Tag: writing

Finding voice

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In third grade, I started handing my teacher essays he hadn’t assigned.

They were about whatever had captured my imagination—dinosaurs, the ancient Egyptian mummification process… I wrote them at home, paraphrasing sections lifted from books I’d borrowed from the school library. I’d handwrite on loose-leaf papers, my letters large and swirling, and give them to my teacher, who took them with curiosity.

He always read them.

At the time, I didn’t have the language to explain why I did this.

Speaking up has never come easily to me. In conversation, words arrive slowly, often long after the moment has passed. Writing, however, gives me time. On the page I can sit with a thought, turn it over, understand what I mean before offering it to anyone else.

On paper, I don’t have to watch someone’s face twist in anger, annoyance, or dismissal. I don’t have to measure my emotions so they won’t be labeled “too much,” or worse, dismissed as the anger of an Arab woman. Writing removes the immediacy of other people’s reactions. It gives me space to think, and to say what I mean without fear interrupting the sentence—or without being interrupted.

For someone who grew up shy and wary of social rejection, writing became the safest place my voice could live.

I’ve only been a published author for less than two years, but I have been writing the last twenty-eight years, since I was a child. Stories have always been the way I figure out the world, lean into what I’m interested in, develop an understanding for another person (even if fictional). And, for someone who grew up shy, and afraid of social rejection, it was the best way I knew how to be heard, if only to myself.

It’s why, during an emotionally turbulent adolescence, ripe with loneliness and self-doubt, I wrote poems scribbled on loose-leaf paper, under moonlight peeking in through the bathroom window, even though I should have been in bed hours prior. The need to pour myself onto the page (never mind that no one would ever read it) outweighed the need for sleep.

Now, I write also because I have something to say to the world.

Often, I dismiss myself, and my own perspectives, thinking they are not important or salient enough to warrant sharing. I’ve been working on a narrative essay collection, of instances of discrimination and racism I’ve seen or experienced in my life, woven with history and science, and yet, several times in writing the manuscript, I considered abandoning.

Who would care about all this?
It sounds like you’re complaining.
Boo-hoo you were told something mean, get over it.
You’re preaching to the choir; whoever reads this book already knows everything you’re saying.
Your life isn’t horrible, stop making yourself a victim.

On and on, the thoughts swirl and confuse me, like a devil tempting me in the desert to give up on myself, an inner tribunal condemning me for being human. At its core it something more treacherous:

that I don’t have a voice.

This means so many things: that what I have to say isn’t important, that no one cares about the things I’m writing, that I’m wrong in my interpretation of my own life, that my life isn’t “bad” enough to warrant an entire book, that no one will take me seriously.

None of this is true, or rather, I would never believe this of another person. And yet I so readily apply these scripts to myself, narrating all the ways I have nothing of value to say.

Where all these feelings have come from is likely something I need years to unpack with a professional, but I do know that so often, girls, and especially, girls of brown or black identities, are told they must remain still, silent, and subservient. No one tells us these things directly, (well, usually), but we learn it implicitly. And we carry it with us into adulthood.

In the last two years of being published, I’ve seen a floodgate open in me, a willingness to stand in the face of all my insecurities and my thoughts of not having a voice, and remain steadfast, even if I falter.

Something about committing yourself on paper is at once freeing and redeeming, a permission granted unto the self to see yourself through the lens of value (and I don’t mean that in a capitalistic sense).

Writing frees the soul, gives voice to those who thought they had none. It is no wonder books are targeted, authors and creatives suppressed, when those in power want to remain in power. It is a way to exert existence, to demand to be seen and heard, to be deemed a person.

When I think about voice, I think about that child in third grade, sliding loose-leaf pages across a desk to a teacher who had not asked for them. I did not know then that what I was practicing was not simply writing, but presence. The small insistence of a person who needed to be heard, even if only by one reader.

Perhaps that is what writing has been for me: the quiet act of sending words out into the world and refusing to disappear.

By: Rania Hanna

If you want more content like this, be sure to follow my Substack.

Skimming time

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I’ve been noticing an awful behavior in myself: skimming.

When articles are longer, even if engaging, I find myself beginning to skim partway through, my eyes darting around searching for keywords alone to understand and judge the content, even as I know that that is not understanding.

When I read books, I now sometimes skim pages to get to the book’s end sooner, so I can move on to the next book, because my ever-growing TBR list is, well, ever-growing. I have lists of books I want to read this year, which I do every year, and never get through said lists. Yet I make them anyway, adding more to it, even as I barely cut through the titles.

And I wonder, how much of this is driven by my need to add and track my reading goals? How much am I being driven to read more, learn more, understand more, because of all the lists I create, and the reading goals (# books, # pages) on Storygraph or Goodreads I set for myself each year? Perhaps, I wonder, that the goal of reading less but more fully, is actually the better goal. That instead of saying I will read 100 books this year, perhaps I should tell myself, I will read 40 books this year. Or maybe, I have no goal in mind, except to understand a chosen topic.

This year, I actually deleted my initial reading and page goals on Storygraph, and instead decided to simply read, only tracking titles I’ve finished, and the lists of books, the Challenges, I want to participate in. Now, I’m wondering if I should even bother with those Challenges as they are, and instead curating one single list of limited titles, based on a topic I want to learn more about this year. That instead of worrying about how many books I’m getting through, I should consider what I’m thinking deeply about. Rather than fear of missing out on knowledge, which drives me to rush through a book to get to the next, I ant to reframe it as sitting with wisdom, which can only come after letting knowledge take its time. What is the use of rushing through the pages, only to come out the other end with only a vague notion of what I’ve “learned?” It is not, in fact, learning.

I wrote in another article that I purged my home library of 200+ physical books, which has helped me more clearly select books to read, because I’m not caught up in analysis paralysis. And it has helped, as I pulled out books I bought a dozen years ago, and have finally cracked open. One title, The One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea I am certain I’ve had since the early 2010s. Now, as a ritual, I make golden milk and read just a few pages, trying to imbibe the wisdom in the pages. The book is short, and yet I’ve been going through just a few pages per week, hardly making a dent in finishing the book. And I’m fine with that.

This year, something’s switched in my brain, where I am feeling less driven by goals and to-dos and being productive, something I spoke to in my article, The Stillness of Sufficiency. This drive to shed even reading goals, in terms of the numbers, is one piece of this overarching puzzle. I don’t mourn it, which I find surprising, because I have always been driven by “the numbers:” school grades, work performance review ratings, and everywhere else numbers show up in our lives: “likes” and comments on social media, the number that shows up when we step on the scale, the number of social events we attend, etc.

Something is in the 2026 air, because I am done with tracking and trackers, with distilling my lift into “the numbers.” Perhaps it’s because it all seems futile and only serves to create anxiety, perhaps it’s fatigue, or perhaps it is emotional growth. Whatever the reason, I find it is more fulfilling, and a necessary shift in my intellectual, emotional, and life maturity.

The only “number” I think I am beginning to care about is, well, none in particular. I simply want to live more fully, slowly, and with a depth I seem to have lost over the years. I don’t want to skim, I want to immerse, to take my time, and to shed old ways of simply moving from one goal or task to the other and replace that with more holistic views of being. Instead of relying on a quantified experience of life, I want to live in a more exploratory and contemplative way. Instead of having a “backlog” pressure, I want to feel free to read as much or as little, and to take as much space as I need to to fully feel and understand what I’m reading.

Even my writing has changed this year. I am focusing less on all the manuscripts I am dying to write, all the stories I am desperate to tell, and more on simply telling a good story and giving it space and time to breathe. I’ve begun exploring a manuscript this year I hadn’t planned on, the beginning of the story simply coming to me. It’s been a couple weeks now, and I’m five chapters in, when typically by this time, I’d probably be a third or more done with the first draft. And yet, I feel no sorrow, no ache, no anxiety to finish.

Rather, I’ve had the thought of, “it will take the time it takes.” And, I’m allowing my brain to sit with the story, as I am only working on the writing two days a week, rather than daily. I don’t know where this will lead me, surely not on a bestseller list, but I do think it will allow me to be more intentional with this story, and to craft something more meaningful. Or perhaps not, and that is okay, I think.

The idea of not tracking in the past would have left me anxious and wondering, “how would I know how far I’ve come?” but now, it has me feeling more, “look how much time I’m giving myself.” It feels healing, almost spiritual, as if respecting time and letting it simply exist around me is less about what has been done in this hour, and more, what has this hour held. Rather than measuring life, I want to inhabit it.

Creativity demands time and incubation, a sense of forgetting about the specifics and letting the brain sharpen the blurry edges.
It’s something I’m trying new; I’ll let you know how it goes.

By: Rania Hanna

If you want more content like this, be sure to follow my Substack.

Diasporic silence

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Being in the diaspora is like living split-body: one part always left behind in the ancestral homeland, the other part desperately, constantly, trying to root itself in the “new world.”

Both parts end up never quite anywhere, in a no-man’s land, belonging neither here nor there.

And nowhere does this show up the most than when the country we live in, were likely born in, or at least whose accent we speak with, invades, bombs, and destroys our homeland. In the US, this shows up with constant invasions, bombing campaigns, human life reduced to “collateral damage” of those who look, sound, and live like our families. All the while, those of the diaspora must continue to work, grinding in a hyper-capitalistic society, with no reference to our bombed and destroyed homelands. Our jobs demand we continue working, continue “providing value,” all while they invest in the very war machines that had forced our families out of our homelands in the first place.

There is rarely, if ever, recognition of what our countries are doing to others, no support for those who have to live keeping one eye on the news, another on Zoom or Slack, waiting to hear from family, and mourning even when we do, because we live in constant worry and fear for them.

The great pain is when we stand solid in the face of “what is going on over there,” and our jobs tell us “how professional” we are, because we are keeping it together outwardly and not bringing things up that may upset people, or that is too political. As if our existence demands our silence to keep other people’s comfort and convenience intact.

Even when our jobs do try so support, it is through mental health resources. And too often, Western mental health is predicated on western ideals and western family dynamics and western concerns, which leaves those in the diaspora, often from more Eastern backgrounds, in a worse spot. Because now, we are being “given resources” but these resources fall short of anything we need. It ends up being a greater burden to have to reject the resources, and either find our own, or simply go on existing in a fugue state.

And still, some people would say, “go back to where you came from if you like it there so much,” not realizing that the reason we had to leave, the reason our families left their homelands, is because they had no good choices. Either stay and be killed by a foreign war machine, or leave to that war machine and try not to let it grind you from within.

Even if we do manage to “assimilate,” whatever that means, we are then blamed for our own suffering, told that if our people weren’t led by dictators and despots, that if we didn’t need “saving,” then we would be left alone.

But as has been said before, “Americans are very lucky, because wherever they go to bring freedom… they find oil.” — Michele Serra, Italian journalist.

(Excuse any typos; I am too tired to care).

By: Rania Hanna

If you want more content like this, be sure to follow my Substack.

The stillness of sufficiency

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What is a life for, production or presence?

There’s no doubt U.S. American culture is shaped by, and founded on, productivity. From the shores of African and Black enslavement, where a body’s output was the measuring stick of a person’s value, to the assembly lines of the Industrial revolution that further quantified human value by human output, nothing defines the United States better than a “can-do” attitude and a productivity clause that seems to be written into us from birth.

This clause seems to be part of a contract many of us have unwittingly signed, one that stipulates our value, our worth, our personhood, to be defined by what we produce, that is, our corporate and consumerist output.

We are expected to produce (not create) and consume until our dying breaths. We are taught that to be citizens of society, we must be valuable, and that value is calculated by how much money we make for others.

This isn’t to say that work is unnecessary or undignified; far from. The question is, who the work benefits, how much we agree to it, and what we get out of it. Many of us are content with our 40-hour weeks and our paychecks in return for that time. And that is fine.

But what I’ve been thinking about lately is how creativity and productivity are intertwined. As a published author, I expect myself to produce book after book, on deadlines I arbitrarily create for myself, in an effort to produce. Sometimes, this is fine, and my creative juices need an outlet, which I am able to give them. Other times, I’m unsure of how much I expect my creativity to be manufactured by a sense of productivity.

Often, I catch myself between projects, with a week or so of “downtime,” and I tell myself, I should be doing research, I should be planning my next manuscript, I should be, should be, should be…

And yet, with my background in neuroscience, I know full well the brain does not operate best while constantly stimulated. The brain works best in between resting periods, and during such times, where it can consolidate information and experiences, define connections between them, and imagine new things. Incubation is necessary for human intellect, creativity, and even identity. You can’t know who you are if you never sit still long enough to ask–and answer.

In 2025, I wrote five full-length manuscripts, and about 80% of a sixth novel, and was so proud I was able to be “so productive.” This year, I am now working on editing about 4 of those manuscripts, and mourning that I cannot write five more this year, even as I am relieved I don’t plan to. Even with that output, and the stockpile of manuscripts, I still find myself reducing my creative work into commodified components: # manuscripts, # ratings, # reviews, #…

There’s a gap between creativity and productivity, between creating for the joy of it, and creating a commodity. Even this blog, which has been dormant for a while, I’ve now revived, and just the other day, I wondered idly whether I should be monetizing it, whether I should be more consistent in what I publish, whether this could be something I commodify as a secondary income stream.

I quickly rejected the idea, not the least because, even if I could monetize it, it wouldn’t be worth much in the dollars it brings in. But there’s another reason: this space is one for me to think and share those thoughts, rather than turning it into a “hustle,” and I intend to keep it that way (for now, maybe for forever). It’s so easy to fall into the trap of doing more, being more, producing more, at the expense of simply being.

This is not to disregard the times when finances demand such labor, and this is not to disregard the lives where such privilege and luck are not afforded. I recognize my concerns come from a plentitude of both. But where I am in life, I have to consider beyond basic needs that are already met, and more.

To be a creative, to be an artist, is to learn to rest and be still, something I am desperately struggling to learn beyond an intellectual understanding.

It’s not comfortable sitting still or doing less; it feels like a failure of self and time, like I am “wasting my life.” And yet, I find the times I do so, that is, rest, my days feel longer, in a good way, and I feel like I’ve done more for myself and my life. Those are the days I am able to marry creative pursuits with more mundane tasks, like errands and social obligations, without feeling tired. In fact, I feel more energized, because I am able to get through to-dos without losing myself in them.

I wonder, then, if a life lived this way lasts longer, not in time, but in the perception of it.

Tonight, as I sit in my living room, watching the blue light fade from the sky and become night, I am allowing myself stillness and silence. That is a privilege, and a rarity it seems these days, I know, and I am a lucky person to have such things. But this path to stillness is not straight and narrow. I’m recognizing that stillness can be found not just in the state of “not-doing,” but in the state of “doing enough.”

What I mean can be shown in an example. This year, as I edit my 2025 manuscripts, I am not pushing myself hard. Even today, I planned on editing two to three chapters of a manuscript, ended up editing four, and then grew greedy and tried to push myself to edit even more. I stopped myself in time, recognizing I had hit a fatigue point, and yes, I could have pushed myself to do more, but I would have enjoyed it less, been less creative, and more frustrated. Instead, I chose to leave the coffeeshop and go home, where I sat and read with a cup of golden milk.

Stillness, I wonder then, does not have to show up in sitting in silence or idly; it can come in doing enough to remain on, or to reach the path you want, but not pushing yourself unnecessarily. It demands listening to your mind and body, and not ignoring them just because “you can.”

I “could have” edited more today; I “could have” been more productive, but I was productive enough, and that is good enough for me. This is the stillness of sufficiency.

By: Rania Hanna

If you want more content like this, be sure to follow my Substack.

Curating against anti-intellectualism

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I’ve been thinking more about curation.

The last few years, I have hoarded more and more books, only to find myself stepping into my home library and not knowing what I want to read. On Google, I have pulled up a random number generator, selecting first a range from 1 to the number of bookshelves I have, and then within that shelf, selecting a range from 1 to 30 or so, to narrow down to a single title. Rarely, which is to say, never, have I pulled that book off its shelf and actually read it.

Instead, I would find myself back at the bookstore, searching for some book to read that suited my mood. I’d come home, either read the book, or end up setting it atop a pile and choosing something else to read.

This cycle has continued on to the point of a certain fatigue, and, if I’m being honest, frustration at not knowing what to read or how to choose.

My home library has traditionally numbered in the hundreds, sometimes rising to 600+ books, which I’ve always taken pride in. There’s a certain comfort in surrounding myself with the written word, being inspired by others’ thoughts, and always aspiring to read every book I own.

These physical books are besides the audiobooks and digital copies I have bought over the years.

The past few weeks though, in a fit of early spring cleaning, I have purged about 200 physical books, over the span of several weeks, donating many to my local library.

And the more I do so, the more books I want to let go of. It’s been surprisingly easy to do, something I’ve rarely, if ever, experienced before. I still have books piled atop books, and on my bookcases, and crammed in piles surrounding the space, but the gaps are beginning to show.

Some of the books I have had for well over a dozen years, having never opened them once to read. Others I thought I would enjoy, only to find myself tossing it aside. Still others I enjoyed at one point in my life, but have grown away from them.

Now, my shelves are taken up by books I have yet to read, but have a higher likelihood of being selected in the coming months and years. I have saved stories I have enjoyed, ones I would recommend to someone. In other words, I have curated something of a proper library, one that represents who I am and who I am becoming.

Books that I once revered have been removed; stories I once thought I “should” enjoy have been replaced by ones I will. I am growing far less concerned about having “classics” on my shelves that I do not enjoy, though I have tried to.

Which brings me to something I have been thinking about more and more recently: literary colonialism.

When thinking about the books I grew up reading in the United States, in school or simply through exposure, most have been Eurocentric, written by white people, mostly male. They have been excellent reads, and have provoked thought and consideration. But rarely has my formal education expanded beyond these identities. Even in world literature classes, anything outside that identity was pulled from more ancient epics, like that of Gilgamesh, or snippets here and there from other works, but mostly, even our global narratives were pulled from England (Shakespeare), Germany (Beowulf), Italy (Dante’s Inferno, Divine Comedy), Greece (Homer’s works), and the like, i.e. Eurocentric, white, male. I don’t recall reading a single Black author in school in any meaningful way, not Toni Morrison’s works, Octavia Butler’s, the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s, even MLK Jr’s. Not a single Black American author, not a single brown author, and limited female ones.

Why is that?

I am certainly not the first to argue this literary limitation, and certainly not the first to do anything about it, nor am I the most educated voice on this. But as I grow more into myself and into who I want to be, I am learning to lean less on what I have been told is worthy of being read, and more on what I think is deserving of my energy.

This is important. Stories we read shape what we think people should be and how they should act. They tell us what to value, what to reject. They tell us how to be. And that is a powerful and dangerous power.

In curating my library, I am not seeing the loss of 200 books; I am seeing the gain of the space I am making for other voices to be heard. I am creating opportunity to listen to those I have not historically listened or paid attention to, or the ones I wasn’t exposed to in my education. In essence, I am curating not just a library, but my own curiosity. And that is one of the greatest things I can do in developing my mind.

There also seems to be a metaphor in here about stepping back, narrowing focus, and being more deliberate. While my shelves are being cleared off, I’m seeing more of the titles I already own, books that I want to read being more visible because they’re no longer hidden by other titles. A reversal of paralysis by analysis, I suppose.

With our society’s descent into a defanged intellectualism, that is, anti-intellectualism, by way of book bans, whitewashing of history, erasure of voices, and the like, this has become all the more pressing. It feels almost like survival in its urgency.

I plan to continue this curation, centering voices I have not historically given space to, and educating myself the best way I can. I am also retaining physical copies of works, something I touched upon in another blog post, access is not ownership. When reality can be manipulated, media updated or deleted, it is that much more important to house physical copies when and where possible, and to support those institutions that allow us access, like libraries.

By: Rania Hanna

If you want more content like this, be sure to follow my Substack.

Decentering violence

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I’ve been taking Arabic classes recently to improve my spoken and reading skills. I grew up speaking the Syrian Homs dialect, but since leaving home thirteen years ago, I haven’t been able to speak to anyone as much in Arabic. So the classes are a way I am reclaiming one of my mother tongues and my culture.

During a class recently, my Syrian teacher and I were discussing films. She loves Agatha Christie. And we were talking about the genres we enjoy when we both learned that we used to love horror, and now…we don’t. It’s not that we don’t like a good scare; it’s more the violence and gore that we can’t take in anymore. It’s something I’ve thought about occasionally the last few years, when I have realized that the movies I used to gravitate to: the Saw franchise, slashers, and the like are the ones I can’t stand to see or hear now. Midsommar, which is arguably a good movie, was difficult for me to watch, and I stepped out of the theatre right before the ‘mallet scene.’

Even “softer” movies with a touch of gore do not appeal to me. I still love a good scare, though, and a horror I watched that I think is so engaging is Oddity. It’s less focused on slashing, and more focused on the psychological horror, and though there is violence, is it not as central as in other films.

As I was considering this since my class and conversation, I happened to come across a Threads post that asked a similar question: do you no longer consumer horror? One of the comments got my attention: @alilamos wrote:

“Those movies are all about collective participation and consent. Our brain & body process fake horror the same way as real horror. You rationally know it’s fake, but your brain processes it the same emotionally. So you sitting in a theater being entertained by torture and violence is actually very similar to being one of them enjoying it in real life. It makes us all see violence as entertainment like they want us to.”

It got me thinking that maybe the poster is on to something. The media we consume becomes part of us. Often, I find myself thinking something only to realize that maybe, I simply imbibed it from the internet without even knowing it. How often have you thought of something only to recognize, days later, that you got your “idea” from something else? How often do you choose something and “don’t know why it came to mind,” only to realize afterwards, oh, right, this number I “randomly chose” is ‘actually my grandfather’s birthday and I was thinking of his death anniversary four days ago.’

Our brains are good at patterns and good at consolidating information. They’re also really good at picking up information from our environments, and kneading it into the neural connections that already exist. Of course, memory consolidation requires conscious discernment, but our environments do shape our minds in ways we don’t always notice.

This is not to say that art should be created to coddle or comfort. Of course not. And this is not to say we should not reach for the art that makes us uncomfortable, that pushes our understanding of the world. It’s more that we should reach for consideration, for story, rather than spectacle.

It is to say, however, that we should be aware, and we should actively choose what we consume. Making a spectacle of violence, becoming desensitized to it, does have an effect on us, whether we realize it. We’ve seen it in the ‘video game x violence research’ literature, and though the research is mixed, meta-analyses have found that consuming violence in video games does have a positive correlation with real-world aggression and lowered empathy. Prosocial games have the opposite effect.

I wrote recently about moving into cognitive conservation, about being more aware of what I consume and focusing more on depth and thought. I think the same goes for the media we consume, using it to sculpt our minds and bodies into what we want society to be, rather than letting spectacle and desensitization shape us. We should be left uncomfortable by our art, if and when we so choose, but not be left desensitized towards our collective humanity by it.

Art can wound, expose, accuse, and compel us. But there is a difference between being compelled deliberately, and compelled by default. I want to see more consequence, more substance, in the art and media I consume, and less gratuitous carnage. Some stories, by nature, have carnage, and that is the story that is being told; it may be historical, it may be symbolic, but it is necessary to the telling of that particular story. But to simply have just to have it is another thing altogether. Our minds are molded by what it is fed, and because of that, it is a rare and wondrous thing. To provide it with nourishment is a different form of cognitive conservation than I wrote about last week; it is a conservation of empathy, of society, of self.

Reclaiming Arabic has reminded me that the mind is porous and is easily shaped. What we stay engaged in becomes our fluency, the language we speak best and most naturally. If a tongue can be lost through neglect or severance, and recovered through reversal of that, so, too, can society move towards something better and healthier, starting with the stories being told, and how they are being told, and for whom.

The question isn’t whether art is meant to unsettle us; I think it should. The question, instead, is whether we are choosing what unsettles us, and why, and how. I want to be disturbed into thoughtfulness and awareness, rather than dulled into apathy. I want my Self to be shaped deliberately rather than by status quo, or by those who already hold the reins of narrative and art.

By: Rania Hanna

If you want more content like this, be sure to follow my Substack.

I think our society is shifting into conservation

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I’m sick this weekend, battling a cold, and just a day before I felt the most sick, I was ravenous. I ate four meals, smaller ones, but more than I would normally consume, and I was starting to slow down in my energy levels. This is normal, as the body mounts an immune response (a metabolically expensive process), and focuses more on energy. Your appetite increases so your body can defend itself, and your body slows down so you conserve energy. Your body shifts from productivity to repair.

The following day, my body gave up, forcing me to take a day off of work. I had trouble sleeping the night before, and ended up dozing off into light naps.

Now, day three of my cold, and I have bursts of energy, but mostly feel like sitting or taking naps, and baking pita bread.

This has got me thinking: when a body is sick, it focuses on slowing down and nourishing itself. I wonder then, of a mind that is also sick with overstimulation and overconsumption. What happens to it?

I think that, it too, slows down and focuses on nourishing itself. I say this because I have noticed that the past few months, I’ve been returning to classics in my reading, craving depth and thought I hadn’t engaged with in a while. I’m seeking more to read to better understand the human condition, to learn, to “return to my roots” in a literary capacity. And, I’ve been focusing on slowing down.

Even in my writing, I am choosing not to push myself, my plots, or my timelines into something they don’t organically grow into. Last year, in 2025, I wrote almost six manuscripts (one I got about 80% of the way through before the new year came around). This year, I am working on editing them, focusing more on building on what I’ve already sown. And though I initially had plans to write at least two, maybe three, manuscripts this year, I have accepted that I may end up writing only one, and have begun to think that I may not write any at all.

This slowing down, both deliberate and organic, comes from shedding old skins last year. I moved on from some decisions I’d made earlier in life, even just years prior, and though I mourn them, I feel lighter without them, more like myself, and less like a shape I was trying to force myself into. That is, I feel more like I am wearing a skin I naturally fit into, rather than stretching out one that no longer fits me.

What I think is happening to my brain is a response to chronic overstimulation, a shift from productivity to repair, a sort of cognitive conservation. This makes sense, as when the brain sustains cognitive overload, i.e. “has too many tabs open,” working memory and decision-making reduce. It’s a sort of “sickness” that your brain decides it has to mount an immune response to, and so it shifts gears into restorative modes.

It’s why my brain has chosen classic literature or more “serious” works to read; it wants something that forces me to slow down because writing pace is slower, compels me to digest what I am reading, which forces me further to slow down. It’s a return to what is familiar and comfortable, and provides a stability as I often recognize what path a plot will take. It also reduces my task-switching: it’s difficult to “switch to another tab” when I’m digesting a thoughtful paragraph. This reading depth leads to sustained attention, which is further less stimulating since I’m focusing on one task, and one task alone.

And I’m seeing it elsewhere, too, not just in my reading. When I was younger, I could sit still, in silence, and enjoy it. The last few years, I have needed stimulation: an audiobook, a podcast, music, a YouTube video. Now, it’s almost as if I can’t stand the noise and stimulation, and instead want stillness and silence.

I’m not alone in this. I wrote in an earlier post “at least for a segment of our society, we desire simplicity and a reclamation of our human intelligence. It feels more like a quiet revolution, an unwinding of what our modern technology has wrought, reverting to less integrated and more simplified routines.“

What I mean to say with all this is as our minds and bodies desire healing from a society that is overwrought in pace, consumerism, and disconnection, I think our minds will begin responding in the same ways our bodies do when sick: by slowing down, digging deeper into our shared wisdom, and doing the things that nourish us. When a biological or psychological system is under strain, it moves to conserve, by simplifying and focusing on core functions.

And I think our society is shifting into conservation.

By: Rania Hanna

It’s been a while: world on fire, creative work, and upcoming comic

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Hi friends. It’s been a while.

Honestly, I haven’t had much energy lately to post much of anything, not the least of which a well-thought out blog post that’s worth sending out. Arguably, I don’t have the energy to write this one, but I’ll try to put down my thoughts regardless.

It’s been a horrible year. The world seems on fire, in some places, quite literally, including in Palestine/Israel, Syria, Turkey, California, Oregon, and other places. It seems the entire world is ablaze literally, and certainly, figuratively.

Palestine is under 22 months of siege, genocide, Israeli-engineered famine, and, as scholars are saying, a holocaust. Syria is under attack by Israel, including in Damascus and in southern Syria, where Druze populations are. Lebanon is precarious, with ongoing threats of attacks from Israel. Never mind our perilous situation in the United States, with Trump’s orders to send in the National Guard into DC, of which I saw groups of 3 or 5 roaming the National Mall and metro stations just two weekends ago.

It’s a scary time, and that’s not even going into the assaults on women, queer, Indigenous, Black, and other lives in America alone.

(BTW, there’s a bookish auction ongoing to raise funds for immigrant and trans rights, through August 27th).

With everything going on, I’ve continued to write, but I feel a bit…dead…inside, like I’m mostly a shell of a person right now. Creatively, I’m still doing work, but I can feel both body and mind slowing down, grieving, and, frankly, retracting, even as I try to reach out to people more. It’s a fine line between staying informed, trying to do work that can contribute to a healthy society, and protecting myself from the constant onslaught of horrible events. No wonder my recent Youtube watches have been on nomading through the US in a car, finding a couple acres to build a homestead on, and relaxing book recommendations coupled with homemade pastries and teas.

I have a few projects I’ve been working on, including a few novels, and one semi-memoir/social commentary on Arab-American discrimination and racism. They’re in different stages of creation, some I’m in the throes of edits for, others I’m still doing research for.

However, a short spread in a comic issue is coming out, a story on imperialism’s actions on collective memory and the rewriting of history. The story comes out in Planet Comics: Book Six, which you can back on Kickstarter. The work has hit full funding, but if you’d like a copy, feel free to back the project. It should come out in November-ish of this year.

Here’s a bit on my piece:

Rania Hanna (author of The Jinn Daughter), Erin Dodge and Ari Pluchinsky bring us the single-issue story, “The Archivist of Al-Azrakh”!

Sample page from “The Archivist of Al-Azrakh”

Signing off for now, and maybe for a while,
Rania

7 Books that influenced my current writing voice

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I’ve already mentioned how I am loving atmospheric books. And some posts mention specific books that influenced my current writing voice.

In thinking about what makes a book stick around in my mind and convince me to convince others to read it, it’s typically the author voice. The author voice and using the setting as a character.

Some books do that with such near-perfection, it’s hard to let go of the story and the characters. And those are the books that impact my own author voice, for the better.

Here’s a list of 7 books that have influenced my writing in terms of voice and tone, and have taught me how use the setting as a major character, the plot as a dreamy wonderland, and the characters as beautiful creatures that are so flawed, they’re perfect.

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

The wintry setting in Russia’s woodlands, and the glittering cities in the Kremlin bring this book to life in ways I wouldn’t have expected. And with the wild and eerily magical Vasya, who is such a perfectly flawed character it’s hard to feel anything but riveted by her, The Bear and the Nightingale not only brought a touch of atmosphere to my own writing, but also opened up a new love affair with Russian folklore.

Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw

The woodsy setting and the moonlight magic had such an earthy and ancient, yet fresh feel to it that I couldn’t help but be drawn in. And though I thought the story was a typical people-fear-young-witch story, the setting and the magic itself brought a fresh air to the plot. Nora Walker’s magic wasn’t anything extraordinary, but her lineage, the recipes and pages of the Walker witch family magic book, and the feel made this story memorable. It also reminds me that setting is a character, and could be the most important one. Keep that in mind when you’re writing your own book! Read my full review here.

The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones

Again, the earthy, woodsy setting was its own character, and it brought a mystical and tactile feel to the whole narrative. And that bone goat – a good reminder that even a sidekick can bring a new twist to your story. The magic was beautiful – dark and necromantic, but with a human and reverent feel to it.

Read my full review here.

The Sisters of the Winter Wood by Rena Rossner

Again, those woods. earthy and ancient, the setting, once again, was its own character. And the sisterly bond made the story that much more human and heartfelt. The magic was old and raw, and though I don’t remember full details months after reading the book, I remember the feel.

A great book to learn how to bring in the folklore and mysticism of an existing culture, and making it your own.

Whichwood by Tahereh Mafi

Here’s how you take something dark, necromancy, and make it beautiful and magical. The setting here is not so much its own character as the townspeople are. The magic is the main focus, and, most importantly, character feelings are the plot-driver. The necromancy is such a beautiful take on the typical dark feel that magical system has, and it brought such color and light to the world that the unexpectedness of it all made me crave more. A good reminder that how characters feel is just as important, if not more, than what they do. This is a strong character-driven book and a great example of plush writing. Read my full review here.

Sabriel by Garth Nix

This is how you build a world so big and powerful, you can get lost in it for ages. Sabriel has such a strong magical system that it influenced all my books since reading it. Almost every fantasy book I have written for the past ten years has featured dark magic, necromancy, and a reserved yet caring female protagonist. I can’t imagine writing a story that doesn’t have those elements in it, simply because Sabriel influenced me that much as a reader and writer. The main trilogy is worth it, and are the subsequent books in the Old Kingdom series.

The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco

The necromancy is strong in this book, with an added twist: raising the bones of ancient creatures and then commanding them with thought. I tried writing a book using this concept and failed to do it right -it’s harder than it seems. And Rin Chupeco does it with such skill. The book takes historical features like geishas, adds a dark magical system, and creates a whole new world and cast of characters. A great example of using what you know and then adding a twist to it. The feel of the magic is everywhere, and you just know how the magic can be used for good or ill, and how much havoc can be wreaked without the skill to manage it. Read my full review here.

*Originally published March 5, 2020.

Your setting is a living character

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Make your setting a character. 

I’ve recently learned this and think it’s advice that I can follow, and plan on following, as I go through revisions of my latest book. In my current MS, my setting feels dead, a stagnant detail that a reader can’t really envision. So as I edit my MS (again) I’m going to be focusing on bringing setting to life. Making my setting a character seems like sound advice.

Being of a science/skeptical background, I of course had to do research on how to bring setting to life and if viewing your setting as its own character is enough.

Turns out, it is and it isn’t.

One of the goals of writing the setting is to find the unique setting elements that matter to your characters, and possibly, to your readers. A setting is alive when its elements, its objects are interwoven with emotions. Think of people: it’s not just their actions, their personalities or behaviors that make them them, it’s also their emotions, their responses to events or circumstances within their environments. The same goes with settings: it’s not just the objects that make the setting, it’s the emotions attached to the objects, or the emotions characters feel towards the objects.

That is, the setting is alive when its details are experienced not only by descriptions, but also by the way the characters experience those details.

Setting should also challenge your characters. Not only physically by, say, having to climb a mountain. But also socially and emotionally, perhaps spiritually if it fits into your book. Your characters should have a dynamic relationship with their setting. Just as you interact with, and react to, your environment, the same goes for your characters.

One thing I’ve thought of when editing, and as I learn more about how to write, is that making your setting a character isn’t enough. At least, not in the way I was initially thinking about it. I think sometimes in my own writing, even if I approach the setting as a character, it’s easy for me to approach it as a dead character. I have to remind myself that setting needs to be alive, be passionate if it fits with the story. It’s not enough to describe the objects and details and emotions regarding a setting; you have to also make the setting have its own mind, be its own main character. 

…You have to also make the setting have its own mind, be its own main character 

Your setting should be both an agonist and an antagonist for your characters. That is, your setting should both simulate and frustrate your characters. Your environment both stimulates and frustrates you, so why shouldn’t the same happen for your characters. They’re people, too, you know.

Your setting should both stimulate and frustrate your characters.

*Note: This article was originally published on January 19, 2016 and March 26, 2020.