Etaf Rum: On the Sheltered Artist, Writing About the Mundane, Her Healing Process Post Debut and Her Novel, “Evil Eye”
Etaf Rum was one of the very first authors I interviewed over the phone. Prior, I had been conducting them over email, and I’ll admit, I was nervous taking her call. But her calming demeanor immediately put me at ease, and we ended up having an inspiring conversation about the power of education, the bravery it took for her to write her debut novel, A Woman is No Man, and how she wrote that novel in one year. “I was super disciplined,” she said. “And just full of rage and so it wasn't hard for me to write.”
I told her I needed some of that fire in order to finish my own writing projects because I couldn’t help but solicit advice from such a prolific writer.
“Write about something you love,” Etaf told me. “Write about something that makes you upset. Or something that moves you or something that you think is unfair or that you feel affects the way you look at the world. That’s how my book started.”
That was almost four years ago, and for the release of Etaf’s second novel, Evil Eye, I had the pleasure of interviewing her again, this time over Zoom. I left our conversation feeling just as inspired as the first, as Etaf is such a generous person with her vulnerability and her honesty on the writing life. Her new novel explores the traditional gendered expectations placed on many modern Palestinian American women and the challenges that emerge from unresolved generational trauma. Evil Eye is very much in conversation with her first novel and, as she shared with me below, very close to some of her own experiences and intimate feelings about herself as an artist.
Read our conversion below, where Etaf talks about her 3 AM writing routine, plot surprises she found when drafting, not adhering to outlines, and staying true to our authentic voices.
Kailey Brennan DelloRusso: I would love to know the initial spark or the genesis of your novel, Evil Eye.
Etaf Rum: I began writing Evil Eye immediately after I finished A Woman is No Man, slightly before the pandemic. I felt like I hadn't finished the conversation I started with A Woman Is No Man, especially since that book focused on three generations of Arab American women. But a lot of the book was heavily influenced by Palestine and these older generations of women and I wanted to explore a more modern-day Palestinian American woman's relationship with life, motherhood, and children. I was thinking about Yara as this young mother who came from the very same backgrounds that the characters of my first novel came from, but, to me, she was highly educated, and she had this idea that she had indeed escaped the confines of her past. And that was such an interesting question for me as a writer. I felt like a lot of women can relate to this, where we come from troubled pasts, and we believe that we've overcome them by superficially doing X, Y, and Z. Getting the degree, getting the job, leaving the toxic home and starting a new home or a new life. But then you haven't really processed or healed from the past. You've just repressed it and put it behind you. Those questions were at the core of Evil Eye. How much of our past is unresolved and repressed—how much of it leaks into our current present life, despite our best intentions to let go and be better? That is really the central conflict for Yara as she slowly, throughout the novel, starts to realize that she's still carrying so much of her past trauma. Not just her trauma, but generational ancestral trauma that her family has unhealed and that she can see it playing out as a mother and as a wife. I really wanted to help her find her way in this novel. I think, in a way, helping her was sort of like helping me because I was also grappling with some of these questions. So that's really where the novel and the idea of it came from.
KBD: You said you wrote this immediately after your first novel, and I’m curious if there was anything that surprised you the most. Either in the characters you were creating or the plot when writing.
ER: I think one of the character surprises for me was her marriage. Initially, when I first started writing the novel, I wasn't really sure what direction I would take with the marriage. I knew that it was going to play a very important role in her arc, in her journey, and her self-discovery. But I wasn't sure if this would be an abusive marriage. Was it emotional abuse? Was it domestic? Was this going to be a perfect relationship? Would she be in love in her marriage? I wasn't really sure how that would play out. I wanted to leave it organic to the characters. I kept tweaking her relationship with her husband, Fadi, throughout the novel until it felt exactly how I believed Yara would feel. So it took a while to get there. And I think that surprised me, too. I'm very pleased with how it turned out, but I didn't have an intention for it. I just wanted to portray not another stereotypical abusive marriage. I really wanted it to be more dimensional than that because I've already written so many dark stories. I didn't want Evil Eye to be another really dark marriage story. I wanted it to be more realistic.
KBD: What did your writing routine look like while writing this book? Since you were moving from one novel to the next, did your routine change, or did it get any easier while writing a second? (laughs)
ER: So, this novel, in terms of writing routine, was much more difficult for me. As I mentioned, I started writing Evil Eye as soon as I was finished with A Woman is No Man. That was maybe a couple of months before the pandemic started. And so, I was very isolated during the writing process. My kids were home from school, and that really affected the quality of writing that I was able to get done during the day. I actually had to completely change my writing routine. I'm usually a morning person when it comes to writing. I like to wake up first thing in the morning before anyone's awake to have the quiet moments of the day to write. Give me four hours of solid writing, and I feel really good. I feel like I've gotten everything off my chest. But because of COVID and having my kids at home from school, and also the intense isolation and fear that was happening at the time, I couldn't really write at all during the day. I felt blocked; I felt agitated. And so I actually started waking up very early. I would set my alarm to 3:00 AM, maybe 4:00 AM, if I were tired. Most of Evil Eye was written in the middle of the night in complete darkness, whether it was in my sunroom or I would sometimes go sit outside, like under a tree, or go to my coffee shop and just write. I found that the darkness helped silence a lot of the voices in my head and helped me write better.
KBD: Wow, so four hours is ideal for you?
ER: Yeah. I think that that's enough time. Of course, if we have more time, that's great. We always need more time. But to me, a sitting of four hours minimum is what I need to get to tap into where I'm trying to go, because those first couple of hours, you're just getting into your body. Trying to get to that place of thought that you are the day before or your aim of where you're heading. It takes a while for me, at least, to get to that space. So, I feel like four hours at minimum is what I need.
KBD: I’m sure it depends from novel to novel, but was there one area that you struggled with or found the most challenging?
ER: What I find most challenging in the two books that I've written is repetition. I feel like I get stuck on certain emotions and certain scenes. And when you're so inside the novel, it's hard for me to come back up again. I've written and felt the scenes, and coming back out of the novel and assessing whether or not something is working plot-wise can be tough—is it repetitive? Are these emotional beats the same? Do I need to revise the arc in certain places of the novel?
I want to be more intentional in my scenes and in my beats, and in how the reader is feeling from chapter to chapter. A part of me wants to do that, but then I get so sucked into the darkness of the journey. In both of my novels, they deal with a lot of dark, depressing elements. And so I think that's the hard part for me. If I get lost in those spaces, it's hard for me to come back out and look at them objectively and ask myself the questions. Is it too much? Do I need to trim down some scenes, maybe? That’s where I find myself leaning on my editor to help me see the novel better.
KBD: Yeah. I can definitely relate to that. I do the same thing. I just finished a draft of my novel, and I feel like a lot of scenes are doing the same thing, but it's sometimes it's just that you want to see that same emotion played out in different ways, because it feels different to you as you're working through it, you know?
ER: That's so true. My editor and my agent are the only two people who read my work. I just don't let anyone else read it, no readers, nothing. But they will both tell me, I know in life you go through the same emotion over and over and over again until you get it. And so that's a justification for us when we're writing scenes— oh, I wanna see my character battling this emotion in different settings just to drive the impact, or just to develop the character a bit. And that's how it works in life. We don't go through this perfect journey. But as my editor will say, in fiction, the reader doesn't have room to mope around with the character in the timeline that it would take the character to figure out the problem in real life. It’s not the same timeline that's needed in fiction. And so that's why there's always trimming, and the character arcs feel tighter and more resolute. In my mind, my character arcs never feel that way. They're so messy. It takes me forever to learn the lesson. It takes me so many times of feeling that emotion, so many times of being in that place where I feel like I've completely hit rock bottom and I'm repeating the same mistakes the next day, you know? And I think that's the battle. How do we capture these emotional journeys in an authentic and moving way while also maintaining the swiftness of literature and the tidiness that literature offers?
KBD: Definitely. You mentioned beats. Are you an outliner? Do you use a beat sheet? What does your draft process look like?
ER: I wanna say that, yes, I am an outliner, but I never follow my outline. I go into the novel with just a vague idea of what the novel's going to be like. Then, a few weeks, a month into the novel as I'm just writing, I’m thinking, who is my character? Where is she from? What does she like or dislike? And I will create a vague outline with where in the beginning of the novel, this is what I want to happen. This is what I want for the inciting event. Somewhere during the middle, it feels like the character should go through this type of emotion. It's not a strict, chapter by chapter plot outline. It's more of an emotional outline. And then, as I write slowly, I will piece together the plot, and that feels more natural to me. I guess I don't really adhere to my outline because I always end up changing it. So that's a tricky question.
KBD: I hear you. I’ve always been confused by the outline process because so much changes draft to draft.
ER: When I started writing A Woman is No Man, I tried to outline a novel, and then it just felt so formulaic. It was exciting to write the scenes that I already instinctively knew were the novel. But then all the other things that I outlined—because I thought they made sense beat wise, since I already knew what I was writing —it kind of took the fun out of it. So I think that's why I deviate and outline just because I'm a type A person who thinks that if I outline the novel, I'm safe. But then I'll sit down to write what I outlined, and I'm like, I'm too creative for this outline. Then I'll just not do it. And I'm like, okay, why did I waste my time doing that? (Laughs)
KBD: Was there anything you needed to work through or overcome in your creative life or process while writing this novel?
ER: What I think I hadn't processed when I started writing Evil Eye was the extent of what I had done with A Woman is No Man. That novel took a lot out of me to write. It came to me so quickly, and I felt like I had this sort of divine intervention to write that novel. I wrote it in a flash with an idea that I needed to write this like my life depended on it. And I wrote it, and it was dark and scary, and it took a lot from me. And when I finished, I said, all right, I'm gonna write Evil Eye, without yet processing what I had just done. And not just what did I do by writing a novel, but also I had never written fiction before. I still had insecurities about whether or not I am a good writer and whether or not someone like me from my background deserves to have a voice. Even though I had written a novel about owning your truth and finding your way, I hadn't processed that yet or arrived at this place without accepting that I had found my voice. And what does that mean? What does it mean to find your voice? Then I started writing Evil Eye immediately after, and within weeks, the writer's doubt came back, the insecurities, the severe writer’s block. I’m sure COVID didn’t help this, but I really do believe it's because I didn't take the time to reflect on how writing that novel had completely transformed me as a person.
And so, when I sat down to write Evil Eye, I was sitting down as the woman who wrote A Woman is No Man, but I wasn't the woman who wrote A Woman is No Man. I had, in some ways, opened up a lot of dark rooms inside of me that I really didn't take the time to go in and fully heal. I thought I healed from them because I wrote about them in a narrative structure. And I think the therapeutic process of writing a novel certainly helped me. But I think that I still had a lot of work to do in terms of inner healing in order to show up again in a different way in this novel. So, for Evil Eye, I had to take a lot of time within the process of writing this book to remind myself, hey, you can do this. Because it felt harder than the first time, it was harder. I felt more insecure, and I had more doubt, which in my mind, I'm like, why do I have more doubt? I should have less doubt. But for some reason, I was more scared. I felt more out of place. I felt like I had more to prove. I felt I was so hard on myself. I thought, that if I didn't show up for myself, that meant that I truly didn't learn the lessons. I truly didn't grow. I was like bullying myself in a sense because, in reality, our work doesn't really define our success and our failure. That's really subjective, anyway. But because I hadn't truly healed, I wasn't approaching the art of it in, I think, the best and most healthy way.
Evil Eye really centers on a sheltered artist. So we have Yara. She’s Palestinian American. She has all these dreams and aspirations, and she does go to college, but she got married so young, and she's a mother first still. And so her choices feel very limited, even though she's empowered. She feels very sheltered. She feels like an artist, although she's teaching art in her classroom and she's never had a chance to visit or view art in real life. She's never had a chance to explore the world. She grew up in an environment where women were not allowed to leave the home unless they got married. So, her father was basically handing her over from his house to another man's house. That’s the norm in the culture that she's from. And that was also the norm in how I was raised. I also feel like a sheltered artist, and that sometimes makes me feel like I'm inadequate. I'm not as well-read, or I'm not as well traveled, or I don't know much about pop culture, and I don't know much about all of these influences that help make writers make these connections that are outside the mundane of daily life. So for me, it's like, is that all I can write about? Can I only write about the mundane? I can’t write about politics and all these bigger ideas. And it was an insecurity for me because I was sheltered. So there were always these questions as I was writing, like, do I belong here? Do I belong in this world? Do I actually have anything valuable to say? Those are some things that I also had to work through and accept about myself. Although I am a sheltered artist, I still have something of value to contribute.
KBD: I love that. I know we weren’t raised the same, but I came from a very religious background and often feel this way, too. But there is so much beauty in the mundane, and you are writing such beautiful books.
ER: Thank you for sharing. It makes me feel less alone, and I believe that even though it seems like some people are alone in their experiences, these experiences are much more universal than we think they are.
KBD: Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's why we read, right? That's the beauty of novels, I think.
My last question for you is, what advice do you have for debut authors?
ER: My advice is to dig deep and stay true to your inner voice and authentic message. Don’t get drowned out by what you think the publishing world wants of you. I think that's the easiest to do in the debut novel because the novel is still yours. You don't know what people think of your writing, and you have the chance to really dig deep within yourself to find out why you are even writing. And I think if writers can spend more time inside themselves, searching underneath the layers of their limited beliefs, of why they're writing and thinking about the purpose of it, that's where I would keep my focus. That’s the advice that I would give. Because it is so easy now to look at the lists and look at the numbers and look at who's getting a movie deal and who's getting a six-figure advance and all of those things. We can't help it. But those are the objective measures of our success. But really true good work, even if you have achieved all that, true good work comes from knowing that you have authentically presented yourself and your work in a way that is true to yourself and in a way that is meaningful. You can hit all the lists, but you could still feel like you failed yourself because you gave in. And so that's my advice: to dig deep while you're writing.
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Etaf Rum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, by Palestinian immigrants. She lives in North Carolina with her two children. Rum also runs the Instagram account @booksandbeans. A Woman Is No Man is her first novel.
