Last year, a friend returned from a life-changing writing retreat. She’d planned it for a long time, organizing the time off from work and family responsibilities in order to “disappear” from her life and finish—at last—the draft of her novel. While I was genuinely thrilled for her, I also felt absolutely and completely jealous.
Taking two or three weeks away to work quietly has never been logistically or financially possible for me. Instead, over the years, I have written my books in the predawn hours or edited a few paragraphs during the fifteen-minute wait at the doctor’s office. When faced with an editor’s notes on a manuscript, I’d escape to a hotel room for one night, where I’d put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and tap away at my laptop. I have managed to write several books like this, by finding the cracks in my days and filling them with words.
And yet, after years of scoffing at the notion of “writer’s block” and telling students of all ages that such a thing doesn’t exist (“It’s procrastination, nothing more,” I insist), I am currently facing what I can only describe as a creative drought.
For the last eighteen months, my writing energy has curled up like the dying petals on a thirsty flower. I am supposed to be working on a follow-up novel to my 2024 debut—I have it all (I really do!) outlined in my head, but I can’t sit down and draft it. These days, I’m lucky if I can scratch out some notes in my journal, and when I do, they’re usually lines expressing my utter horror at the state of the world.
I complain about a lack of time, but in fact, I have plenty of time. Like people who wake up at 5 a.m. to jog or work out, I’ve always managed to find the time for something as essential as writing.
No, it’s more than that. The fact is, I am not writing because, in this moment, writing feels self-indulgent. It feels selfish. It feels wrong.
*
Sitting down and sketching character biographies, narrative arcs, and entire worlds has never really felt like work, but in these times, it strikes me that writing is like having fun while the world burns. Students are being snatched off the streets; men are being shipped off to prisons in foreign countries; civil, LGBTQ, and women’s rights are being reversed at a startling speed; books on topics as benign as Black joy are banned in record numbers; autism is being discussed by government officials with casual, cruel ignorance; and then there are the brutal wars, the bombs dropping on men, women, and children caught in nightmares that are utterly preventable.
Every day, the bad news barrels towards me like baseballs flying out of a pitching machine, leaving me fragmented and numb. It’s especially difficult for me as a Palestinian American, when the Palestinian people have been enduring a live streamed genocide for a year and a half now. Every morning, I wake up and check my phone to see how many people burned in their tents overnight or how many children have starved to death because humanitarian aid has been cut off. Last week, I read in horror about the Red Crescent rescue teams that were found dead and buried with their ambulances. I’m watching a horror movie that won’t end.
I am, like many, experiencing an overwhelming sense that everything that matters—morality, kindness, justice, democracy—is under attack.
How can we write in such a time? How do you reflect on what’s important while you’re actively treading water, trying not to drown in moral darkness?
And who am I to “get away” from it all, to hide from the bleakness of the news to indulge my creative mind?
I see many of my creative friends stuck in a similar place. Most of us are having a tough time digging down into that important space, that precious mood that exists between the real world and our imagination, which makes the words on the page seem like creative gold spinning out of a loom.
How can I reach that place when nothing seems to stop the bad news from coming?
*
When my father was a little boy, growing up in his village in Palestine, he wanted to join the kashafat, or the Scouts, which had been organized in Palestine in 1912 and was part of the World Scouts organization. To be a kashaf, you had to be the kind of kid who enjoyed camping, hiking, whittling, and all the other fun, wholesome activities the Scouts do. But there was one more thing you required: the uniform, which included a particular sweater in a specific shade of olive green. Apparently, my grandmother’s face paled when she learned the cost of the sweater, and my grandfather knew it would be impossible to purchase. He was trying to run a small farm to feed his large family, and perhaps have a little olive oil at the end of the season to sell. The sweater seemed indulgent, a brand of class rank rather than achievement or potential.
My father was devastated, but my grandmother had a solution. She unraveled some little-used garments, rewound the yarn, and knitted him a sweater in a similar style. Then, the color: She got hold of some green dye and set to work, soaking the color until she matched the uniform’s shade. It was not perfect, and my father was very aware of the differences, and yet he never told his mother that the other boys snickered over them. He felt a distinctive pride in his special sweater, and most importantly, on cold camping nights in the hills of Palestine, this sweater, born of my grandmother’s creativity and hard labor, kept his small body warm.
Much has been written about the Palestinian value of sumud, whose basic meaning in Arabic is “steadfastness.” It is a value that I witnessed growing up in a Palestinian household, and I heard it emphasized in stories like the one about the kashaf sweater. Palestinians possess an awe-inspiring resilience; they face obstacles with ingenuity and enthusiasm. In my own household, if an appliance broke, my parents would make a game out of seeing how we could fix it. This meant, in pre-YouTube days, borrowing library books, asking friends, or simply inventing a solution. Creativity, passion, and curiosity were required; negativity was not only forbidden—it was considered in bad taste.
Sumud has also, over the past several decades, taken on a sociopolitical meaning: According to researchers from An-Najah National University and Cardiff University, “‘Sumud’ is a Palestinian idea that. . . . refers to ways of surviving in the context of occupation, chronic adversity, lack of resources and limited infrastructure.” It is a decision to stay the course and refuse erasure. In Palestinian Christian communities, such as my own, sumud has theological implications, related to the concept of hope, which often feels illogical but necessary.
In practical terms, I am reminded of sumud when I see Gazans using a bicycle to generate power for a sewing machine, or when I watch videos of how they stitch together canvas flour sacks to make tents. Sumud is watching the Palestinian Civil Defense forces use their bare hands and hammers to clear rubble that has crushed entire families in a bombing. It is family members taking turns carrying elders during an evacuation because nobody must be abandoned.
Sumud has its limitations, however. I fear that, given the scope of destruction and death in Gaza and the West Bank, sumud has become a way to impose superhuman qualities on Palestinian victims. Palestinians are enduring a genocide, and it is unfair to keep calling on them to be “steadfast” when they are starving and being bombed on a daily basis.
Therefore, as a political concept, I fear sumud has met its limits. However, I would like to share it with others as an answer to cultural production and, therefore, cultural resistance.
I want to offer sumud as a way for others who are feeling drained and burdened to find a way to be steadfast.
For decades, I have talked and written about the importance of Palestinian writers “seizing the narrative”—that is, not allowing political entities to depict our community in a narrow and dehumanizing way. I have railed against stereotypes. I have insisted on writing that portrays my community with complexity, with nuance.
Writing has been the way I seek to understand the world, but I no longer can retreat from the world to do so.
This work, then, is not self-indulgent. It is not selfish. It is part of your sumud.
In this terrible time, your writing process will look different from your usual schedule. You may not be able to “get away” physically or mentally. You may not be able to shut off the news and block out the noise of the awful, outside world.
Instead, you have to write through that, write with the noise. Allow it to change you. Let it penetrate through to your heart and flow out through your work. Sumud is not always about making great strides; it’s about not allowing the tidal wave of sorrow to push you backward. It’s about not allowing yourself to be replaced; in terms of cultural production, it will mean writing your stories so that others don’t write them for you.
It will require some unlearning, of pausing our old belief in creative writing as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” At this time, tranquility is not to be found, so we must unravel old ideals, wind them into a different creative process, and recraft them into new methods entirely.
No matter how you do it, remember this: Writing your truth in a terrible world is, indeed, resistance. It is how we preserve beauty, resist erasure, and remind ourselves—and the world—that we can do better.
Susan Muaddi Darraj is an award-winning writer of books for adults and children. Her books include her linked short story collection, A Curious Land, as well as the Farah Rocks children’s book series. Her new novel, Behind You Is the Sea, was published in January 2024 by HarperVia. It received praise from The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Ms. magazine, and it was named a best book of 2024 by The New Yorker and Apple Books. Behind You Is the Sea was also shortlisted for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award.
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