Is Your Fiction Autobiographical?

Reading Jonathan Franzen’s article in the Guardian’s Review section (May 26th, 2012) has inspired me to explore what some of the ideas that he offered mean to me.
        The article is trying to answer the four most unpleasant questions (Franzen’s words) that novelists often get asked.  The first three questions and his answers to them you can read up yourself, I am concentrating on the fourth one:  Is your fiction autobiographical?
        When I was interviewed in Turkey for the launch of the translation of my first novel this was one of the most asked questions.  I meekly answered NO, before conceding, almost apologising, that the novel was emotionally autobiographical, and also was partly set in a city that I knew very well, Vienna, where I had studied.
        Franzen says that he experiences this question as the most hostile of questions.  I can sympathise.  Although I wouldn’t go as far as to call it hostile, it is a question that can’t be answered with a straightforward Yes or No.  It makes me nervous.  It feels invasive, as if people want to judge me according to the characters in my book.  Did you really do all that?  If you asked me which of the scenes in the novel had really happened in my life, I could point you to two or three.  However, if you asked me whether I experienced any of the emotional turmoils that my characters went through I would tell you that all my characters have benefited from my own life.
        If I agreed with Franzen’s statement that “the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer’s work, the smaller its superficial resemblance to the writer’s actual life” I can honestly claim that I am progressing steadily on the way to becoming the most autobiographical writer.  The novel I am working on at the moment is set in seventh century Arabia, and the characters’ exterior lives have nothing in common with my life whatsoever.  And yet, their inner world is the world of human beings; and by the time I will have finished writing the book I might well recognise and admit that it is my most autobiographical novel so far.
        Franzen wants the novelist to take risks when she writes, to take an adventure into the unknown, to solve a personal problem.  Coming from a spiritual tradition I would say that the writer has to find out something about herself while writing the novel, has to go through an inner transformation, move on a step on the way to self-unfoldment.  Let me quote Franzen,  ‘And if you do this, and you succeed in producing a reasonably good book, it means that next time you try to write a book, you’re going to have dig even deeper and reach even farther, or else, again, it won’t be worth writing.  And what this means, in practice, is that you have to become a different person to write the next book.  The person you already are wrote the best book you could.  There’s no way to move forward without changing yourself.  Without, in other words, working on the story of your own life.  Which is to say: your autobiography.’
        Franzen then goes on to tell us the story of The Corrections, and that the first thing he had to do, to free himself for writing it, was to get out of his marriage.  That may sound cruel and selfish, but when you read the article you will not judge him harshly.  It was the right thing to do for him.
        Yet most of us, or maybe I should speak for myself here, do not want major upheavals in our lives before embarking on the next novel.
        I am working on my fourth novel.  The first one was probably the one that resembled my actual life most, although when I started to write it, I was writing about a character over ten years younger than myself, a fictional version of a self that I had definitely outgrown by then.
        My second novel I wrote as part of my MA Writing course.  The story of its heroine was far removed from my own, until she ended up struggling with three young children in a foreign country, away from family and friends.  These were my struggles at the time, too, in a different context and with a different outcome.  Writing the novel helped me explore my own ambivalence about being a stay-at-home mother, and ultimately may have helped me to find out that this was what I genuinely wanted, rather than what had happened to me because I gave birth to three children in less than four years.
        The third novel focused on a middle-aged couple, whose only daughter had left for university.  My two daughters had left for university around the same time.  Although my son still lives at home, I missed my daughters when they moved out.  In the novel I followed the father’s and the daughter’s story.  The fictional daughter has nothing in common with my real-life daughters.  I think I used her to work out the relationship between parents and children in that time of semi-independence, when one minute they are adults, the next minute children in need of money and emotional support, and utterly oblivious to the needs of the parents.
        I am fascinated by these last two paragraphs.  I have never before looked at my novels in that light.  I certainly wasn’t aware when writing them what I was doing.  I think this is a good sign.  If you were aware at the writing stage it would be too easy, too dishonest.  Your conscious self probably would want to censor and manipulate events.  Even if my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you what I am working through in my current novel.  It is a true journey of discovery, and I am confident that it will turn out that change has happened somewhere in my life.  A new chapter of my life must have started without me realising it.  This gives me great motivation.  For somebody who can’t produce a book every year, not even every two or three years, it is a great consolation to know that a book worth writing may have to wait until your autobiography has caught up with your writing, until there is something new that will be the starting point for your writing.
    I am aware of a paradox here.  On the one hand I believe that the author has no real power over the story of her life.  We may think that we are in charge of our lives but in truth nobody has ever chosen illness, grief, disappointment, failure in relationship or career.  We have some kind of freedom how we deal with what life throws at us, that’s all.  On the other hand I am asking the writer to work on the story of her life before writing her next novel.  It is as if I were asking for difficult times to come her way to enable the next book.  That sounds clearly too extreme for my taste.  I shall assume that it must be enough to have experienced an inner change, an emotional growth spurt, a change of how we look at the world, to justify the start of the next novel. 

Found in Translation

I have been trying to write this post for the last three weeks, ever since I came back from Istanbul where my novel “When the Mountains are scattered as Dust” was published by Kaknüs in Turkish as Hakikati Arayan Kadin. For some reason I struggle to express clearly what I feel about this unexpected recognition.

Let me start with the easy task of telling you how the publication came about. If you are a believer like me you will probably agree with me, after hearing the story, that God is the best of planners. I couldn’t possibly have orchestrated the whole affair. If you don’t believe in a Higher Power, then you will call me lucky. Here is what happened.

I have been working on a novel set in 7th century Saudi Arabia for over a year. This was the time when the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, emerged with his divine message amongst his people. I have been desperately searching to find literature in English or German that gives me details of daily life during that time, be it amongst the desert Bedouin tribes or the city dwellers of Mecca and Medina. While trying to find material online I came across an English website dedicated to the life story of the prophet Muhammad. I e-mailed them and asked for help. I got a reply from a woman, telling me that she knew of no English resources available, but that she had had a look at my blog. She was interested in reviewing my book. Could I send her a copy? I did. Only then did I find out that the editor of the website was based in Istanbul. In the end she didn’t think the novel suitable for a review on their website but she liked it so much that she passed it on to publisher friends of hers who eventually decided to publish it in Turkish.
All the negotiations were done by e-mail, the contract posted by snail mail. I didn’t actually meet the publishers, or the translator and editor, until the book was launched during Ramadan, three weeks ago.

This is the story on the outside. Very straight forward, no headaches whatsoever. Just before leaving for Istanbul I started to watch myself closely, taking note that I was getting excited about the prospect of spending a week in Istanbul, especially during the month of Ramadan. This is a holy month for Muslims that we spend fasting during the daylight hours. Fasting in this context means no food or drink is allowed to pass your lips. I did not mind getting excited about spending part of Ramadan in a Muslim country, what I got worried about was whether I was getting excited about the publication, about the attention I would get as an author. I judged myself as level-headed and neutral. In fact I had to force myself to tell people why I was leaving for Istanbul so suddenly. The publishers had not given me much notice. I think the real reason I was not letting myself get excited about the publication was the fact that I had been told that I would have to give interviews. Rather than worry about interviews I pushed the whole affair to the back of my mind. I can honestly say that I did not think about the issue until I sat opposite the first journalist who wanted to hear my story. Only when I was told how many interviews I had to give over the next three days, and that they were with national daily papers and weekly/fortnightly magazines, did I acknowledge the tremendous effort that my publisher had made to draw attention to my book. I was amazed by what they had achieved. I was, after all, an unknown first-time author.

They were a husband-and- wife team who were not only excellent in their field of work but also kind human beings who made sure that I was at ease, who welcomed my husband and daughter as much as they welcomed me.

To my surprise I enjoyed talking to the journalists. Most of them did not speak English and we depended on a translator for communication. The only downside was that I had to repeat my personal story, how I became a Muslim, over and over again. I found this very tiring and sometimes I let the translator tell the story. I joked that she will soon know my life story better than I do.

What worried me a little was how many people thought that the novel was my autobiography. It was my first novel, and yes, the emotional journey of one of the main characters was similar to my own, yet the story line was fiction and all the characters were fictional. Some people reacted with disappointment when they found out that none of the Turkish characters were “real”. ‘Not even the shaykh?’ they asked. ‘No,’ I had to say, ‘I have never met a Turkish Sufi shaykh in my life. I have never visited a tekke in Istanbul.’

All through the days of the interviews I was fasting. I think this fact, and the fact that my husband and daughter were around, helped me enormously not to get too excited and too joyful. This felt really important to me. If I failed this test, to stay level-headed when success came my way, I could no longer claim that writing was my prayer, that I was writing because I had to, because it was what I did well, what came from a deep place within me. The student on the spiritual path aims for serenity, for a way of coping with the frequent ups and downs of life. Her ultimate goal is not to be violently tossed about by the storm of life, but quietly sitting in its eye, surrendered to what it brings.

I am back home now, and I am pleased to report that my life has not changed. I am still paralysed as far as the novel I am working on is concerned. Maybe my next blog will deal with writer’s block. My home is still a mess more than three months after a fire (don’t ask, this is another story where sitting in the eye of the storm is demanded of me), yet despite everything I feel nothing but gratitude for what is, and a gentle curiosity about what God is unfolding for me from one moment to the next.

PS: I promised my publishers to put up the links to the Turkish media coverage of the book. If you speak Turkish, have a look. My Turkish is non-existent, but I hope that the articles are honest summaries of the conversations I had with the journalists.


Links of Coverage of Hakikati Arayan Kadin in Turkish Media:

*Avrupalı İslam’ı hayal ediyorum by CEMAL A. KALYONCU in Aksiyon

*Esrardan zikir çekerek kurtuldum by SEVİNÇ ÖZARSLAN in Zaman

*İnsanlar zaten ırkçı, medya da kışkırtıyor by AYÇA ÖRER in Radikal

*Tek başına bir kültür mozaiği by EYÜP TATLIPINAR in Aksam

*Müslüman kadın yazar etiketine karşıyım by ŞEBNEM ABAYGİL in Habertürk

 

Interview on Kitap Cafe

The 5 Languages of Love

I started reading The 5 Languages of Love by Gary Chapman for personal reasons. I wanted to understand my husband better. We have been married for twenty-five years but every so often the same issues of disagreement and resentment flare up, leading to exhausting and fruitless discussions. My husband and I are committed to our marriage, so usually call a ceasefire immediately after a battle. Recently we both agreed that it was time to broker a proper peace deal. What took us so long? Mainly the fact that our battles were too infrequent to seriously disturb family harmony, and to a lesser degree that we are in a phase of our lives where the children have grown up and there is more time and energy available to focus on our relationship. Anyway, when we were looking for help in achieving a peace deal the above mentioned book was suggested. I read it almost in one sitting.

Chapman’s theory is that every one of us knows all the five love languages vaguely but most of us are only fluent in one or two of them. However, if you want to convey love and affection to your spouse, or children, or in truth to anybody you have to deal with on a regular basis and you care about, you better learn to speak their language. Chapman promises that learning it and choosing to speak it will transform your relationships, and will also make you feel truly loved.

So what are the five languages of love? Before I start describing them I want to mention here that the author believes that when you fall in love you instinctively speak the other’s love language, because you are completely focussed on the other; everything is exciting and it is easy to give of yourself in every way. Yet this blessed state doesn’t last forever. Studies have shown that two years down the road both partners will have returned to their monolingual state. To have a successful long-term relationship will involve actively choosing to speak more than one language. The languages are mentioned in no particular order, they are all equal as such, but the individual will have a primary love language. If not spoken to in that language she will feel rejected and unloved.

Language No 1: Words of Affirmation
These are words of praise, compliments, pointing out the good in the other, thanking her for support and help. A dialect of this language (yes, the love languages have lots of different dialects) is encouraging words. It is saying, ‘You will play that piece perfectly one day, have you forgotten that you couldn’t play a single tune two years ago?’ to the child who is jumping up from the piano stool declaring ‘I am rubbish at the piano’.
Another dialect is kind words. It reminds me of the advice the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, gave his companions,
‘If a person loves his brother, he should tell him so.’
As somebody who has yet to learn to speak that language fluently, who finds it easier to point out flaws than give out praise, I have chosen as my first challenge to refrain from criticism, hoping that at one point the ensuing silences will fill up with words of affirmation.

Language No 2: Quality time
The most difficult aspect to take on board about this language is that talking to somebody and focusing your attention on her does not necessarily mean quality time. Yes, it is a prerequisite to focus. You are not spending quality time with your children when you sit beside them while they watch a cartoon and you text your brother. Quality time is talking to them, or playing with them, and not doing anything else. But sometimes talking is already too much. Listening to your partner/child could be the real quality time. Most people, when they tell you about a bad day at work or school, don’t want to hear advice, don’t need the problem solved, all they want is to let go of it, to find their own solutions. You can help by watching their body language and say things like, ‘That must have made you feel angry,’ giving the other person a chance to explore her feelings. But don’t say that you wouldn't have put up with that situation; you would have told your boss immediately about that inappropriate remark of your colleague.
A dialect of quality time is quality activity. Sometimes people enjoy the same activity. In this case it is easy to spend quality time together, like walking or cycling. But what if only one of you enjoys visiting galleries? Well, you can choose to visit a gallery once a month with your spouse, in return for him browsing in the second hand bookshop with you for an hour or two. Again, it is the active choice to speak in your partner’s language that is the crucial point here.

Language No 3: Receiving gifts
I am always amazed when my Palestinian friend stays with me in the UK, and I watch her shopping frantically before her departure.
‘Who are you buying all these presents for?’ I ask her.
‘For everyone,’ she says, ‘my brothers, my auntie, my children, my brothers’ children…’ Her list is endless. Giving gifts seems to be one of the culturally imposed love languages in Arab culture.
Personally I hardly speak that language. I was grateful when my children were old enough to buy their own birthday presents. All I had to do was transfer the money. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t giving anything to them. I gave in a different way, as the next language will show you.
According to Chapman, if your partner’s or child’s love language is receiving gifts it is important that you give, no matter how tight finances are. The monetary value of the gift is irrelevant. They want a visible token of your love, maybe it’s a card you made, or a flower you dried for them. Chapman thinks that it is one of the easiest love languages to learn.
I made all my children do the test on Chapman’s website to find out what their primary love language was. It is perhaps not surprising that they speak only the languages fluently that their mother and father speak, and receiving gifts isn’t one of them.
However, I am quite fluent in one of the dialects of this language, what Chapman calls the gift of self or the gift of presence. It means going to the funeral of your friend’s father, it means picking up your sister from hospital after her operation and making sure that she is all right, and it is very close to

Language No 4: Acts of Service
This is the second of the two languages that I am fluent in, a very close second to my primary love language of quality time. It comes naturally to me to cook for my family, to keep the house clean, to sort out everybody’s problems. Most wives and mothers have to learn that language to a certain degree, yet it is not necessarily their language of love. If it isn’t you’ll do the things that are necessary. You’ll feed the children and not worry that it’s take-away pizza or ready-made chicken nuggets for tea. If acts of service is your love language, however, you will cook fresh meals; you’ll want the children to have a taste of you rather than Pizza Hut. It also means that you want to be shown love in that way. My husband, who doesn’t speak this language well, still can’t understand, after all these years of being married to me, why I insist every day that he makes me an espresso after supper; on the weekend I will even ask for more than one a day. It makes me feel loved, I recently told him, after he asked me yet again why he had to make it for me.
Beware though that this language has dialects too, depending on the importance of the act of service. Many husbands think that the fact that they work and spend their money on the family counts as an act of service. Not for most wives. It is not something that you do solely to show your love to your wife, unless before marriage you were an idealistic and broke artist, who finally took on a boring job for the sake of the family. For most wives it’s that cup of tea brought in the morning, the nappy changed, the dishwasher emptied, the washing hung up that counts. For most men whose primary love language is act of service it’s the clean house, the meal cooked that makes them feel loved.
Speakers of that language have to watch out not to make themselves into a doormat. The doormat no longer gives out of love; she will sooner or later resent her giving.

Language No 5: Physical Touch
No, we are not talking sex here. Touch is the most basic sense, the one sense that all of us are able to use, as far as I am aware. People may be blind, deaf, and not able to smell or taste anything, but no matter what, you will have skin that can be touched. Studies have shown that babies who are neglected, who are not touched and hugged and kissed enough, develop emotional problems later on in life.
In times of crises a hug is an instinctive gesture and communicates that we love that person.
Most men will say that their love language is touch because they connect it with sex. You have to ask them the question, ‘If you can have regular sex, whenever you want, how important is it for you to be given a hug, to hold the hand of your spouse, to say good-bye with a kiss?’ If the answer is, ‘not very’, your primary love language is not touch.
My primary love language is not touch but I learned to speak it when I became a mother. It seemed the most instinctive and natural way to express my love for my children when they were babies. I am glad I learned it, because it is my husband’s primary love language. He is not very happy when I travel without him. As a married man with grown-up children he relies on me to speak to him in this language. He will agree to two weeks without me; any more than that and he starts to feel unloved and lonely.
I volunteer for Age Concern and one of the most common laments we hear from our elderly clients is that they are never receiving touch in a loving way. Yes, the staff in the home wash them and dress them, but it is not the same as being touched for affection, out of love.
By now you may either be bored to death or at least asking yourself, ‘What has all this got to do with writing?’ The reason I thought of it as important for the fiction writer is the fact that knowing about these languages we can make our characters different in quite subtle and consistent ways. We can create a scene and ask ourselves, ‘How would somebody, whose primary love language is touch, react to that?’ For example being groped or slapped will feel much more hurtful to her than to somebody who doesn’t relate touch and love quite in the same way. It is another tool to help us portray the world of our characters in a rounded way, not only through their thoughts or senses but the way they express love.
As I am still working on recognising the primary love languages of people and haven’t actually started using the knowledge in my writing I cannot say much more about it. I am, however, excited about giving every character of my novel in progress a primary love language.
Maybe the most fascinating aspect of the idea of love languages is the fact that we can actively learn a language that doesn’t come naturally to us, that we can actively make a decision to do something out of love. It gives the human being a tool to own their love, to make it an active choice based on commitment and loyalty. For me love as this magical force coming over you, falling in love and falling out of it, making the human being a victim of forces outside her control, has always sounded fake, an excuse to act selfishly and ruin the lives of other people in the name of love. Love is giving of yourself, with no expectations of anything in return, not only when it is easy but when you would rather withdraw or walk away.

Is there a Medicine for Doubt?

It is always a difficult time for me when I am starting a new novel. Although the one I have just started to work on is my fourth, the truth is that only two of the three I have written so far have been polished to the best of my ability, and none of them have yet been published with a mainstream publisher. In fact, I am still looking for an agent. Although both manuscripts are with an agent at the moment, for consideration, a sense of doom has entered my heart. I am trying to figure out what it means and why it should feel so much heavier than all the times before when I have been in the same situation.

I think it was triggered by something I read. Every so often I convince myself that I am not doing enough to find an agent/publisher and go off to the library to read yet another book about how to get published. This time it was Harry Bingham’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook Guide to Getting Published.
I shall quote his damming verdict ad verbatim.

‘You should aim to come up with a list of ten to twelve names, and send your work to them. Some of those people will reject your manuscript for essentially random reasons: the book you’ve written just doesn’t happen to be their sort of thing. But not all dozen. If you send your work to ten to twelve agents and they all reject it, then your work isn’t good enough. It’s that simple. (Or almost – we’ll talk about some complications in a moment.)’

You probably guessed that I have had rejections from at least double the number of agents mentioned above, and of course I haven’t read on to see whether Harry Bingham covers my case when talking about the complications.

At the moment I am in the research phase for a historical novel, a first for me, set in seventh- century Saudi Arabia. I am desperately trying to find out details about daily life of that period, to give a sense of place and time. What did they eat? What did they wear? How did they build houses, cook, sew? I seem unable to find any literature about it in languages that I speak. I know about the social system of the seventh- century Arabs, about their religious beliefs, their battles, their economic situation, but nowhere can I find out how the women baked bread or what dyes they used to colour the wool.

Of course this creates doubt by itself. Maybe this novel is not meant to be written. With my last novel I had a similar problem. The main character insisted that he was from Iran, a country I had never been to. After reading too many books on Iran and still lacking the confidence to start writing I tricked myself into action. I promised myself to visit Iran after finishing the novel, and I did. I didn’t have to rewrite the novel on my return but I remember rewriting a few scenes that I thought I had got wrong.

I have been to Saudi Arabia for Umra, the minor pilgrimage, and I know that nothing of the seventh century is left there except the desert and mountains. Unfortunately landscape descriptions hardly feature in my writing at all. Harry Bingham’s careless comment came at a time when doubts where already assaulting me. Now the doubts were no longer confined to the question whether this particular novel was meant to be written, rather whether I should continue writing at all.

I thought I had clarified all these questions for myself; that writing was prayer for me, that when writing I was doing what I thought I was good at and what I was meant to do. Now I wonder whether I am deluding myself, and whether, on the day when I am going to leave this world, I shall regret not the fact that I am not published but the fact that I have spent all this time writing when God wanted me to do something else. But what? I am doing a lot of other things, and when you look at the reality, I am not spending that much of my time writing. I feel guilty when I write and I feel guilty when I don’t write. When my children were young, I had no doubts about my main focus. I was a stay-at-home mother by choice, doing a bit of teaching and translating on a very part-time basis. Now the children are adults. Only my son is still living at home, not needing me except for occasional reassurances of my love, keeping the house and his clothes clean and the fridge stocked up. I am involved in voluntary work with a charity helping the aged as well as in community mediation but I am reluctant to make a career out of it. I wouldn’t be good at it on a full-time basis. What would I be good at on a full-time basis? Why is my answer always writing?

I know quite a few mothers like myself who had stayed at home to bring up the children and decided not to go back to work when the children were older. Some of them spend too many hours a day in the fitness studio; others have now elderly parents to look after. This phase in my life has passed. My mother-in-law, who lived with us and who I cared for at the end of her life, died seven years ago. The only surviving grandparent of our family is my father. He lives in Austria and, should he ever need care, will most likely be looked after by my siblings who live close to him.

Some mothers do voluntary work like me, and others enjoy their hobbies guilt-free, from gardening to golf, quilt-making or painting. Others are already grandparents and have started looking after children all over again. Nobody I speak to seems to feel guilt. They do what they do, some of them stressed and under time-pressure, others finally enjoying a slower pace of life. The only women who still seem to struggle like me, who never feel quite right whatever they do, are the ones whose marriages broke up, or whose children have major problems, or who are tired of their jobs. They envy me. ‘Don’t envy me,’ I want to say. ‘I wish I could claim that serenity and peace have entered my heart.’

Of course I am old enough to know that I am blessed. I have healthy children, all talented and doing what they want to do. My marriage has survived a quarter of a century, and hopefully we’ll work out how to enjoy each other’s company for the next quarter, if God wills. To let Harry Bingham unsettle me seems immature and shallow, and utterly destructive.

So here is what I think is happening. I am a writer, and when I am actually writing, I don’t want to do anything else. I am absorbed in the task to the point that I forget myself and the world. It is bliss. I will do it even though I am not paid for it and I don’t care whether my novels will ever be published or not. Unfortunately these times of writing are far and few between. Most of my time is spent reading, doing research and rewriting.

The real reason why I am in such a station of doubt right now is the fact that I haven’t written creatively for over a year, since when I finished my last novel. Writing is the cure to my misery, not reading books on how to get published.
I better heed my own words and sign off here and open a new file headed ‘Chapter One’ and start describing the tent in the desert that is the home of my main female character.

Are your Characters loveable enough?

Two writers of my writers’ group were recently given feedback from their agents regarding their just finished novels, and the feedback they received was almost identical, ‘Your main character is not engaging enough, we don’t warm to her enough, she is too cold.’ Although we writers always yearn for critical feedback when it is given our first reaction is to question it.

'Do readers really only want to read about loveable women? Does every heroine have to be “toasty”?’ my friends asked. After giving suitable expression to their understandable disappointment they moved on and agreed that the only way forward was rewriting. We had a long discussion, during a meeting and later by e-mail, what it actually means, as one agent put it, “to warm up your character”.
My first thought was, ‘Ladies, be grateful that you’ve got an agent who gives you feedback. I wish all I had to do was warming up my character.’ The more I thought about it though, the more I realised that this was no easy task. The two novels in question are historical novels, set at the beginning of the 20th century, and the heroines are part of a social class that does not encourage women to express their emotions or opinions freely.

Before our brainstorming session on solutions we questioned whether “loveable characters” are only demanded of unknown/unpublished writers, as we could all think of numerous novels by famous authors whose characters we didn’t like or care about. Some novels we finished reading despite disagreeable characters because we were gripped by other details in the book, others we abandoned. For example I have never managed to finish a Rushdie novel for the very reason that I don’t care about his characters; his showing off of his intellect and the flights of his imagination hold my attention for a limited time only.

We also realised that we did not agree at all about whom we loved/hated in fiction, so the whole question seemed so subjective that for a moment we thought it might be easier to change the agent than warming up the character.
When we finally settled down to the task in hand we came up with the following points of how we could achieve a “warmer” character. I list them here for those of you who might find themselves tackling the same task.

1)The reader must be shown the feelings the character goes through, even if we are writing in the third person and can’t enter her head. One writer of our group quoted the American poet Robert Frost as saying, ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader; no surprises to the writer no surprises to the reader.’ The writer has to suffer during the act of writing, has to give herself completely to the emotion, be it extreme pain and loss or extreme joy which is just as difficult to convey. For some writers this may be impossible if, for example, the character goes through experiences that the writer went through in her own life but has not completely digested yet; or if they are too far removed from any experience the writer ever had in her own life. If the latter is the case, I suggest using your imagination. Just go there and kill the self that watches the character so that you can become her. Let the character speak, not your self.

2)If your novel is set in a time that represses emotions and elevates good behaviour and honour to the most desired qualities in a human being, the writer who sticks to the current mantra of creative writing courses “show, don’t tell” will have a difficult task at hand. Nevertheless, human beings are human beings, and they have always found a way of expressing their emotional state. Music, poetry, literature, or any art for that matter, of the time the novel is set in can point towards the inner life of the character if she engages with it. Or the writer may have to let the character transgress at least some of the boundaries of her culture. In the end it may not be necessary to portray her as loveable at all; just giving her an emotional reality will engage the reader. She could be selfish and rude and arrogant, in a passionate way, so that the reader can hate her passionately and wants to read on for that reason. Boredom and not caring for the character is the one thing that makes us stop reading.

3)Bear in mind that the reader wants to experience change, a transformation. If the book tells only a story, an episode in the character’s life that leaves her emotionally and spiritually unchanged, we will not be interested in it. Maybe in genre fiction this is not an issue. The detective in the crime novel doesn’t need to change. The heroine of a romantic novel will be good at the beginning and at the end. Her happiness depends on overcoming the obstacles of the outer world. In literary fiction the reader however expects to be going on an emotional and spiritual journey too.

Last week I read a quote by Alan Sillitoe, who was in the news for having moved on from this world,
‘The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.’  I think that sums up the whole issue very neatly. The reader wants to be enlightened, but in an entertaining and easy manner. We want to be sure from the first chapter that following this character will teach us something about ourselves, no matter how far in place and time we live from the world portrayed in the book.

Herta Müller - Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009

Having just finished reading “Herztier”, Herta Müller’s most praised novel, in the original German, I was awed by her ability to create extra-ordinary verbal images by using simple German words and sentences.

This is not going to be a book review, however; I mention her novel only because reading it motivated me to find out more about Herta Müller. I found an interview with her on the official Nobel Prize website. For those of you who speak German, you can listen to it yourself.

For the rest of you, I am going to tell you about it, because she deeply moved me in her humanity and humility. She starts the interview by saying that she believes that literature cannot be ranked, cannot be marked or measured.
‘There are so many different varieties of literature. You can’t really compare them, in the end you can only choose between them. In this respect I was fortunate.’

She goes on to say that luck or fortune is not something that one can earn.
‘If you have known misfortune, you recognise fortune,’ Müller says. She has a way of detaching herself from what others would call her achievements. When asked what the Nobel Prize means for her, she answers,
‘The prize was given to my books’, as if she and her books were two completely different things. I like her for that statement because this is very much how I feel about my writing and my books. There is me, and I exist without the books, and there are the books independent of me, having their own voice, their own message.

All she will admit to is her pleasure that the topic of dictatorship is being given attention through her winning the prize. She stresses that there are still too many dictatorships around, be they left or right or theocratic. Whatever they are, they all have the same effect on the individual, namely its destruction.

When I first heard Müller speak in the interview I was slightly puzzled. She didn’t sound completely like a German native speaker. She grew up in a German-speaking village in the Romanian countryside. Her parents were German; her father had joined the SS at 17 and fought for Hitler like most of his Romanian contemporaries. After the war, when Romania changed allegiance to the Soviet Union, this part of the history was written out of the official version. Only the German minorities were suddenly the ex-Nazis. Later on in the interview Müller explains that German was her only language until the age of fifteen. They were taught Romanian at school as a foreign language but their teacher was a German himself whose Romanian wasn’t very good. I was fascinated when she said that her first foreign language was in fact Hochdeutsch, the written German taught at school, because at home they spoke a strong dialect. This was exactly my own situation growing up in Austria. My parents were working class who spoke the local dialect, and on my first day at school I was confused that the teacher was speaking to us in a strange way. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand her; rather I knew I couldn’t talk like that myself.

Müller learned Romanian when, aged fifteen, she went to live in the city to go to grammar school. She tells the interviewer how she loves the Romanian language, its idioms and poetry, how it is much closer to her emotional nature than the German, but that she could never have written her novels in Romanian. She just wasn’t confident enough. She admits though that knowing Romanian has enriched her German, because subconsciously there are two ways of looking at the world inside her head. She gives as an example the name for lily of the valley. In German it is called ‘little bell of May’, in Rumanian ‘little tear’.

When the interviewer talks about her beautiful German, Müller explains that in art we use the world beautiful when we are touched, although quite often what touches us is almost unbearably painful.

I have taken a different path from Müller and write in my second mother-tongue, English. There are several reasons for this. First of all, it lets me explore many things much freer and without baggage from the past. Besides that I never felt completely at home with Hochdeutsch. Although I had to use it at school and university, and it served me well to express intellectual concepts and ideas, when I wanted to talk about matters of the heart I didn’t feel comfortable talking in Hochdeutsch. Even before I married my English husband and moved to the UK, even before I spoke to my children in English, I preferred speaking English to speaking Hochdeutsch in certain situations. My husband, whose German is not very fluent, and who only knows Hochdeutsch, is always surprised how often it happens to him that Austrians switch to English, even when their English is no better than his German, as soon as he asks them to speak Hochdeutsch.

I wholeheartedly agree with Herta Müller when she says that it is an advantage to have more than one way of looking at the world in one’s head, no matter how subconscious it is. Recently I have spent a lot of time reading the Qur’an in Arabic. My knowledge of classical Arabic, a mostly passive one, as I was taught it at university as if it were a dead language, is good enough to understand the Qur’an, at least the first layer, the obvious meaning. I cannot claim to have knowledge of the 70,000 inner meanings of every verse. Sometimes images from the Qur’an suddenly come to the forefront when I try to figure something out. In recent weeks one verse has haunted me, where God says of the unbelievers,
‘We have put yokes round their necks, right up to their chins, so that they cannot bow their heads.
And We have put a bar in front of them and a bar behind them...’
(Sura 36,8-9)
Was it an arrogant banker that first triggered the image? Or Richard Dawkin? It was definitely somebody who annoyed me and whose behaviour angered me. Yet that image softened my heart. As soon as I saw them as enslaved by their own ignorance and lack of vision I almost felt pity. What a way to have to walk through life.

When Müller is asked whether she tried to forget her memories of Romania after she emigrated to Germany, she is emphatic that forgetting is not an option when your friends have been murdered or imprisoned or simply collapsed and became mentally ill under the strain and burden of living under the regime. However, she conceded, memories are always reorganised within a human being.
‘Writing tames memory,’ she insists. ‘In fact every kind of work that takes you out of your existence, that makes you forget (I think she means the past and the future, leaving only the present moment), tames memory.’ For her, and for me, that is writing.

The Role of the Self in Arts Practice and Spiritual Practice

A while back I was invited to give a talk with above title to members of an artists' group who are all actively travelling on a spiritual path. Unfortunately the talk has been cancelled but having thought about the topic for some time I want to put my thoughts on paper, or rather screen, because many times I don’t really know what I think until I write about it, and the topic is no doubt of great interest to me.

Maybe I should start with sharing the nature of my spiritual practice. I am a Muslim who follows a particular Sufi path, the Shadhdhuliyya tariqa, which goes back to the 13th century beloved of God, Shaykh Abu l-Hasan ash-Shadhdhuli. He was known for only accepting students who had learned a trade and were able to make a living in the world. He wanted his students to live in the world like everybody else while their hearts were permanently turned towards their Creator. As a Muslim I perform the five daily ritual prayers- their times are fixed according to the cycle of the sun – and I fast during the month of Ramadan. There are of course many other obligations upon a Muslim but most of them are not unique to Muslims, like the display of mercy, compassion, patience, forgiveness, generosity, kindness; virtues that are demanded in all spiritual traditions. Although I try and perform my daily prayers in a state of surrender and humility, quite often the main struggle is to stop what I am doing and get up and pray when the time for prayer has arrived. It can happen that during the whole five to ten minutes of the prayer I am not really focussing on God but am preoccupied with something else, and yes, even with mundane things like the shopping list. There is a joke, or maybe it is a true story, that one day in the mosque the Imam prayed only three rak’as instead of four during the evening prayer. A rak’a is one cycle of movements that will be repeated twice, three times or four times, depending on what prayer of the day it is. The community was quarrelling how many rak’as had been prayed. One man finally stood up and declared, ‘We only prayed three rak’as. I know for certain because I have four shops and in every rak’a I go through the earnings of one of the shops in my head. I had not come to the forth shop yet.’ God does not say that distraction during the prayer makes the prayer invalid. He is the Merciful. As long as you stand on the prayer mat for His sake He will reward you.

On the spiritual path, however, the shaykh or teacher will ask of the student a greater commitment. He wants you to remember God more often than five times a day, and in different ways. There is a silent solitary remembrance, dhikr, as well as a communal one that often is accompanied by movement and voice. Many of you may have heard of the whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi tariqa for example.

My silent dhikr is the repetition of the Name of God, Allah. We are asked to repeat it on a daily basis, sitting on the prayer mat or wherever we can. I usually fall asleep when sitting or kneeling on the prayer mat, be it in the early morning or in the evening before going to bed. For me the best way to be in the remembrance is during my walks. The moving and silent repetition of the Name puts me in a state of receptivity. My sense of hearing is heightened. My mind is still and I can hear God, if you want. Not as a voice of course, but He can speak to me nevertheless, and guide me, and show me the answer to questions that have been troubling my mind.

The resulting inner state of this spiritual practice is very close to the state I am in when I sit down to write a novel. The characters of the novel will have visited me for a long time beforehand; they will fill my head with ideas. They will tell me who they are and where they are from, and they will insist that I write down their stories. I have written three novels so far, and in every case the characters pestered me for years until I was ready to write their stories. They usually know that they are winning when I start reading up on the background information that I need to tell their stories.

When I feel that I know enough about the background of the story I will sit down at the computer and get into that state of receptivity. I can’t tell you how I do it. It is a kind of killing of the self for the duration of the writing. It is difficult to come out of that state when I am interrupted. For that reason I prefer to write when nobody is in the house. Recently that has become a problem because my husband has moved his office to the home. It is not that he has a habit of disturbing me but his physical presence makes it more difficult for me to enter this state of complete surrender of the self.

I have just finished reading Sara Maitland’s Book of Silence. She has committed herself to a life of silence and prayer, and has found that she has stopped writing fiction. Her explanation is that when you seek silence, when you give yourself over to God, your goal is the extinction of the self. In fiction, however, you need a strong self, a self that is creating, almost putting herself beside God. This is obviously not how I experience myself when writing. If you asked me whether there is a difference between writing and dhikr, I would say no. In both cases I am turned towards God. I have no other goal but to be His slave, to surrender, to let go of my self and to manifest what God wants to manifest. I don’t believe for one moment that what I write are revelations. What I aim for is that the story I am telling is told without interference of my lower self, my ego. I don’t want to show off, neither my knowledge nor my way with words, nor make a point, or preach. I only want to tell a story, from my heart to the heart of the reader. I want the story to be true. Not a true story, like all the misery memoirs or autobiographies that are so fashionable at the moment, because most of them are not true in the sense I understand the word. Truth is eternal and unsentimental and lifts the spirit. It points to God who is the Truth, the essence within every human being that unites us all. I want my novels to be pointing to the divine within, no matter how weakly and timidly.

I have a simple test when I am writing. Usually before I continue writing on a story or a novel, I read what I have written during my last session. Most of the time I don’t remember anything of it. I read it like somebody else’s work. If I can remember it, I pay attention. It is very likely that my “ego-self” has interfered and tried to manipulate the story. Of course there has to come a point when this self is allowed to voice her concerns. After all we want sentences that are clear, we want the narrative to be flowing, the characters well formed; we want to have a sense of place and time. I am not a writer who overwrites, rather the opposite. I am more likely to be too sparse with my information. Adding some extra colour and flavour is often the task of my “ego-self”.

After having told you all of the above I have to be honest and admit that what has worked well so far is not working any more. No characters are visiting me. Nobody wants me to tell a story. At the same time it doesn’t feel like writer’s block because another yearning has taken hold in my heart. I want to immerse myself in a different time than the one we inhabit at the moment. I want to explore a time when one of the prophets of God walked on earth, want to imagine how it could have felt to have such pure light in one's midst. Having studied Islamic studies the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is the one I know most about, and about whom numerous historical sources exist. Never having written a historic novel before I will be grateful for all the background material easily accessible that I can use in my research.

The characters prove to be a challenge this time. Some days I want to write about a historical figure and fictionalise her life. Then I have doubts and wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to let a fictional woman experience the time of the arrival of the last prophet, let her meet some of my heroes of that time. I am in the stage of conception. I don’t know yet what the outcome of it will be. Unlike my spiritual practices my writing does not happen on a daily basis. Some writers sit at their desk every day for eight hours, or so they claim in interviews, making the likes of me feel bad. I compare writing to giving birth. While you are pregnant you don’t do much to make the baby grow. You get on with daily life and wait. When the time is right the baby will be born. The giving birth stage, the writing down of the story, lasts usually a few months with me, but the pregnancy can last for years. To not give up hope during this time of pregnancy, to trust that everything will come right, is the most important quality the novelist has to hone. Premature births often don’t survive. Patience is the only way forward. Only patience allows you to taste those elusive and rare moments of bliss, moments where you touch eternity, whether they be during a writing session or during prayer or dhikr. During these moments the self has disappeared, but in both cases it will have to be resurrected again. “After the ecstasy the laundry”, as one Buddhist traveller on the path put it. Writing is no exception. The laundry is the rewriting, the ordering of the chapters, the editing, the weeding out of all the scenes that impede the flow of the story. Like on the spiritual path the self that is needed for this task in its best form is the self that is cleansed from its selfish desires and has surrendered to a greater authority, in the case of a novel the wisdom and heart of the story that is being told.

Coping with Rejection

There cannot be a writer, and the exception will only prove the rule, who has not had to cope with rejection. The only way to escape your work being rejected is to keep it in your drawer or on your hard disk, not even trying to find a reader for it. For some of us, this may be how we want it. Others, and I am one of those, want to be read. To be read you need to find a publisher. To find a publisher you need to find an agent first. To find an agent you need to steel yourself for rejection. Once your rejection letters are in their double figures you will stop counting them, or at least I did. I can only tell you that they are numerous.

What I want to talk about here are the effect they are having on the writer and her work.

The first rejection letters arrived while I was still in a state of innocence about the life of a writer. I had picked out some names from the Writers’ and Artists’ Handbook and full of hope sent out the synopsis and sample chapters of my first novel, convinced that it wouldn’t take long until somebody would be persuaded by the brilliance of my writing to take me on. I don’t remember how long this state lasted but by the end of it I was ready to enrol in an MA in Creative Writing, accepting that I probably had to learn a bit more about my craft.

I decided not to rewrite the rejected novel on the course but to start a new one. While writing my second novel I sent out the first one to a few competitions, and encouragingly, it was short-listed for prizes. At that time I was too busy to cope with the course and the death of my mother and the illness of my mother-in-law to send it out again to agents.

At the end of the two years-long MA course I had finished another novel, and a few of the agents and editors who had been invited to a reading of the students’ works, were very interested in taking it on. This caused a state of euphoria in me that I distinctly remember. I was on a high, hardly needed sleep, and started to polish the novel with the help of an editor from a big publishing house. When in the end she didn’t take it on, something inside me switched. It is difficult for me to say whether this was purely the effect of rejection, as I was also dealing with grief at the time and a seriously ill mother-in-law who was living with us and needed care. The fact was that I stopped sending out my work. As far as I remember I didn’t make a conscious decision not to put myself through the ups and downs of this process. I simply concentrated on the other areas of my life which was not difficult at the time. I also stopped writing at this point, except in my journal. I have always written journals for myself, therapeutic writing, as I call it, but I never confused this with my fiction. I firmly believe that fiction is not the place to deal with undigested emotions. I am not a champion of the misery memoir or turning your life into a novel. I believe that writing has to be a creative act of the imagination, using your experiences but not being dictated by them.

I can’t remember how long that state lasted, somewhere between two and three years. All that time a character would frequently come to me and ask me to tell his story. He called himself Ayyub and told me that he was Iranian by birth. I successfully ignored him because I had never been to Iran and I didn’t want to write another novel.

After my mother-in-law had died, and the house had been renovated to incorporate her half of the house into our half, I felt empty. There was nothing to distract me from the fact that I still had a yearning to write fiction. Ayyub was insisting that his story was worth telling. I played deaf.

Then I saw an advert in a writers’ magazine for a residential course that would give me the skill of editing my own work. Part of me thought, ‘How ridiculous is this, you have passed your MA with a 2:1 and don’t know how to edit your work?’ Part of me thought it was too much money, after I had already spent so much on the MA without getting anywhere. And part of me, the one that won, said, ‘If your children can spend money continuously on school trips that go nowhere you can spend three days with other writers without feeling guilty.’

To take part in the course we had to submit chapters of our novel which were then used to teach us the skills we needed. I chose to work on my first novel. It had been written so long ago, I wanted to see whether I could still stand behind it. In the end one of the partners in the literary consultancy liked the novel so much that she tried to find me an agent for it. This had always been part of the deal, that she would try and use her contacts for novels that she thought good enough to be published. Now the serious rejections started to come. They were not generic rejection letters where only the name of the author and the title of the novel had been changed. They were e-mails to the literary consultant and giving good reasons for the rejection that she kindly forwarded to me. Let me quote a few.

I can see exactly why you love this. Fatima has a rare talent, knowing and understanding her characters intimately, and leading us effortlessly into their emotional lives....Yet for all its brilliance, the novel felt sparse at times, and a part of me was hoping for the concessions to style and narrative that would clinch its chances of commercial success...
I think Fatima is a wonderful writer and I love the setting of the novel. Karl positively makes my stomach turn. I do wonder if it is a little bit too quiet and whether the pace should be worked on more.

So, I have agonised over this overnight and I think I am going to pass. I love Fatima’s turn of phrase, her Germanic tone, the sparseness of the sentences. This book feels definitely European and also somehow other worldly and she is certainly a very skilled wordsmith. That said, I just can’t fall in love with any of the characters.

That should be enough to make my point. Whenever you receive a rejection letter from an agent, and chances are you won’t receive detailed ones like these unless via a literary consultant, remind yourself of one thing. Tastes are completely subjective. One agent loves my sparseness, the other dislikes it. One can’t fall in love with the characters, the other one does.

You may not be surprised by now to hear that I still haven’t found this elusive person, the agent who loves my characters, my writing style and the story. I guess it is a lot to ask for. The consultant gave up trying to find me an agent after about ten rejections. When she heard that the novel won the Muslim Writers Awards in 2008 she gave it another shot, equally unsuccessful.

This time the rejections did not have the same effect on me as after completing my MA. Maybe I was stronger emotionally. Coping with grief helps one to put things in perspective. I think what helped me most was the fact that with every rejection there also came praise. I was lucky in that. The only way forward as a writer is aiming for that balance of knowing your weaknesses and your strengths.

I am also part of a writers’ group. We are five women who met during the MA course and felt that we needed the regular feedback of others. We aim for a monthly meeting, mostly to share our writings, but also for comfort, encouragement and advice. Because we respect each other we are honest in our feedback. Often enough I have left one of our meetings in despair. Yet the next morning, trying to rewrite the chapter after digesting the remarks of my friends, I realised how kind they had been. They hadn’t torn apart the whole scene; they had given me tools to make it clearer, subtler, livelier, more believable, whatever it needed. And most of all, not once did I think they were wrong.

If you only get rejection letters from agents, try finding a writers’ group whose members take their writing seriously, who aim for publication rather than treat writing as a pastime. There’s nothing wrong with writing as a pastime. I can’t imagine anything more satisfying than spending an hour writing. Why should we not encourage that? Does anybody think that playing the flute for pleasure is wrong? Yet if you want to perform and ask the public to part with good money to hear you play you will have to commit yourself to daily practice and to frequent rehearsals.

How have things worked out for me? As I have said, I am still looking for an agent. In the meantime the Arts Council have sponsored a Print On Demand version of my first novel. The copyright stayed with me and I am still hoping the novel will find a home with a proper publisher.

Ayyub finally won and I told his story in my third novel. This novel was written with the help of brilliant mentor. There were many reasons why I chose to work with her. I wanted to be forced to write regularly. I had trouble making space in my day for writing. I wanted somebody to be able to comment on the whole of the novel, the way the story unfolded, something that the members of my writers’ group were not able to do. We simply haven’t got the time to read more than a few thousand words for every meeting. The novel has been written and the first rejection letters have arrived. I hear my mentor’s words in my head every time I read one, ‘This novel is very good. Trust my verdict. It deserves to be published and it will be published.’ ‘In sha allaah, God willing,’ I added in my head at the time and I still do.

Ultimately this is where my real strength comes from. I know from a deep place that God has given me this skill with words. I can’t think of anything else that I could do with the same sense of achievement and satisfaction. I am talking of course here about the area of my life that is concerned with work and my place in the world and in a certain degree with my relationship with God. For the time being I know that this is what I am meant to do, the rejections are part of this work, there must be wisdom behind it.

You never know, one day I might be writing a blog entitled ‘Coping with Success’, in sha allaah.

The Enemies of Writing

For the last session with my writing mentor, after having finished a whole novel under her care, I was asked to write a list of ten enemies and ten allies of my writing.

I found it very difficult to name ten enemies because an enemy is somebody who wishes you harm, or a thing that is bad for you. However, it is perfectly possible to be an enemy of Fatima, the writer, while at the same time being the beloved of Fatima, the wife or mother.

After compiling the list and looking through it, it turned out that most of the enemies were given power by none other than myself. In a sense, I am the worst enemy of my writing.

Why have I come back to that list now? I have just finished a novel and although I may not be ready to start writing another one I am ready to start researching another one. My next novel is going to be a historical novel, God willing, and the sooner I start the research the sooner I will be ready to write it. Yet making time for research is no different from making time for writing. The same enemies are attempting to hinder serious work. I shall be listing them here now in the hope that looking at them with the eye of reason will take away their power and give me back the time and discipline for writing.

I am at heart an intuitive and spontaneous person who likes to be busy and active but prefers doing things in her own time and according to her own rhythm. This worked very well for me while I was single and a student. Everything changed when I got married and had children. I had to function according to the rhythms of others, and I had to plan certain activities in advance. When you have got three children under four you better go shopping when there is still some food in the house, not the moment they are hungry and you realise that the fridge is empty. Shopping, cooking, washing, going for walks, everything was now planned. I started to make lists because I felt overwhelmed with all the responsibilities. From domestic chores to doctors’ appointments, classes for the children, exercise for me, my part-time work, guests, everything and everyone was put on my lists. These lists have been with me for about twenty years now, and although the children are grown-up and can buy their own food if the fridge is empty, I still write the lists and I still want to tick everything off before I go into my office. Of course by the time I have ticked everything off I am either too exhausted to focus on creative work, or there isn’t enough time left of the day to get started. Because after my lists the next enemy of writing is the idea that it is not worth starting unless I have at least three to four hours uninterrupted time. How many days a week do I have this long empty stretch of time in my day planner? Hardly ever. I have been back from my annual holiday in Austria for over three weeks now and I had two or three magical days like that. I had a week of catching up on housework, a week of guests, and lots of other minor interruptions. This is quite usual for me and I will have to learn to accommodate these events into a writing routine. Guests must learn not to expect constant attention from me. Most of my guests invite themselves, because we have space in our home, we are near airports and near London, and I hope they also like our company. What they don’t do is ask whether the time of their visit is convenient. As they don’t ask they should not expect to be treated like special guests. I know that they would not mind if I disappeared into my office for a few hours a day but I find it difficult to do. It seems rude to me. Yet my husband will disappear for the whole day without feeling guilty. His activities are called work. That excuses everything. When necessary I shall have to call my writing work too. This is the only way forward.

Not only do I need uninterrupted time of a few hours, I also can’t focus and concentrate on my writing when other people are in the house. Most of my writing in the past got done when my children were at school and my husband at work. Two years ago my husband moved his main office into our home. He is at home a lot these days. His physical presence makes me aware of his rhythm, when he wants lunch for example. It just seems too mean to make myself a nutritious salad and not share it with him. Or to ignore his comment, ‘I’m going out at 1.30,’ which translates as ‘I would love lunch before that’. Don’t get me wrong, my husband is no tyrant. If I don’t leave my office before 1.30 he’ll make himself a quick sandwich, even bring me a cup of coffee, before disappearing. I alone am to blame for interrupting my writing to have lunch with him.

The same need for quiet and solitude prevents me from writing when workmen are in the house. In a big old house like ours they seem to be permanently stationed here. No sooner had we painted the windows this summer, damp problems appeared in the loft. A bathroom needs redecorating, and so on. Two to three months without workmen are the most I can ever expect it seems. Again, the workmen will not enter my little office. They only interrupt very occasionally to ask a question. My husband has learned that I will not communicate with the workmen; that is his job. All I have to do is to ignore the noises and get on with my writing.

Having a big house to look after, and an obsession with healthy home-cooked food adds another pressure on my time. I never had a cleaner while the children were young, for the main reason that I believe everybody should clear away their own mess. This was no major problem while my mother-in-law, who lived with us, was alive and looked after her half of the house, and later when my children were old enough to help with the weekly clean on Saturday mornings. Now my daughters are at university and my son works full-time, we have added my late mother-in-law’s half to ours, and I am left in sole charge of cleaning. Maybe it is time to change my mind on this topic. Maybe all these cards put through my letterbox, of Polish women looking for cleaning jobs, are a sign that having a cleaner does not necessarily mean that I am selfish and exploitative. Maybe these women would rather clean my house than go back to Poland where work is even more difficult to find. I could see myself letting go of the cleaning, handing it over to somebody else, but never of the home-cooking. This is non-negotiable. I like freshly made food, from healthy ingredients, and as my husband jokes, my repertoire includes only dishes with a preparation time of less than twenty minutes. Surely these twenty minutes will not hamper my writing.

Likewise I don’t feel like giving up my charity work. It may take up two half days a week but since the death of both my mother-in-law and my mother I have hardly any contact with people older than myself, apart from seeing my father and aunt and uncle when I am on holiday in Austria. Working for Age Concern keeps me in touch with the outside world and the world of the generation above me.

After listing all my writing enemies it is only fair to acknowledge that the list of my writing allies is longer than the list of enemies, and that I am thankful that I have all this support in my life. I am helped by prayer, by long walks, by yoga, by my husband’s and son’s patience when I ask them to solve my computer problems, by my women writers’ group, my freedom to go on retreats and to travel, by having my own little office, by all the other writers whose books I read, by the cups of coffee my husband serves me (his espresso is the best!) and last but not least by my husband’s financial support. As a Muslim he considers it his obligation to look after the financial needs of the family, and never once has he made me feel self-indulgent for having opted for the life of a writer. Surely this army of helpers should be proof to me that the enemies of my writing have no chance. I will not let them stop me writing.

A Sense of Place

Clockwise from top left; The Imam Mosque in Esfahan, an Iranian tourist family we met in Shiraz and Esfahan, Abbassi Hotel Esfahan during the day, and again at sunset. Photos by Al-Qasim Martin

Most fiction writers will at some point have to engage in research about the place or places they set their novel in, unless you set your novel in a place that you know very well or the place exists only in your imagination, whether in a realist or science fiction format.

Every writer is unique in the way she brings forth her novel. At workshops and talks writers often struggle to articulate that process, but more often than not they admit that at some point it is a matter of trust, of blind faith, that somehow or other that novel will get written. Some writers start with ideas, others with places, others with plot. I belong to the group of writers who are motivated by characters. The characters of my novels are not so much products of my imagination but independent beings who will pursue me and ask me to tell their stories. Once I have agreed to sit down and write them they will let me know what has happened to them, what it feels to be them, but they don’t usually tell me about the place where they are coming from or where they are living.

Unfortunately that doesn’t mean I can just put them anywhere. One of the main characters of my third novel insisted he was Iranian. I told him that wouldn’t work; I had never been to Iran. I suggested all kind of Middle Eastern countries I had visited in the past, but the man was unmoveable.

Because I liked the character I started reading travel books on Iran. I found them fascinating, I enjoyed myself; but I postponed writing because of my lack of first-hand knowledge of Iran.

I am a member of a writers’ group. We have been meeting about once a month ever since we finished our MA Writing course seven years ago. All the while when this Iranian character pursued me I was embarrassed coming to meetings without having written a word since the last meeting. I watched with envy how one of my colleagues had the courage to throw a whole manuscript into the fire and start the project afresh with the help of a mentor.

‘I need a mentor,’ I told myself, but a mentor costs money, and as an unpublished writer I felt I couldn’t justify that expense.

Then my husband bought me a bread maker for my birthday. I had a perfectly good one and used it regularly. Why would I want another one? “Our daughters keep asking when you get a new one, so they can have the old one,” my husband justified his purchase.

In no time I had found myself a mentor, openly claiming that she was my husband’s birthday present. My husband did not deny it. She told me right at the beginning of our year together that she would expect me to write about 10,000 words a month. I panicked and wanted to travel to Iran immediately, but of course that was not possible, and instead I sat down and started writing. To my surprise I had no problem to write the scenes set in Iran. All my reading had provided enough background knowledge for a first draft.

When nearing the end of the first draft, however, the yearning to go to Iran came back. I wanted to see with my own eyes that the things I had described from online images, after reading other people’s impressions and listening to people who had visited Iran, were accurate.

I persuaded my teenage son to join me because I didn’t want to travel on my own and my husband was too busy. We applied for a visa. My son was granted one, I wasn’t. I applied again. Again my application failed. So I went to a travel agent who promised a visa, against additional payment of course. This time the visa arrived.

The trip to Iran with my son was only a 12-day event, far too short yet long enough at the same time. We arrived in Tehran during the holiday time of Noruz, the Iranian New Year, and at first I was disappointed because I needed to see Tehran at its worst, not quiet and without traffic. At the same time however it allowed us to explore the town in a relaxed manner. We walked up the Elburz Mountains, we saw some of Tehran’s splendid gardens, we visited the quarters of the rich and the poor. We flew on to Shiraz, a place not featuring in my novel but a place I wanted to see, its Bazaar and the tomb of Hafiz, a 14th century poet and mystic whose poetry many Iranians are still able to recite by heart. About 70km northeast of Shiraz we visited the ruins of Persepolis, an ancient city that quite a few Iranians called one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is not one of them, but it is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Finally we travelled to Esfahan, the city where my character’s family comes from and where he returns to with his daughter. I fell in love with its mosques, its beautiful square, its gardens and courtyards. We stayed in the Abbasi Hotel, a five-star hotel that we were forced into because all the cheaper hotels were full. It had been impossible to book hotels from the UK. Being an independent traveller had its disadvantages. The disadvantage was purely a monetary one though; everything else was perfect in the hotel. We sat in its magnificent courtyard that was once part of a caravanserai, looking at pools and the lovingly planted beds of flowers, their scents becoming intoxicating in the late afternoon just before sunset. Above the wall surrounding the courtyard we admired the view of the turquoise tiled dome of the adjacent mosque. Birds would fly in and out of the trees and shrubs, and for moments I felt quite literally in paradise.

The indoor swimming pool was single-sex, with different times for men and women, which suited my Muslim and feminist sensibilities.

Was the trip necessary to finish my novel? I think so. I had to rewrite quite a few scenes because I pictured them as if they happened in one of the Middle Eastern countries that I had visited when Iran was in fact different. In Iran smoking in public places is forbidden. The airports are modern and not crowded at all. I had no idea that you had separate entrances for men and women. Many of the beautiful mosques are no longer used for communal prayer. I was unaware that Shia Muslims, like the Iranians, pray only three times a day, and that you will hear the call to prayer only three times, not five times like in the Sunni countries. I imagined the cities full of huge billboards with photos of the ayatollahs, akin to the portraits of the royal family in Saudi Arabia lining the roads, but the portraits were much smaller than expected, and not at all ever-present. These may only be minor things, and the average novel reader might never have spotted the mistakes, but to me they were important.

After coming back from Iran I had this renewed energy that allowed me to finish the novel. It still needs further rewriting, this time in the context of character development, but at least I feel that I have done my best concerning the sense of place. In a strange sort of way, the visit has also helped me to understand my characters better, and to see much clearer the road they are travelling on during the timescale of the novel.

I am a Slow Blogger

When my daughters first heard that I wanted to write a blog they were not convinced.
‘What would you write about every day?’ they asked me. ‘Nothing ever happens to you.’

I was outraged. Many things happen to me every day but of course my children consider them neither newsworthy nor exciting. Or maybe they think that shopping, cooking and cleaning and offering telephone counselling when they are low, usually around exam times, are all I do most days. Nevertheless, their comment kept me thinking that maybe I hadn’t quite got the idea right what it meant to write a blog.

I started the blog anyway and put on a few postings. Then, one day I came across an article in the Guardian about SlowBlogging.
I was fascinated. Immediately I recognised myself. I am a slow blogger, no doubt. I don’t want to churn out a daily stream of trivia. I agree with Todd Sieling, who invented the term SlowBlogging and wrote up a manifesto, that SlowBlogging is a rejection of immediacy. It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly, and that many thoughts are best served after being fully baked and worded in an even temperament,...(Slow Blogging) is speaking like it matters, like the pixels that give your words form are precious and rare. In fact, I cannot understand why anybody would want to give a constant running commentary on his daily life online. Who are the readers that are interested in these details? No matter how famous a person, why would I want to know what they did yesterday or this morning? If it’s important, I’ll probably read it in the paper, if it’s gossip, my life’s too short to worry about strangers. There are too many people in my life that I really care about and want to be in touch with. I'd rather write a letter or e-mail to a relative or friend than reading up on what Alistair Campbell is doing today. He is mentioned here because according to the Guardian he contributes daily to his blog.

Sieling asks us to share our own SlowBlogging manifesto with him. Here are my thoughts on the topic.

The fastest growing plants in my garden are the weeds. They need no attention or care, they’ll just appear. Trivial thoughts will almost write themselves. SlowBlogging means asking yourself a few questions before you share your thoughts: Am I saying something good? Will it benefit people? Is it important enough to spend time on it? If you answer no to any of these questions, then censor yourself. Use your time in a more meaningful way or go out and talk to family or friends face to face. Or accept that membership to the slowbloggers club will be denied to you.

Illness

What has illness got to do with writing? you may ask. I will give you an answer in a minute.

I am a person who is very impatient with sickness. My children were sent to school no matter how tired or pale they looked. If they had no temperature they could go to school. Occasionally I would get a phone call from the school, ‘Mrs Martin, your son really is not well. He complains of a headache. He didn’t want lunch. Can you please pick him up.’ Of course I picked him up, and of course by that time he had a temperature. Did I feel guilty for sending him to school? No, because 9 out of 10 times it turned out the other way round, that he was fine once he was at school.

I was never a mother who fussed over her children when they were sick. Okay, I made sure they were neither too warm nor too cold, had enough liquid to drink, but after that I expected them to stay in bed and sleep. For this very reason my children never pretended to be ill, nor did they want to stay at home when they got better. It was just too boring. Sick children weren’t allowed TV or running around, or eating sweets and biscuits.

My husband more or less gets the same treatment when he comes down with flu. I will serve the regular lemon and honey drink and otherwise ignore him.
I don’t seem to possess one ounce of nurse material.

Likewise I don’t like being ill myself. I try not to stay in bed unless I absolutely have to. I resent every day spent without energy, yet I know recovery can’t be forced, no matter how hard I try.

And here comes the answer to the question: What has illness got to do with writing? Sometimes the creative energy is as low as the physical one. I feel sick in a different way, but helpless quite in the same way as if struck down with flu. No matter how much I want to finish that chapter/that story/that novel, it cannot be forced. The character doesn’t let me know what is going to happen next. I have to wait. I can try and force a move-on by engaging in activities that will enhance creativity (in my case I will opt for walking in nature, doing yoga, reading Qur’an, listening to music) but quite often that will only help to calm down my impatience rather than speed up recovery. The advice of many creative writing tutors, to just sit down at the computer and write, even if it is rubbish, doesn’t work for me.

It has just taken me over six years to finish telling the stories of nine of the twenty-five prophets mentioned in the Qur’an. This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t writing other things, but this project had me sick a lot. You can compare it with having an injury. You hurt your ankle while running. The doctor tells you not to run for a while. He tells you to swim or cycle, but no running. You simply have to wait until that ankle is healed.

The waiting, the recovering, the healing, is the most difficult part in writing. It means trusting the creative process, trusting your ability as a writer, and trusting that the story will be told eventually. Just because you are not running now doesn’t mean you won’t be in a month’s time. Keep trying but don’t blame yourself if you fail.

Brenda Ueland: If you want to write

I am trying to figure out why this book that was first published in 1938 has had such an uplifting impact on me.

The author, a writer, editor and teacher, who was born in 1891 in Minneapolis and died in 1985, says nothing that is new to me. I guess the joy of reading this book is the joy of discovering that there are other people out there who believe art to be about beauty, about the divine self within us, and who are convinced like me that real creativity comes from the truth within us, from the imagination and love that we all can find within.

Her first chapter heading reads: Everybody Is Talented, Original and Has Something Important to Say
Again and again she returns to this truth. We must not judge, discriminate art in any other way but for the honesty in expressing what is within. She won’t fall for style, education, intellect or anything else.

Imagination is the Divine Body in Every Man is how William Blake expressed it. He thought that we must keep this creative power alive all our lives. It is our duty to make time for its manifestation. Ueland stresses more than once that writing is not the only form of expressing this divine power. It can be expressed with anything that you love doing or making, from painting, making music, dancing, gardening, cooking, sewing. The possibilities are endless, but the expression has to be honest.

The simple thing of cooking comes to mind. People have lost the ability to express their truth in this way today. They eat out, buy ready-made food, or imitate TV cooks.

I have always cooked. For me it is part of giving the love to my family. My adult daughters, who are at university now, still come home for a cuddle and for a shared home-cooked meal that tastes of me, when they are in emotional turmoil. They prefer to eat at home rather than be invited out. My cooking contains my essence and my love, and that’s what they long for when they are stressed or unhappy, or even when they are deliriously happy, because too much luck or good fortune can also take its toll on the heart.

Blake wrote poetry and painted endlessly but he never had ambition, or worried about being published. He burnt most of his work.

I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art…
Ueland defines the creative impulse, in her case writing, such: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. She promised herself never to fall into those two extremes (both lies) of saying, I have nothing to say and am of no importance and have no gift or The public doesn’t want good stuff.
As writers we might do well to join her in this promise. The majority of us are neither bland and boring nor geniuses but ordinary human beings trying to do their best in making use of the gift they were given.

Is it ethical for Writers to fictionalise Family or Friends

Julie Myerson’s book, The Lost Child, not in the bookshops yet, has created a lot of pre-publication excitement, not because of its literary merit, nobody seems to talk about that, but because Myerson admitted that it dealt with the drug problem of her oldest son.

The son says he didn’t want the book to be published.

The critics not only blame Myerson for disrespecting his wishes for privacy but also for her actions, which she details in the book, throwing her 17-year old out of the family home.

I personally belong to the group of writers who judge it unethical to use family or friends as characters in their fiction. A fictional story has its own flow and rhythm and can never do justice to the life of a living human being. Autobiography and biography may try to achieve a complete picture of a person but I don’t believe for one moment that they can ever succeed and capture the whole story.

On the other hand I completely understand that a writer deals with emotional upheavals by writing. I do the same but I distinguish between writing as therapy and writing for publication.
When I write because I can’t cope emotionally or spiritually with what is happening in my life I first of all change the way I do it. I use paper and pen rather than the computer. I have many notebooks full of letters to human beings, to God, to my deeper self, as well as descriptions of my states. Nobody is ever allowed to read these notebooks, not even my nearest and dearest. I am well aware that they contain material for a few novels but I wouldn’t dream of using it, or shall I say not directly, in its raw form.

For example I coped with caring for my terminally ill mother-in-law, with whom I had a very difficult relationship, by writing. My writing was fuelled by anger, by self-pity, by exhaustion, and many other more fleeting emotions. Years later I have used her death – she died at home – in a novel. A character in my novel dies of the same illness she died of and I used my memory - I didn’t need the notebook - to describe the moment of his death. The character and his son go through completely different struggles from the ones my mother-in-law and I faced, and the emotional side of my real life-experience was not touched upon in the novel at all.

At other times I might use an emotional experience for a novel, but not the actual story. A broken heart, being jealous of a sibling, getting married, becoming a mother etc. are universal experiences that many of us go through, and yes, sometimes our fictional characters will mirror our own way of dealing with these emotional issues. At other times however I enjoy creating a character that does what I can’t do. In Julie Myerson’s case I might have written about a mother who does not kick out her son, who finds another way of dealing with the situation. I appreciate that this is not easy to do while you are going through the trauma.

I believe that if you want to use real-life traumas as themes for a novel you have to wait until you have fully digested the whole experience. The writer can’t afford to be emotionally involved with her characters. She needs a coldness in her heart while writing. All the characters must be equally precious to her. She can’t take sides with the character that sees the world like she does. Many people say that at least seven years have to pass; some say ten, before you should use events from your own life in fiction. Experiences have to lie fallow and fade in importance before they can be turned into successful fiction.

And what about the motive of warning others, of trying to raise awareness of an issue, you may ask. Campaigns have no place in fiction. They belong to non-fiction.