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First Draft Episode #319: S. K. Ali
August 19, 2021
S. K. Ali is the New York Times bestselling author of Morris Award Finalist Saints and Misfits and its sequel Misfit in Love, Love From A to Z and its forthcoming sequel, Love From Mecca to Medina, and picture book The Proudest Blue. She also co-edited, with Aisha Saeed, the middle grade anthology Once Upon an Eid.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to S.K. Ali, New York Times bestselling author of Saints and Misfits and its sequel, Misfit in Love. As well as Love from A to Z and its forthcoming sequel, Love from Mecca to Medina. She also co-edited with Aisha Saeed, the middle grade anthology Once Upon an Eid, and wrote picture book, The Proudest Blue with illustrator Ibtihja Muhammad.
I so loved what S. K. Had to say about how activism led her to take her writing more seriously, on when we shouldn't humanize villains, and how crucial it can be to have characters believe a lie.
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Okay. Now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with S.K. Ali.
Sarah Enni: I'm so excited to talk today, Sajidah. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing today?
S.K. Ali: Great! Thank you so much for having me. I've been a long admirer of your podcast, so excited to be here.
Sarah Enni: Yay! So happy to have you. So then if you're familiar with the podcast then you know I love to start my conversations by asking where you were born and raised.
S.K. Ali: So I was born in India, the Southern tip in south India, but I was raised in Canada. I came to Canada when I was three years old with my parents. So I grew up in Montreal and then we moved to Toronto and I've been here since.
Sarah Enni: What was your father's PhD in? What was he studying?
S.K. Ali: He was studying comparative religions. He'd studied Islam before he came to Canada in the Middle East and then he wanted to do further studies. So that's what he was studying at McGill University in Montreal. So it was like a comparative religions PhD with Islam as a focus.
Sarah Enni: That kind of leads me to my other question cause I just love hearing how everybody's childhood and growing up sort of leads to their creative expression later in life. So I'd love to hear about how reading and writing was a part of growing up for you in your family.
S.K. Ali: Oh yes, that was really important to my family. My father just surrounded us with books cause he was always studying and reading. I always remember, even though we struggled financially, we were surrounded with bookshelves, that was a given. When I think about it, just knowing that there was all these bookshelves at home with books that were in English, but there was all these other languages as well. We had Arabic and Persian and Farsi books.
So there was lots of different books that captured heritages that were not the ones that we'd learned about in school. But then that really helped me to understand that the stories that I wanted to eventually learn to tell... I didn't want to tell them in the beginning when I was like falling in love with reading and writing, because then I was writing stories with kids that were not like me, or adults that were not like me. They were white kids that I would write about cause that's what I'd read.
But then eventually when I went to university and I started to write more in my own voice and accessing my own experiences, part of the confidence in doing so came from those bookshelves that affirmed that there were other stories that were as valuable. And though they weren't in English, I just knew that that was part of our heritage.
Another thing is that my father, as soon as he found out that I was interested in it, he was very supportive of it. I know sometimes a lot of immigrant children sometimes talk about how their parents have a route that's presented to them as like, "Oh, be a professional." In terms of like medicine, or engineering, or law, or something.
But for my father, as soon as he heard that I was interested in writing, creative writing, he was very supportive. He was like, "Yes, that's a noble thing." So I got that sense.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I love that. That's so wonderful. I do want to ask about studying creative writing in university. It sounds like you had already understood that creative writing was your passion, but I'd love to hear about deciding to study it in that really express intent way.
S.K. Ali: I actually, for the longest time, thought I was gonna go into fashion design and I had my whole portfolio for it. And I went to all the fashion shows in Toronto. Because Toronto, at the time, was trying to market itself as like a fashion capital of Canada and I was like really dedicated to it.
And then what turned me into more looking at writing was when the first Gulf War was happening. I was like getting interested in the why's of things. Like, "Why did people think it was okay to do wars? And innocent people are suffering." And I started getting to the activism part and then I started to write more about it. And I saw that the need for people who were written about, and who were in the news, that Muslims like to actually participate in writing our own stories. And I saw that as a 17, 18 year-old.
So then I was like, "Okay, I think I'm gonna try to study journalism." And I went into create a writing because I got a scholarship at the university that had a creative writing program. And so when I learned that they had a creative writing program I was like, "Oh, I can still study creative writing and still do nonfiction pieces and stuff." So that's when I decided to go that route.
And I was so glad I did, because I don't think I was made for journalism. I really love bringing issues to light through stories as opposed to the hard and factual clarity of nonfiction writing. I think it would have bored me. And so yeah, creative writing and just being around people who also were into seeing possibilities in new ways to talk about things, which was what I experienced in my creative writing program. Just exploring a lot of new ways to do things. I love that. I loved it. And so that's how I ended up studying creative writing.
Sarah Enni: That's wonderful. I love that you got to university and you realized that creative writing was how you were gonna express yourself. You're even thinking, too, about audience that early on. It's about self-expression, but it's also about putting a vision of the world out there, or reflecting your experience in the world, as a way to connect with other people and engage with the world. It's an important part of being a creative writer.
I do understand, though, that the time between studying creative writing and your debut novel Saints and Misfits, that there was a gap there. I would love to hear about what was happening. Were you writing then? Were you trying to write, was there a detour? What was going on in your life at that time?
S.K. Ali: I'm laughing at the word 'gap' because I felt like it was a cavern. It was a long time. I ended up getting married at the end of university and then I actually had a child. Obviously, when you start a family you need to put bread on the table, you start working, and so I started working. And I think maybe this is true for a lot of writers that creativity, for me, it doesn't really thrive when I'm focused on other things that are more survival things.
So I was working and taking care of my son and married and later we bought a house. And so there was a lot of just life stuff happening. And so in the midst of it, I'd start things. And I just taught a YA writing class, we just finished it like two weeks ago, and a lot of the students in the class were talking about this thing that I experienced a lot of during those years, which I call starting the ignition. Starting stories and starting things, and then abandoning it because that stamina to see through a project wasn't happening, but still I wanted to do it. I still had that desire. My life wasn't conducive to the dedication you needed for it.
And so the thing that kind of led me to actually finishing and doing what I initially wanted to do since I was a kid was, I ended up getting divorced. I was a single mom, I had two children. Actually. I have three now because I'm remarried with a blended family. But at the time when I was on my own, when the kids would go every other weekend to their dads, first I was just going out with my friends and just being like, "Okay, I'm back to being single," and just kind of enjoying that aspect.
But then when that kind of died down, then I was like, "Okay, so what am I?" And I realized that for a long time I had defined myself as just a mother and a teacher, I was teaching. And I just started thinking about what were the things that I really was interested in? Who was I, kind of thing. And then I realized those dreams I had from when I was young, I actually wanted to try to restart them.
I was at a party and we all pitched in for a gift for somebody. And a friend of mine pulled out her wallet to pay for her portion and this little tattered piece of paper fell out of her wallet. And we were like, "What's that?" Because it was like really ancient looking. And she was like, "Oh, this is my life list. And I've had it since I was 18."
So we were like, "Okay, is it a bucket list? What is it?" And she was like, "No, it's the things that you envisioned for your life when you were setting out in your life." And it was all the things that she thought she would be and do. So she shared her life list and we were all inspired by it.
So right then and there we said, "Okay, if we each thought to our 18 year-old self, what would our lists look like?" And so at the very top of mine was become an author. And that was 2006. And then I was like, "Oh, so this is something we should do." And right then and there we also made this pact with ourselves that we would meet up at least twice a year to like check on our life lists. So it wouldn't just be just within ourselves that we would actually have some accountability.
So that accountability factor actually drove me to be like, "Okay, I'm gonna start a blog just recording my thoughts and getting into the writing." And then from there we just kept checking in. And then that's when I started writing more consistently. And I wrote a novel in 2009 that I wrote in like a few months and I thought it was done. And I thought it was great. It wasn't good.
And then I started to learn that there's this whole thing called the publishing industry. I knew about the publishing industry as somebody who'd gone through creative writing and learned a bit about it. But I didn't know there was all these different aspects to it. Then when I started to read I was like, "Oh wait, this is not a YA novel." And then I worked on it a bit more and I got it to like 60,000 words.
But again, it didn't have any of the structures or anything. But I did query it, and I got bites meaning I got requests and I got to revise and resubmit. But then I decided to spend a year looking at it. I just wrote a list of everything that was right and everything that was wrong with it. And then I took all the right things and I said, "So, I'm gonna start another novel with these right things." And then all the things that I found wrong in my first manuscript, I would work on learning those. And that's the books that became Saints and Misfits, the second novel.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh. That's such a great story.
S.K. Ali: But that took me 10 years! Learning from 2006 to 2016, getting back into writing, writing a manuscript - the book that taught me how not to write a book. And then the book that got my foot in the door.
Sarah Enni: That's incredible. I love so many things about this story and I'm interested especially as you, at that time, being confronted with this idea of a list that you would have written as an 18 year-old. I'm so intrigued by that, because I think a lot about my young self and how I am, and am not, living the life that that person envisioned and the limitations of your imagination at that age.
And also, I mean, just our changing selves. And I think about that a lot also because, of course, we write for young people. So I try to think empathetically about all that that person believed in, and all that person didn't know. Anyway, I'm just interested in what that experience was like.
S.K. Ali: It really helped me to rediscover the importance of creativity in my life, at that point. Because I was the girl that made my clothes, I'd make jewelry and I'd sell it at stalls and stuff like that. So I remembered that part of me and how I'd let that all kind of slip away from my focus. I think I was just so into the idea of being a super-mom to my kids, that it was just killing a lot of what I was about and I had been.
So that rediscovery was really good for me to even just bring happiness back into my life as well, post-divorce, where it was like your identity was made up of being a married person. And all of that was part of the way that you were perceived and that you went out into the world.
Reshaping that by discovering who I was pre-marriage was amazing for me cause I had gotten married very young. But then we went on, in terms of those life lists, we went on to kind of rejig it to who we are as adults as well. And we still do it. I still meet with the people who have the life list and we talk about how we're moving forward with our new things and stuff.
Sarah Enni: I love that you led us right to Saints and Misfits. I do want to ask some specific questions about that book but before we talk about it, do you mind pitching that book for us?
S.K. Ali: It's about a girl who sees her world as being made up of either saints, people who are really good and into helping the world, quote unquote, just anything that is good for the world. And then misfits, who's like the main character. She doesn't feel like she belongs in any of the places, the communities that she quote, unquote belongs to because she doesn't really feel like she belongs. And then monsters, which are people like the person who harmed her in her community who is seen as a Saint, the rest of the world sees them as a saint, but the main character, Jenna, knows him as a monster.
Sarah Enni: And I want to ask about this because in Saints and Misfits, the main character, Jenna, is dealing with the after-effects of a sexual assault. But of course the book is much more than that. It's about her and her life, and high school, and being a young woman, and many other things.
She's also a Muslim main character. And I think when Saints and Misfits came out in 201, and though there are many books about Muslim teens now, there's still not enough, that's an understatement, but there were even fewer then when that came out.
So I'm interested in how did you think about balancing the weight of expectations to represent Islam, and a Muslim character, and a hijabi main character, with what you set out to explore also, which is sexual assault and this kind of universal reality of predators who mask their behavior by putting forward this sort of unassailable front, which in your case means sort of the veil of religiosity and chaste, or, what's the word I'm looking for?
S.K. Ali: Holiness.
Sarah Enni: Holiness, and saintliness, yeah. This is a big question, but I'm just interested in how you thought about finding a balance or tackling those things all in the same book.
S.K. Ali: So when I was actually writing, I didn't think of those things, because I think when you cross over the boundary into being published, then you realize there's so many things behind the curtain. So while writing, cause it took me five years to write it while I was teaching full-time, so writing part-time, it took me that long. And I wasn't really thinking of those aspects of expectations or representation.
I didn't even realize that this was the first mainstream published book featuring a character in hijab in North America. There was one in Australia before then. I didn't even realize all those things until it became published and then started getting interviews and I was like, "Oh, oh, I didn't realize all those things." So I didn't think of that. And I'm glad I didn't, because I don't know if I had, if I would have been just so brave to explore the things that I wanted to explore.
I'd been a feminist since I was really young and so I cared about these issues, and I always had. And all my favorite YA have been ones that have very strong feminist ethos underlying it. So I just knew that that's where my book would, hopefully, take its place. But I didn't know. And I think afterwards I was faced with what it means to write a book like this.
And when I got some emails, even when I was on a panel and somebody in the audience asked me, like, "Why are you writing about this when there's so much scrutiny of Muslims already?" It was from a Muslim person, and then I realized the reception from my community, my Muslim communities, it was either people loved it, or people were upset at it.
And then I had to really understand why. Cause my first identity, I would say, is Muslim. And I'm proud of being a Muslim and I've always been close to my communities. So that was confusing to me at first. Then I realized, as I started to understand it more, that there was like a fatigue in our communities of like bad press, I guess.
So if this book that has a hijabi main character, the first one published in a mainstream publisher, there are indie published works before mine, I want to make sure that that's pointed out. But as a big five published one, people were like, "Does it have to be about somebody who's doing something wrong in our community again?" I had to really understand all that.
I'm not upset about it. I'm glad I didn't think of those things while I was writing cause then I wouldn't have written it and the book has become very important. There's a lot of look, now, at spiritual abuse in Muslim communities and there's a few organizations that have risen up. And one of them, in Canada, that's run by somebody I really admire. She told me she ordered a lot of Saints and Misfits to support the work. And so I'm really proud of all that part.
But I think that because I don't like to ruffle feathers, my personality doesn't like to ruffle feathers, I think if I had known that I'd get some of the emails that I did, and stuff, that maybe I wouldn't have been so bold. I didn't really think about those things.
Sarah Enni: Well, this has come up a few times on the show of especially debut writers, when you are writing for yourself and you are just expressing the things that you're trying to work through in your own life, not everybody then is prepared. It's so different than to have that work be out in the world and be publicly scrutinized or received, however it's gonna be received by whoever is reading it.
That's so different from writing. It's so different from any other part of this process. So yeah, my heart goes out to you for having to have that abrupt realization like, "Oh, it's very public now and people can say whatever they want about it."
S.K. Ali: Actually, yeah, when it first came out, I actually told my publicist I didn't want to talk about the topic that was in there. I was like, "For any interviews, can you tell them that I don't want to talk about that part?" That was at the beginning 2017. But then the 'me too' movement gained traction. And though it was coined by Tarana Burke before, people were sharing their experiences. And at the end of the year, I started talking about it. Because it didn't feel like it was just something that could happen in our community. It was horrible. It was terrible. It was just so widespread right? And so, that was a switch that kind of happened.
Sarah Enni: Yes. And that was the entire point of that movement was to feel supported in talking about it and recognizing that it is everywhere and affects everyone, regardless of background, or nationality, or any of that. But the other thing about Saints and Misfits that I love, and that felt so specific to me, was that actual delineation.
That thinking of people as either saints or misfits or monsters, that felt so specific to me in such a good representation of how we sort of come to understand the world as children. And then have to kind of move past as those easy categorizations, or boxes, or ways of thinking about the world, kind of get exploded by the nuance that you come to a realization of as you grow older.
Was that something that had been in your mind, a saint, a misfit, a monster that kind of categorization of the world?
S.K. Ali: So in doing that, I was exploring how, because resilience is something that's interested me in different situations. Like how people can go through traumatic things and go on. One of the ways that I realized that I felt like I could thrive still, beyond my pain, was that I try to make sense of things in whatever way that I did. It didn't have to be the right way, but if it helped me to cope like compartmentalization.
When I was writing Saints and Misfits, this was actually like in the YA communities, people are talking a lot about humanizing villains, right? And giving nuance to villains. And I was like, "No, I'm not gonna do that in my book." And I was like, "No." Especially when you're writing first person. You're writing about a character who's suffered at the hands of somebody. I felt no need to give nuance. And I'm glad that editors didn't ask me to do that.
Sarah Enni: I love that you're touching on this, pushing back against. And I'm talking broadly as in like the 20th century to now, sort of narratives. Often the push is to tell stories of forgiveness, right? Things that end in this like, "I open my heart to this person. We all come together for goodness." And I'll just speak for myself and my life as an adult, there are just people that you don't need to forgive, and you just need to move on and put them into whatever box you need to, in order to live your life.
And I think that's a wonderful thing to also display, as you say, in a first person narrative. Just to show, "This is a way you can cope. This is a way you can understand the world so that you can move on." That's a whole other kind of triumph.
S.K. Ali: Not everyone needs like a full nuanced... I don't know. There's just some villains in the world, you know?
Sarah Enni: Exactly. So I want to segue into Misfits in Love. And then we'll come back and talk about the other books that you wrote. You wrote Love from A to Z in the interim because we follow Jenna, and get to talk more about her. But I want to ask also about the reception for Saints and Misfits, because it was a Morris Award finalist.
It was really one of those books that was everywhere and really getting shouted out, and a lot of love. And as a debut, you just brought up that that's a really complicated experience. So I'd love to hear about what it was like to have that kind of reception for your first book? And what led you to come back to Jenna and be interested in telling more of her story and her life?
S.K. Ali: I was surprised at the reception for Saints and Misfits. But a lot of the reception to it, I also attribute to sort of being the first fruits of the 'we need diverse books' movement. It got extra scrutiny and eyes because of that as well. But it was really surprising to me. And I was obviously very happy about it.
I still remember when I got like the email that it was a Morris finalist, my car was at a shop and I was waiting for them to tell me how much it was gonna cost to fix it. And I was waiting there and I opened my email and got this email. And I could not believe it. And then I think I agreed to every repair they said, because I was just so happy. I ended up spending a lot of money.
Because I just couldn't believe it. It was one of the best times of my publishing career because I was like, "Oh, there's a Muslim girl featured in a book. Her story made sense to other people." Other people, meaning, people who read a lot of books right? It was just such a special moment that made me really feel confident that Muslim stories can reach people.
Not that I didn't think so, but I grew up with so much erase your misrepresentation and something called mal representation, which is the deliberate use of stereotypes and heinous stereotypes of Muslims for different reasons. So I grew up with that. And so it was just amazing.
It wasn't just about my book. It felt it was about the possibilities for Muslim stories. That different parts of the book world could say they liked the story, I felt like it was opening the way for more of us to tell not just Muslim stories, but all sorts of stories that people might not have been open to before.
And then I decided to write a sequel because I had a two book deal with Love From A to Z, and in talking to my editor about what the second book could be I told her that I didn't feel like I did a good job closing Saints and Misfits off. Because in interacting with readers, I learned that adults like the ending more than young readers because young readers, and I'm not making a blanket statement, but the ones that I interact with at events and through emails and stuff, they were all saying, "But what happened to Jenna? Does she end up with Noah?" They wanted to see happiness for her and satisfaction in the ending seemed to be missing.
So then I talked to her and I was like, "What if I went on and explored her story more?" And my editor loved that idea. So it was really in response to readers still kind of worried about her. Cause to me, as a writer who's done a creative writing degree and it's very literary kind of focused in universities, I guess, with MFA's or degree programs. And so I'd learn to write a very open-ended kind of ending where not everything is tied up in bows.
And cause I write for young readers, and I'm committed to that, so to learn that there was a worry about a character you wrote, I didn't like that. And I was like, "Okay, let me set her next book, the second part of her story, to a very joyous event where you get to see how she's processed and moved on a bit more, two years later." And that was the reason I chose the specific things like a wedding setting and stuff like that.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I love that. I want to ask all about that stuff, but I do want to just have an official pitch for Misfit in Love if you don't mind.
S.K. Ali: Okay, Misfit in Love. Jenna, it's her brother's three day weekend wedding. And she's decided that this is gonna be the weekend that she's gonna tell her crush, Noah, that she's ready to move on to better things with them because he's liked her as well. But in the midst of it, two newcomers come in and she discovers her mom might be involved in her own love life, and the wedding is going awry because there's a groomzilla situation. And so Jenna has all these things that she has to deal with on this wedding weekend and discovers more about herself through all of the drama of that weekend.
Sarah Enni: I really love how you're talking about the decision to come back to Jenna. And, again, it's so interesting to have an audience so firmly in mind when you're setting out to tell the next stage of this character's journey. Did you feel like you had a grasp on where Jenna went? Or were you kind of coming up whole cloth with what happened? Or did you have a preset notion of how her next two years were gonna look?
S.K. Ali: No, I didn't because I'm not a plotter or an outliner. But I've learned to be since I wrote my first book that outlining is very important if you want to save time. So I had originally thought I'd write a love story in terms of her getting together with Noah who'd been there for her in Saints and Misfits. But when speaking about it with a friend, a writer friend, she suggested that I really look at some of the issues that happens with intercultural relationships in different communities, specifically the Muslim community. Some experiences that people have had and stuff.
So I decided, "Yeah, you know what? That would be a good thing to do." Especially since I knew that Jenna wasn't ready for love. She's 17, but if you're a practicing Muslim who has the commitment to the way relationships evolve by the fates kind of expectations, you kind of have to be more mature to be ready for that.
And so though she felt it I, as the author of her, knew that she wasn't fully ready. So I knew even if I had made Jenna and Noah get together, it wouldn't be at the level that she had envisioned it. So I felt okay changing that rout and just opening up her mind to the possibility that she didn't need somebody to complete her. She didn't need that idea of safety by being coupled.
And I wanted to explore it, especially as a young person who doesn't date in the way that dating happens in our societies here, you can really feel like if you're not in a relationship that you're missing out, you're losing out or something. You're like a misfit, right? I wanted to explore how you can kind of take yourself out of that mindset through experiences.
Sarah Enni: I do want to ask about, as you said, you talked to a friend and then that gave you the inspiration to talk about racial discrimination within the community and just intercultural relationships. That's such a perfect way of saying what you kind of explore in here. And it's not only her talking about the realities of what it means that Noah is a Black Muslim and her love interest, and talking about his experiences, and learning to have those difficult conversations with her family and people that she loves. And she's also learning to see her mom as a human being, as a flawed, imperfect human being who is seeking love after divorce. And so there's so many layers going on.
So I'd love to hear about what it was like crafting realistic, but loving, relationships like that.
S.K. Ali: So while I was writing this, though I had started writing it in 2019, there's been a lot of conversations about racial justice. And though it's agreed upon that we want change and we honor societies to have lasting change, I knew that at the same time, in order for change to obviously happen, there has to be change from the smaller circles in our life. That was something that I knew had to happen in order for people to move forward.
And so I decided in terms of just young people, how do you deal with that uncle that says stuff at Thanksgiving dinner? That's a really cliché example, but you can very easily just say it's misfits, like just box them up and say, "Okay, I don't need to deal with you." Like, "I'm done with you." Kind of what Jenna wanted to do with her dad, right?
There's a point when she realizes that she wasn't gonna deal with them because her mind was just gonna like block them out and just be like, "Okay, I don't like how you think of these things. I don't like you because you're doing this." And it was like, just deal with it in that way. But then that doesn't move anything forward.
These conversations came from also my editor, cause I actually, initially, wanted to just block her dad and just be like, "Okay, you're not somebody that I want to deal with." And so then the conversations with my editor, where she was like, "Can we go more into that thing we were talking about?" Give the nuance to his background and have Jenna face it and entangle with it.
So that's where I decided, "Okay, I have to do this." Because it felt uncomfortable for me to do it because I'm also learning about this topic, right? I'm a learner and so I had fears about getting it wrong or doing a disservice.
And so I spoke to my friend who's an interiorist activist as well, so I spoke to her about how I was starting to get worried that I wasn't gonna handle it right. And she said something that really eased my mind. She said, "Well, you're not going to do everything. This is one contribution to the discussion and the conversation. Your book is not gonna do all of what needs to be done. So you're gonna do a part of it."
Then I felt more free to just explore it the way that I would envision somebody who had Jenna's personality confronting somebody with the way the dad was. And so that gave me sort of a confidence to do that. And then I also had lots of consultations to make sure that I was doing the best job I could.
Sarah Enni: I so appreciate you speaking to that and I very much relate. And that piece of advice I'm really gonna take with me, because that's something I think about a lot as a white person asking questions of non-white people, non-women, all kinds of different experiences that I'm trying to understand and get to the truth of all of these stories that everyone is telling, but respectfully, while talking about complicated things.
It's very intimidating, but it also is work that needs to be done. And trying to remember to be brave and also humble enough to understand when we make mistakes. I mean, it's all stuff that we're all just trying our best, and that's all we can do.
I want to talk about Love From A to Z and those characters, Adam and Zayneb who are appearing in your upcoming book Love from Mecca to Medina. I would love to just have you kind of talk a little bit about Love from A to Z as a romcom and what led you to want to continue exploring those characters?
So Love From A to Z was a book that I wrote purely with Muslim readers in mind. Because I think when I got that realization that there was kind of representation fatigue when Saints and Misfits came out, then I wanted to tell another type of story that was more from a place of warmth and from the community.
And so Love From A to Z was an idea I had in 2011, but I had kind of pushed it aside because I knew it was a big story and I didn't know if I was ready to do it. And so in 2018 I was revising another novel that I had written and I was kind of tired of it.
And I went on Twitter and Twitter was helpful. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Twitter was really helpful because the first tweet I saw said, "Writers, don't hoard ideas." That idea that you're really saving it, you know? A 'write it now' kind of thing.
And I saw it and I was like, "Oh my gosh, there is this idea that I'm hoarding." Which is Love From A to Z that I thought about in like, sorry, it was 2012. Then I was like, "What if I stop revising this and work on that?" And I started to write the chapters for it. And then I sent it to a friend and she said, "But what if you write the whole thing and then you have to send and revise that?" So she told me, "Why don't you send it to your agent and have him look at it and see if you should continue with the story?"
So I sent it to him. And he said, "This is ready to sell." So I was like, "What?" And it was only like two or three chapters. And so he told me to write an outline for the rest of the story. So I did. I did the outline and then I sold that like two weeks later. It was just interesting because I'd been working on the other novel which I thought was gonna be my second novel for like a year-and-a-half. And then this one I wrote in like two weeks and that's the one.
But for Mecca to Medina, it's my most loved book from the books I've written. I get messages and emails every day about it. I decided, "Well, if people want to know more about these characters..." And I loved writing them, I loved writing Adam and Zayneb because it's fun because they're so opposite of each other. And because I get bored fast as a writer. When I'm writing their chapters, it's just fun. When I get bored of one voice, I can just be like, "Okay, now it's Adam's turn." It's just great to flip between them.
And so then my publisher wanted another novel and I just thought of a way to continue their story, which would still attract new readers. It's not a straight sequel. So that's why I made it so that it's set at a pilgrimage.
Sarah Enni: I would love to just to wrap up with advice. I want to ask your advice from the point-of-view as someone writing contemporary that tackles a lot of different subjects at once, without losing track of the emotional arc of your characters.
That's really a challenging thing to do. So if you have any advice for new writers who want to tackle a lot of things at once. Do you have advice for how to keep all those things up in the air while concentrating on your character's development?
S.K. Ali: So some advice that I learned, and this might be very basic as well so I apologize if everyone's like, "We already know this."
Sarah Enni: No, I love it!
S.K. Ali: But it's just to make sure that your character's arc is plotted in terms of internal goals and external goals. So I'm very loose and basic when I do it, because again, I'm a pantser and I'm always learning to be more outlined.
But I always try to envision my character at the beginning of the book, her state, and then at the end of the book, her state is gonna be a different state, obviously. So I try to do that in terms of the character's diverse goals.
So she, or he, or they, are gonna have an external goal and knowing clearly where that external goal ends up at the end, before you start your book, is very important. And then knowing your character's internal goals, whether it be one or more, because she might have internal goals in terms of something that's about her, and then she might have internal goals about her relationships. And so drawing all those out.
I do a lot of drawing and so I'll just draw a little image of where she is at the end, in all of these different things that she wants. Also figuring out what is the lie she believes at the beginning. So what he, or they, believe at the beginning. For example, in Love From A to Z, Zayneb believed that the world is never gonna make sense for her as a Muslim young person, because it seems so stacked against her.
And so that's a lie she believed at the beginning. And at the end, the scene that happens where her whole class, like almost everyone in her class, walks out of a class in support of when she walks out as a protest against her Islamophobic teacher. That actually shows her that she believed a lie.
So having a firm grasp of what is the lie at the beginning state and then how that's shown to be proven to be false. So these are things that I work out before I write cause then you have a satisfying emotional arc and then you can plot the things that support those. So having a tight hold on those things is very important.
Sarah Enni: I love that and I love that framing of it. That's so helpful. And I think it's always helpful when we can think of character and plot, they're not truly separate things.
S.K. Ali: No, yeah.
Sarah Enni: Even though you have to think about them one at a time, sometimes, but it's so important that they be inseparable, that they be feeding each other the whole way. And I'm always here for practical advice. I love that so much. That's so helpful.
Thank you. But I'm still learning every time I write a new book, I actually Google 'how to write a book.'.
[Both laughing].
S.K. Ali: I'm not embarrassed to say it because you always have to learn. There might be some new things that people have put out that's better, right? And so anything that can help me. I have this binder that says, "Things to do when writing a book." And I just keep adding stuff to it. And then I just look through it.
Sarah Enni: I love it. Oh, that's so great. This has been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much again for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it. And thank you so much.
S.K. Ali: Thank you Sarah, for having me.
Thank you so much to S. K. Ali. Follow her on Twitter @Sajdahwrites and Instagram @SKAlibooks. Follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
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First Draft is produced by me, Sarah Enni. Today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to social media director, Jennifer Nkosi and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And as ever, thanks to you groomzillas for listening.
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