip and had started having nightmares. So something had to give. It was a horrible choice. The guilt was enormous and so was the feeling of failure. But it was also a relief because I was hating everything I was doing because I didn’t have the time to do it well.

A friend of mine recently went through a similar experience for totally different reasons. He moved, due to a job change and then had to spend his time moving in and focusing on the new job. Time passed. He didn’t write. He blogged (here) about the challenge that posed for him because he, like myself, has been regimented about his writing and is a spectacular writer who recently sold his first four book series. His pain is that during his move he hasn’t written a word.

To me the ‘not writing’ has been a lot like what going through nicotine withdrawal must be like. I still find myself at the computer early in the morning, I know I should write (and I do—on work), but the most I’ve been able to write creatively has been these blogs. I tell myself it’s okay, but I know it’s not because it’s very easy to fall out of a habit that’s good for you and very easy to fall into a habit that’s not –like sleeping in.

On Thursday I received a phone call from the airline that is taking me to Peru. They advised that the flight times had changed and therefore I have to leave a day early and layover in Toronto overnight. Thanks goodness my schedule as a consultant is a little flexible. I was able to do it, even if it’s going to be tight for work. Be flexible, I said.

So I’ve decided that writers need to follow my cat’s lead and give themselves permission. Instead of being rigid and getting anxious about not writing, writers need to assess their situation and give themselves permission to not write. Occasionally the world intervenes, like my friend’s move, like another friend’s illness, like another friend dealing with a death in the family. I know all of them are back at the keyboard.

And I know I’m a writer, so I’ll be blogging while I’m travelling and writing when I get back from Peru. That’s promise, just as surely as I know Ben and Shiva will be back to caterwauling in the morning.

Shiva, imposing himself on thanksgiving dinner (2010) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Going Places You Never Thought You Could

By Karen Abrahamson | January 15, 2011

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.

Trouble- Shiva and Ben at 6 months Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

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.

Controlling the Muse, and All Cats Have Aspergers

By Karen Abrahamson | January 8, 2011

Ben and Shiva 2008, Photo (C) Karen Abrahamson

My companions at home are two, two-year-old cats, Benares and Shiva. (People warned me about naming a cat after the god of destruction.) I like to think I’ve gotten through the wild and wooly kitten years and on to the years of peaceful coexistence. Except my cats are Bengals. For the first time in my life I didn’t go to a shelter or a friend’s place for a kitten and I didn’t adopt a mature cat. I’d just lost a cat and she had been marvelous. She was gregarious and liked to travel with me when I went on trips. I wanted that in my next cat and had read that Bengals were friendly, attention-seeking cats and I’d met one that was on a leash in a pet store with dogs all around him. The Bengal ignored the dogs and sat there imperiously. So I got my boys.

Since I brought them home my life has been in turmoil, or if not my life, at least my home. I won’t bore you with the destructive forces of kittens (well, maybe I will in a future post), but let me just say that attention-seeking is not the half of it. These boys will practically grab you by the throat if you’re not giving them enough attention. I’m talking the throw books off the shelves, swing pictures off the walls kind of attention seeking. I’m talking about shred the manuscript and steal my pens attention seeking.

It’s a lot like trying to control a muse. Now I’d never actually thought about having a muse until I thought I’d lost her/him/it. Suddenly every word came out harder and with a lot more doubt that it was the right word, in the right place, at the right time in my manuscript. It all started when I became REALLY serious about marketing my manuscripts. Everything was about producing a product that would SELL, the product the reader would love. And the words came out slower, and more doubts crept in, so I held on tighter and harder. And things got even slower and the doubts greeted me whenever I sat down at my computer.

So I tromped down on the doubts and the sense that something was wrong, and focused harder on finding those right words, in the right place, at the right time. I’m frighteningly stubborn, you see.

And it solved nothing. A lot like following the advice I got from a cat breeder that I needed to do something about my cats to make them behave—like take a rolled up newspaper to them when they were on the counters or pulling something off shelves.

I did what the breeder said and my big boy, Ben, reacted exactly as I didn’t expect: I’d swat him with the newspaper and he’d hunker down and purr at me. Hard to swat him again when he does that.

So it was suggested that I treat them as a big cat might a small one and so, when he was creating some form of havoc, I picked Ben up by the scruff of the neck, yelled, and locked him in a room. The results? Well aside from the room taking a beating from the temper tantrum he threw, nothing changed.

So I was stymied. I didn’t know what to do and believe me, my house was getting torn up, big time. And then one night I realized something. All this bad boy behavior was aimed at getting my attention and my reaction was to give negative reinforcement to the bad behavior by giving him attention. I realized that what I needed to do was just give them attention. Spend time with them. Love them.

And you know what? The destruction didn’t completely stop, but it slowed down immensely. (You see I can’t be at their beck and call ALL the time.)

So what I learned with my cats I applied to my writing. I had to get out of sales mode and focus on what made my muse happy—not right words, in the right place, in the right time, but the story I was telling. I met my muse again and spent time with him/her/it. I relaxed and stopped putting rules around my desk and suddenly I was writing again, focused on creation, not selling.

Which puts me in mind of a wonderful little book called All Cats Have Aspergers. It’s a little book, a picture book really, for parents of Aspergers children. (For those of you unfamiliar with Aspergers, this is a form of autism, but the children are higher functioning, just in a different way than most of us. The heroine of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo probably had Aspergers. So did the protagonist of the Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time.) But one of the messages of the book is that Aspergers children (and cats) have their own way of doing things. They want attention when they want attention. They like to play their own games. And they don’t like to be held too tight.

A lot like muses.