Who: Elif Shafak

Claim To Fame: Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published seventeen books, eleven of which are novels, including the bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, and Three Daughters of Eve. Her work has been translated into fifty languages. She was awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people who would make the world better. She is also a political scientist and an academic. Her writing has been featured in major newspapers and periodicals around the world, including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal

Where To Find Elif: Her Website, Amazon, Twitter

Praise For Elif: “Shafak is a brilliant chronicler of the ills that plague contemporary society and once again proves her mettle.” — Booklist

When and where do you like to write? Are you the same-thing-every-day kind of writer or can you write anytime, anywhere?

I write sometimes at home, sometimes in the noisiest places: restaurants, airports, train stations… I don’t like silence to be honest. And I panic if I am a neat, tidy environment where everything is perfect. I operate better in chaos. I prefer to be surrounded by the sounds of the street, the sounds of the city…. I don’t have a specific routine that I abide by day after day, season after season. For many years I have been teaching at various universities while I was writing my novels. So you juggle various roles. When you are a mother of small children you cannot have a precise schedule anyhow. No offence, but it’s usually male authors of a certain age or a certain privilege who are extremely fond of their unchanging schedules. The rest of us, female and male authors of all backgrounds, we try to carve out a time, a personal space whenever we can, wherever we can.  

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?

I listen to music a lot, usually various subgenres of heavy metal. When I like a song, I can listen to the same song on repeat dozens of times. So that’s what I usually do, I put on my headphones, turn the volume up and listen to industrial, gothic, viking, pagan metal or metal core. I always love that energy.

Do you struggle at all with that dreaded enemy of writing: writer’s block? Do you think such a thing exists?

I have never experienced writer’s block, not exactly, but I did experience some sort of disconnection when I went through postpartum depression. For about 8 months I was not able to write fiction, to imagine new stories.  That experience was very painful but in some ways, transformative. Prior to that I had always thought of democracy as an external concept. Depression taught me the importance of also “democracy-within”. In the end I wrote a book called Black Milk. Although it is about depression, the book is written with compassion and humour. I tried to turn black milk into ink and with that ink I wrote about being an author and woman, as well as the labyrinths of the art of storytelling and the labyrinths of the mind.

Deciding on an idea to pursue writing about can be the most challenging aspect for a writer. How do you come to find the stories and lives that become the subjects of your books?

I am still not sure whether we rationally “choose” our subjects or somehow, the subjects of our books come to us or we bump into each other in the most irrational ways. I know that sounds odd, but that’s often my experience.

You write and are fluent in both English and Turkish. Does being bilingual help your writing process—perhaps when you’re searching for just the right word? Or does it have the opposite effect, making the writing process more complicated in some ways? Do you prefer writing in one over the other?

James Baldwin used to call himself “ a commuter.” That is very close to my heart: commuting between cultures, cities, languages. It makes your job more difficult, really. You have to spend twice as much time. I write my novels in English. Once they are translated into Turkish, I take that translation and rewrite it. So it’s a bit insane. But I love the freedom, the sense of endless possibilities that you experience in that journey. Even so, over the years I realized when it comes to sadness, melancholy, longing… I find these things easier to express in Turkish whereas humour, irony and satire is much easier in English.

What is your process for research like? How does your approach to research for a novel differ from your approach to research for nonfiction articles?

I am a political scientist by training. I have always liked and treasured interdisciplinary studies: political philosophy, gender and women’s studies, cultural studies… This is very basic but I think it needs to be said: writers are readers, primarily, and they should always remain readers. In other words we have to keep reading, reading. But novelists should not only be reading novels in my opinion. I believe it is intellectually much more challenging and stimulating to have eclectic reading lists, fiction and nonfiction, East and West.

People often discuss social media in the context of procrastination and wasting time. Especially with respect to writers and creative’s—being on platforms like Twitter seems counter-productive. You’ve built a massive following on the platform. How does social media factor into your writing routine? Do you find it difficult to balance the two? Do you think it’s important for writers to have a presence there?

Social media is a bit like the moon. It has a bright side that radiates light. And then it has a dark side that we haven’t talked about for a long time but we must. So I don’t overromanticise social media. At the same time, I find it important that writers speak up and speak out—both in the public space and the digital space.

What does a successful writing day mean for you? And how do you finish out a day of writing? Do you have a process, or is it just that you know you’ve hit a natural stopping point?

Whether it’s your first book or tenth, it’s interesting that you will almost always go through tunnels of anxiety, tunnels of self-doubt and then there will be days bright and extremely productive. Each day is different, so is every book, of course, but the writing process is always replete with ups-and-downs. It never gets easier.

What books or writers have most influenced the way you think and the way you write?

So many. So so many. Not only novelists, but also thinkers, philosophers, poets… I was an only child raised by a single working mother and from an early age books became my friends, my companions. They changed me, they made and remade me.

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

Writing fiction is primarily a work of love. Before anything else, above everything, it is about this profound love you feel for the art of storytelling. Where does it come from, that love? How is it possible? I don’t know. All I know is, whenever in doubt, please remember the love and let it be your guide.

___________

Ready to create a writing routine of your own?

Sign up now and receive our free guide “12 Essential Writing Routines To Help You To Craft Your Own.”

Learn from the routines of superstar authors Stephen King, Gertrude Stein, John Grisham, Ernest Hemingway, Neil Gaiman, and many more.

Get the free guide here!