Back Stage With Freedom's Stand

My youngest child has at last cut the umbilical cord and is taking those first tottering steps in the big, wide world outside my hovering embrace. Not some unanticipated late-life flesh-and-blood offspring [my husband just breathed relief!], though the birthing has been far more prolonged and arduous than any of the four humans who list me as parent on their birth certificates.

No, it's just that my latest book, Freedom's Stand, rolled off the press this month. Its exquisite face looks up at me from the pages of CBD catalogs. It holds hands with illustrious neighbors in Tyndale's summer fiction ads. It makes its own way beyond my control into bookstores and libraries. As a parent, I hold my own breath, urging it on to a long and healthy life in that competitive, even cut-throat that is today's book publishing world.

Much has been said elsewhere both by myself and others about the message and story of Freedom's Stand [see Christianbook.com's Fiction Blog], my own heart for Afghanistan and its people, issues of religious freedom and the persecuted church. So I won't linger on the book's contents here. In brief, Freedom's Stand is the sequel to 2010 Christian Book Award and Christy Award finalist, Veiled Freedom, set in contemporary Afghanistan. Veiled Freedom brings together on Kabul's dusty streets a disillusioned Special Forces veteran, an idealistic relief worker, and an Afghan refugee, each in their own personal quest for truth and freedom. Returning in Freedom's Stand, these three unlikely allies soon discover that in a country where political and religious injustice runs rampant, the cost of either may be higher than they realize. Will any one of them be willing to pay the ultimate price?

But one question I've been asked repeatedly in interviews may have value to ICFW readers. "I know you weren't on the ground over there that long nor able to travel widely due to security concerns. How were you able to portray such a realistic depiction of Afghanistan and its people?" Here are a few of my own stratagems in writing Freedom's Stand which any good novelist can duplicate to bring alive a distant place and people.

Google Satellite Mapping: Where exactly does the Kabul Stadium, where the Taliban once stoned female offenders before soccer matches, lay from the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, home to embassies, private contractors--and my main character's humanitarian project? What is the landscape around Afghanistan's notorious top security prison, Pul-e-Charkhi, or its interior layout? Can I triangulate a villain's luxury compound, a refugee's sanctuary, and a defensible escape route in the reality of the high, dusty plateau overlooking Kabul where Pul-e-Charkhi sits?

All of this and so much more is possible with today's technology--and those once-classified global satellite maps. Even in Kabul, Afghanistan, zoom will get you close enough to track your characters through every back alley, plot every location, mark every prison access entrance. [Looking for the US embassy? It alone is missing from close-ups. But if you know where to look, what's behind that sudden blur is clear.]. For continual reference, I kept mounted on my office wall a full-sized, fold-out driving map, available quite reasonably on Amazon from Nelles or International Travel Maps, for virtually any country.

Boots on the ground: Yes, I had boots on the ground for every aspect of my book--military, private security contractors, humanitarian aid, medical, pilot, State Department. These were the same who read the manuscript before press to ensure I had no errors. Finding boots on the ground is not as hard as it may seem, thanks to that 'six degrees of separation' principle we hear about. If you don't know experts in the fields you want to write about, you likely know someone who does, or their friends know someone. It is often just a matter of putting the word out. And since human beings do like to share their expertise, you'd be surprised how available most prove to be for input, if only to make sure you get their world right on page!

Blogs: But there is another type of 'boots on the ground' far more accessible and often fruitful. In this day and age, one can find people anywhere on the planet with time on their hands and a willingness to spill their daily lives, post pictures of their environment, vent their opinions and feelings in blog form. During the writing of Veiled Freedom and Freedom's Stand, I followed numerous blogs representing the worlds of all my main characters. Military and private security. Humanitarian and state department. Afghan medical students and journalists.

An embassy security bash with those demining robots for which your tax dollars paid purloined and reprogrammed to serve drinks--all in living jpeg! A UN secretary's chronicle of daily life and romantic liaison with her Afghan driver--including a non-subtle advertisement of his upcoming availability when her contract is up.

An Afghan journalist's frustrations and hopes for his nation--until he suddenly disappears from internet existence like so many other journalists under the Karzai regime. The frustration of being a female aid worker in a Muslim country. The pride of mission in a Special Forces medic saving an Afghan villager's life. The confusion and anger and curiosity about Western life of a Pakistani medical student. Living on the ground with your character counterparts can add details of daily life, personality, emotion, motivation that I can personally testify the best interview will not produce.

Research: And of course there is no substitute for just plain research. Before starting to write, before even traveling to Afghanistan, I literally saturated myself in the country. Histories, biographies, country studies, political commentary, regional literature, travelogues, I had easily read 30,000 pages material before I ever picked up a pen or computer keyboard. I kept a Google Alert to follow daily news happenings there. I explored Afghanistan's streets, food, art, culture, restaurants, hotels through such expatriate resources as Lonely Planet, Bradt, Essential Field Guides. I studied its setting through watching on-site films and documentaries. Here is just a small sampling of my bookshelf from this project alone:

Ghost Wars-The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden by Steve Coll, Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile, First In by Gary Schroen (the Pakistan CIA field agent who was first into Afghanistan after 9/11), Kabul Winter by Ann Jones, The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad, Inside Afghanistan by John Weaver, Opium Season by Joel Hafvenstein, Prisoners of Hope by Dana Curry and Heather Mercer, The Sewing Circle of Herat by Christina Lamb, The Hunt for Bin Laden by Robin Moore, Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson, Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Along with many, many others.

Empathy: In the end, there's no substitute for empathy with a country, culture, and people group to bring it alive on page. And that can't be taught. I have personally learned empathy in part by walking the streets of more than thirty countries on five continents, getting to know and love people from countless different backgrounds, listening to their viewpoints, identifying with their pain, burning with their injustices. And coming to see through their eyes as well the beauty in very different landscapes, cultural practices, social styles than my own.

But some of the best novelists I know have such a natural gift of empathy, they bring foreign places alive without ever leaving home [check out ICFW member Kathi Macias' international fiction titles like No Greater Love and People of the Book for a great example]. Bottom line, empathy with others learned in any circumstance and background can be applied to any setting with enough good research.

And for that, just follow the tips given above.

Just Do It!

I am often asked how I began my writing journey towards being a published author, as though armed with that knowledge, the supplicant could simply replicate the process and accomplish the same. Like everything else about my life, I cannot really recommend my own path as typical. The truth is, I wrote my first book out of sheer boredom.

My husband and I were the only expatriates at the time in a southern Bolivia city, working with a Christian ministry organization. While my husband traveled the Andes mountains two weeks at a time, I was stuck at home with three preschoolers, no car, no TV, no radio. Once my preschoolers were in bed, I had only the handful of English-language books I’d read dozens of times. I finally decided if I had nothing to read, I’d write a book instead. Stories scribbled while my babies slept became Kathy and the Redhead, a children’s novel based on my growing-up adventures at a missionary kids boarding school.

Like most writers, you will find the path to writing success a very individual journey. But there are a few strategies that can help maximize those possibilities:

1. Just do it!

I couldn’t say how many people over the years have confided in me their ambition to write a book. Many have carried a particular book idea around for years. They don’t want to share that idea because someone might steal it. I'm often asked if they should copyright it. [NEWSFLASH: Ideas are not copyrightable! If you’ve had one, be sure someone else has had the same]. Invariably, these idea-hoarders are bursting to let me in on their secret--so long as I promise not to steal it. Be sure once I’ve heard it, I’ve yet to be tempted!

The only way to write a book, an article, a short story, a poem . . . is to stop talking, sit down, and do it!

Which brings me to the second strategy.

2. Discipline--be persistent!

How does one sit down and write that book? By writing the first page, then the second and on to the third until the book is finished. Plenty of people start books. Too few finish them. The persistence to keep on going, no matter how far away that finished goal seems, day after day, page after page, is what makes a writer, not a great book idea.

Having written now fourteen novels, three of approximately 250,000 words, I’ve learned not to even think of how much remains of the project—it is too discouraging to look 18 months down the road—but just of the next scene, the next chapter. As I discipline myself to do this day after day after day, fourteen times now I’ve had the pleasure of suddenly realizing that I’ve written the last paragraph and can scribble ‘The End’ at the bottom of the page.

The difference between the successful writer and the drop-out is not their talent, but their persistence.

3. Write what you know.

A protagonist peeling off a parka in the middle of the Amazon. An experienced archeological team in the Peruvian Andes leaving an Inca find-of-the century unguarded to go eat supper (and then displaying horror that their find is stolen!). A Colombian drug lord choosing a backwoods English village for an operating base (because the author is from that village, making it easy to describe), instead of Miami, Rio, or anywhere with a swinging night life. All these tell me that the writer whose manuscript I’m reading hasn’t the smallest personal knowledge of the settings they’ve chosen to write about.

Your writing can only breathe reality and authenticity if you know what you’re writing about.

4. Don’t stop there . . . always pursue new knowledge.

On the other hand, what's the fun in limiting settings and plot lines to one's own personal experience! I’ve kicked around some of the planet's wilder settings, which is a wonderful advantage as a suspense novelist, if not so comfortable in real life. But I also research thoroughly enough to put the pieces of what I dig up together with what I already know on the ground and extrapolate--well, let's just say, intel some government agencies figure I shouldn’t know!

I never stop learning. Everything I hear, read, experience, research for a writing project gets filed into my mental data banks. You want to know about Guarani ethnomusicology, Mennonite history, the unparalleled brutality of the French in their colonies, I can pull out the stats. If I can see no present use for that data once the project involved is over, be sure that someday it will crawl into the pages of some other book I write.

5. Listen to editors.

Editors are smarter than you think. If they tell you something isn’t good enough, don’t run out to self-publish. Start rewriting!!

I would not be where I am today if it weren't for editors who took time to tell me where I was going wrong even while rejecting my manuscript. Or if I hadn't taken their advice and plowed it back into rewrites. If nothing else, the editor knows what sells. So if they’re willing to take their time to give advice, a wise writer pays attention.

Too many quite talented writers never make it to print because they’re just too proud to submit their work to an expert critique or too lazy to go back and improve their rough draft.

IN CONCLUSION:

One of my sons loves music, but as a teenager played no instruments, had never had a voice lesson, and to my ear at least could only just carry a tune. So I was astounded to find out he was now lead singer of the youth worship band. When I broached him diplomatically about his lack of any musical training or visible native ability, he informed me airily, “Oh, Mom, you don’t have to have talent any more to become a pop star!”

Since then he has been lead singer for countless ‘gigs’, including at Miami's Hard Rock Cafe. Confirming a long-held conviction of my own concerning my teens’ choice of music styles!

There is a truth, though, that it is not innate talent or grammatical skills that make a great writer, though those do help. Many with ample talent and fine writing skills will never write a book—because they never get around to it! Like the hare and tortoise of Aesop's fable, they will be passed along the path by the writer who perhaps doesn’t have Hemingway's genius, but has a passion to write that keeps them plugging along, writing, rewriting, tearing apart and putting back together. Each rewrite a little better until one day an editor takes a look at their work and says, "Hey, this is fabulous!" And suddenly (actually, make that many months later!) they find their byline on a printed page.

Bottom line, there's only one real strategy for writing.

Just do it!

Writing Tip #2: Weaving Illusion Into Reality

A favorite query I receive from interviewers who've read my press bio is whether government agencies really have questioned if I've received classified information. The answer is a multiple 'yes', the stories in retrospect more funny than alarming (bottom line, any place on the planet government intelligence can send an agent to dig around, some missionary or aid worker will already be there and know more than they do!). Certainly good research helps and a mind that 'thinks like a terrorist', as one government type informed me. Unfairly, since if like any good journalist, I'm fairly competent at piecing together an intel puzzle and thinking up unique ways to use it, at least I do so only in fiction.

However there was the time, soon after writing my first major suspense novel CrossFire, when I found myself in the DEA compound of a certain Latin American city being grilled by a furious Special-Agent-in-Charge. He was very competently using six-foot, four-inches of Special Forces-trained body language to intimidate one petite female civilian--me! Among his list of infractions was a description I'd made in CrossFire of an interrogation room within the DEA compound. I had at one time been privileged to take the same tour of that compound as any visiting congressional junket. But certain areas were off-limits, and that was one of them. The SAC was determined to find out which of his agents had let 'that author woman' into a 'classified' zone.

The guy was good. I can honestly say that if I were trying to lie, I couldn't have kept it straight five minutes. But since I was telling the truth on all accounts, I rather enjoyed myself as only a writer can, taking plenty of mental notes of what it felt like to be grilled by the 'best of the best'. And I got my revenge (as any good writer should do with obnoxious people in their lives) by writing him into my next book, The DMZ. Yep, that large and furious U. S. task force commander berating a certain female reporter protagonist in the Colombian jungle. I hardly had to change the dialogue.

When I finally got out of the SAC's office, it was to find a couple of agent acquaintances lurking in the hall. "You're still alive!" they commented.

"He was actually quite courteous," I responded, "and accepted my explanations very reasonably."

At which they gave me a disbelieving look and said with what I certainly hope was sarcasm, "That's because you're a civilian, and he knows he can't kill you."

There is far more to that story. But I picked up one great writing tip that day. Good research is important, the blogs, interviews, on-the-ground experience I've mentioned in an earlier blog. But what about when you still cannot find the details you need? How do you weave a plausible reality that can con a counternarcotics field SAC into thinking you've been inside his interrogation room? The answer is again simple.

Reality is in the eye of the beholder--or reader.

You see, I really hadn't been in that interrogation room. However, I have eyes and a brain. When I walked across the front courtyard and through a huge, steel-reinforced door with multiple locks and cameras into the headquarters building, I couldn't help noticing a verandah lined with doors out front that was not part of the tour. Being a nosy investigative journalist, I had to ask myself, if I was counternarcotics with 'bad guy' informants entering my compound to report, where would I want to interview them? Maybe somewhere that gave no access to the inside workings of a DEA field office. Like those doors along the verandah.

On the other hand, I'd certainly want access from those outside rooms into the headquarters itself, just in case an agent ran into trouble and needed backup. So let's add a second door across the room. What else would an interrogation room hold? A table. Some chairs. A surveillance camera. My description was as scant as my knowledge.

I have no idea to this day how close the reality behind those doors matches the picture in my mind as I wrote the interrogation scene in question. What I do know is that those few details I'd included matched my interrogator's own reality closely enough that his own personal experience in those rooms had filled in the blanks to leave the erroneous illusion I had to have been inside.

Since then, a notorious Third World prison, a Vietnam-era Huey, North America's largest underground network of nuclear waste tanks, are among settings I've never actually been, but have heard back from readers who have (including a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission). One humanitarian aid worker who'd been in that same Third World prison wrote, "Reading [FireStorm], Palmasola was so real I could actually smell the urine on the walls."

So how to weave a plausible illusion of a reality you've never experienced?

1) You don't have to know all the details as long as those you use are accurate. Any written scene is only a bare outline of the endless details contained in any real life counterpart. The reader fills in the rest from their own life experience. So as long as you use only details you've researched and are sure of (and leave out anything you can't confirm), the reader who has actually been there will fill in the blanks from their own memories and assume you too are writing from personal knowledge.

This again requires only basic research. In writing of Palmasola for instance, I'd driven by (and so knew its smells!), but had never been through the gates. Human rights reports and other news stories gave me such details as the drug lord mansions with saunas, big-screen TVs, catered meals and mistresses on one side and common debtors ten to a cell without food or bedding on the other.

2) A jungle is a jungle is a jungle. So is a desert. Once you've experienced any setting or situation--an earthquake, blizzard, hurricane, cliff top, hunger, thirst, the terror of personal assault, the joy of love and friendship, or a law enforcement interrogation--you can write that experience in any setting on the planet. All you need is a little research for details unique to that setting.

3) Travel guides like Lonely Planet or Rough Guide are excellent resources. Virtually every country, however remote, has at least one. With detailed city maps, sights, roads, restaurants, hotels, travel and danger tips for every region of a country, and LOTS of pictures, these offer those bare bones details to be able to plot an accurate setting in your mind. Amazon.com has the widest variety. Add those traveler blogs for your local color, and you are set.

Now how to navigate the shoals of all that internet data to know which is truth? Again it's simple, but that's for another day.

Armchair Globetrotting for the Earthbound Writer

"I want to write about other countries and cultures as vividly as you do, but I don't have your opportunities to travel. I'm housebound in suburbia with a spouse and children. I've researched my setting thoroughly, but how do I make everyday details ring true?"

It is one of the most common questions I receive as a writing instructor. Almost as common as commentary from someone who has traveled to one of my novel settings. "Iguazu Falls are exactly as you described them (or Ciudad del Este, Lake Titicaca, the Colombian Amazon, a Central American biosphere). I felt I was walking through the pages of your novel." Or from a local, "I see from your book you were here. It's so nice to have a writer get us right."

Granted, you can't beat personal, on-the-ground experience, and I've been privileged to experience first-hand a variety of countries and cultures. But let me make a confession. I have not been to all the places I've written about (though most), and some I've visited after-the-fact, only to discover with my readers that they were exactly as I had imagined--and wrote. How did I pull it off? More importantly, how can you? The secret is as simple as it is mind-boggling, one of the great privileges of being a writer at this particular point on the timeline.

Blogs.

Yes, that's all there is to it. Simple, garden-variety blogs. There is no longer a distant, exotic spot on our planet where tourists, expat personnel, or even locals, have not only passed through, but been motivated to chronicle their adventures on-line in endless, detailed prose. Better yet, with countless snapshots of their journey (if you are one of these, please don't consider this a negative; on the contrary, I love it. Keep it up!). Do you want to write an authentically hair-raising confrontation with Turkish soldiers at a Mt. Ararat military checkpoint (not to mention cockroaches in the hotel bed that night)? The sights and sounds and smells of walking a cloud forest trail--or visiting the residents of a Third World city dump? A private security contractor bash in Kabul complete with demining robot programmed to serve drinks? (hey, I couldn't make this stuff up!) If you can't go yourself, travel with those who have.

A few tips for using blogs as effective research tools:

1) Read as wide a variety of blogs as possible. Different travelers have different experiences and takes on local life, but if you read enough of them, you can pick up a good sense of your setting. If ten blogs all describe the same spiderwebs lacing the walkways and coatimundis (an adorable, but badly-behaved cross between monkey and raccoon) stealing lunch at Iguazu Falls or the constant dust and diesel smell of Kabul, chances are using those particular details will make your writing ring true to the knowledgeable.

2) Use blogs to get inside characters' hearts and minds. Reading blogs of the actual character types you are writing about is a great asset in bringing their fictional counterparts to believable life. The frustration of being a female aid worker in a Muslim country. The pride of mission in a Special Forces medic saving an Afghan villager's life. The confusion and anger and curiosity about Western life of a Pakistani medical student. All are insights as valuable as a one-on-one interview (and sometimes more so, I can attest personally). For writing my most recent novel, Veiled Freedom, set in Afghanistan, I followed blogs of humanitarian aid workers and diplomatic personnel, U. S. military, Afghan students, and more.

3) Set your computer to Google Alerts. Again, for Veiled Freedom, I kept a Google Alert both for general Afghanistan news and for Afghanistan blogs during the entire writing process (I still am for the sequel I'm currently writing). The result was a constant, up-to-date flow of data and local color during the writing process. This is simple enough to do by following instructions on the Google (or other browser) home page. I set mine to arrive once a day to my email inbox.

Of course the next question is how to weave a plausible reality if you can't uncover those necessary details. But that's for another session . . .