A Letter To An Anxious Writer

by ELIF SHAFAK

"Dear Anxious Writer,

You woke up this morning to a fractured world. A hurting world.

Or perhaps, let's put it another way: You woke up this morning with a stronger realisation that the world has been broken for a long, long time, but now, the cracks are becoming more visible than ever before. They are deeper, sharper, more dangerous. And the weight of it all feels overwhelming—worrying, demoralising, too lonely. A part of you wants to pull the covers back over your head, to retreat into the stillness of your bed, because the thought of summoning the energy to sit at your desk and create imaginary stories seems almost impossible. How can you write fiction, when the world around you is in such turmoil?

What is the point of literature, you wonder, when things are so dire, urgent, unstable, and nothing feels solid anymore—the norms, the institutions. How do you even communicate across borders when people are divided into clashing epistemological tribes that do not talk to each other anymore—and instead constantly talk about each other.

Disruption is easy, demolition even easier; what is much harder is to build up, and build up better. Writers are bridge builders. How can you build bridges when the very idea of common ground seems impossible to find?

Ongoing violence, immense suffering, relentless Othering… It is as though we never learn from history—not just from the distant past, but from the very recent one. How can you possibly write about empathy, interconnectedness, and our shared humanity when the world is consumed by so much anger, hatred and pain?

At a time when we are faced with massive global challenges that require real international collaboration—challenges such as climate emergency, the next pandemic, deepening inequalities and the unforeseen-consequences-of-AI— we are doing the exact opposite and tumbling back into isolationism, nativism, populist nationalism.

You tell me that you cannot stop thinking, and you cannot stop thinking in images: the little Palestinian girl who was pulled out from under a rubble after another Israeli airstrike, hundreds and thousands of children in Gaza orphaned; the women and girls in Sudan experiencing horrific sexual violence and who are almost forgotten by the international media; the face of the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who died from her injuries after another Russian missile; the diary entry of an Afghan-Hazara girl named Marzia before she was killed by a fanatic suicide bomber…

And then other images accumulate: a man holding a banner at a recent U.S. political rally that reads, 'Women Are Property.'

You juxtapose this with images of Turkish women who have been killed this year, as we witness a disturbing rise in cases of gender-based violence and femicide.

And in the meantime, the climate crisis keeps accelerating with undeniable force—a glaring reminder of our failure to act. The sorrow of the citizens in Valencia after the dreadful flash floods….

An urgent need to understand that as human beings we are not above nature, superior to all other beings, but merely a tiny part of a delicate ecosystem, and we must learn to value water, trees, earth over money, greed and profit.

You tell me that all these images and many more keep churning in your mind.

You tell me language fails and you cannot write.

I listen to you, and your words reverberate deeply within my heart.

I cannot simply tell you not to feel anxious, down, or sad—because these emotions are real, and they reflect something important: that you are engaged, you are not detached, neither aloof nor apart.

What I can offer, however, is something simple and universal:

Writing is a radical act. It is an act of love, a rebellion in words. Writing is resistance. It is today, as it always has been.

Letter by letter, word by word, we craft bridges that transcend the confines of our own limited selves, reaching out to hearts and minds far beyond our own echo chambers. For a storyteller there is no such thing as “us versus them”. No dualities. In Storyland, “the Other” is my brother, my sister. “I” and ‘‘the Other” are One.

Writers are memory keepers.

As one character says in There Are Rivers in the Sky:

“Words are like birds, when you publish books you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in mansions of gentry, in farmsteads and laborers' cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.”

It is a broken world, true. But it will be a much more difficult and divided place to live in if art and literature were to wither away.

“Books, like paper lanterns, provide us with a light amidst the fog.”

That the fog is growing denser only underscores our need to seek each other, to seek literature, to seek creative art, to seek more light."