Arab and international authors discussed the position of the writer between the reality of the world we live in and the world of fantasy and imagination during a panel discussion held at the Sharjah International Book Fair.British Author Rehan Khan said that it is the responsibility of the writer to get an emotional response from readers and to do that they need to spend time designing their story.“When looking at creativity there’s a couple of things I do. I look at where I’m setting my novel, how can I get an emotional response from the reader by setting it in a particular way? The other thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about when designing my novel is what level of conflict I want to portray?” he said.Khan added that the tension placed on characters brings out their ‘true’ personalities. “As a novelist you will spend a lot of time on characterization like what does the character look like but then the true character comes out in conflict. It’s just like in real life, everyone can be really nice but then when times get difficult, how the person reacts brings out the true character,” he said.
He stressed the importance of figuring out what is the meaning behind the novel. “As a writer you don’t really know. You just have a vague idea. As you progress it becomes a lot more clearer. Try to work out what’s the heart of your novel. try to get the essence because that will shape the entire story and everything else that comes out of it,” he said.Also on the panel was Hammour Zeyada, a Sudanese writer, who said that Creativity is adding a dimension of imagination to reality. He said that you can’t really trust creative people with facts because their imagination will always be more powerful. He quoted the words of Colombian Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez who said: “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” “I can’t say that creativity is based on reality, the fundamental concept behind creativity is that it has no boundaries,” said Zeyada. He added that in the Arab world writers are always asked whether or not their stories are based on reality or if they are imaginary. “It is because our societies are judgmental and believe that we should all have common values. Novels can be seen as scandalous if you’re writing about yourself or others,” he said.
Also on the panel was American Author Leza Lowitz and her husband Japanese writer and translator Shogo Oketani. Lowitz said that when she thinks of fantasy she thinks about “what’s possible or what we think of as being beyond possible or beyond probability so this is a realm of what we might consider beyond our imagination.”
She said that this is very close to fiction because fiction in itself is a created world. “It’s a complete world in and of itself that the reader can enter and be taken along the story. So the bridge between fiction and fantasy would be the space between possibility and impossibility. You can view reality from various perspectives… so which one is real? They are all real because that person’s experience happened in their perception,” she said.She said that one of the greatest questions in literature is ‘What does it really mean to be a human being?’ and added: “Ideas of justice, of good and evil, these are what define us as human beings. Those kinds of enquiries can be set in a fantasy world as long as we can connect to the basic human dilemmas that the character faces. The world that we live in was a fantasy yesterday. What we think of as impossible today is probably possible tomorrow. As a writer we have the great possibility to bridge them.” Oketani said that when writing a story you tap into the memories of people who lived ordinary lives and it’s like writing a little history.