When I first start­ed writ­ing, I loved read­ing advice for writ­ers from my favorite authors. Yet there was one com­mon piece of advice I did­n’t quite get. When­ev­er writ­ers spoke about let­ting the char­ac­ters con­trol the sto­ry, I became skep­ti­cal. It sound­ed a bit too fluffy and hazy for my under­stand­ing. I had no idea how to imple­ment that advice. After all — I was the writer. I was the one decid­ing my char­ac­ters’ fate. What does that mean, in a prac­ti­cal sense, let­ting the char­ac­ters con­trol the sto­ry?

I still don’t ful­ly get that advice, but after gain­ing more expe­ri­ence writ­ing, I have learned that in order to pro­duce my best work I have to be will­ing to aban­don many inten­tions I had for a sto­ry when I first began writ­ing it. This is prob­a­bly one of the hard­est things that I had to learn to do as a writer. Every writer comes to the page burst­ing to say some­thing. Yet I found that in order for a sto­ry to work one must be will­ing to aban­don their orig­i­nal inten­tions in the ser­vice of what works best on the page.

A few months ago I googled myself and found a bunch of thought­ful respons­es (both favor­able and less favor­able) that engaged with one of my just-pub­lished sto­ries, ​“Means of Sup­press­ing Demon­stra­tions.”

Some respons­es, how­ev­er, treat­ed the sto­ry as if it was non-fic­tion, and clear­ly in ser­vice of one par­tic­u­lar opin­ion or anoth­er. Because the sto­ry was fic­tion, I was sur­prised to read these polar oppo­site respons­es from peo­ple who held strong opin­ions on both sides of the Israeli-Arab con­flict.

Some viewed the sto­ry as pro-Israeli pro­pa­gan­da and claimed that it was degrad­ing to Pales­tini­ans, while oth­ers claimed that I must hate Israel, and that I’m try­ing to prof­it by neg­a­tive­ly por­tray­ing my own coun­try. The lan­guage of the respon­ders on both sides was far less kind than my sum­ma­ry of their sen­ti­ments.

I was pleased to see that oth­er read­ers pushed back on these pure­ly polit­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions of my sto­ry, and that they urged for it to be under­stood as fic­tion. I think the fact my sto­ry man­aged to enrage peo­ple with oppo­site polit­i­cal views is actu­al­ly an odd kind of accom­plish­ment. The irony is that one of my sto­ry’s cen­tral themes was the absur­di­ty of the war of nar­ra­tives that is hap­pen­ing in the West regard­ing the Israeli-Arab con­flict.

A pas­sion­ate war of nar­ra­tives regard­ing this con­flict has been going on for ages. Peo­ple on both sides are eager to eval­u­ate every­one and every­thing only in regards to how that per­son or work of art either agrees or dis­agrees with their point of view. Although I wish my work could be eval­u­at­ed only as a work of art, I know that because of my sub­ject mat­ter that may not always hap­pen.

While many dif­fer­ing inter­pre­ta­tions have been giv­en to the choic­es I made in that sto­ry, the truth is I feel as though many of those choic­es were not up to me. They were in ser­vice of the sto­ry. What­ev­er my orig­i­nal inten­tions were when I began writ­ing that sto­ry, it was the sto­ry itself that dic­tat­ed my lat­er choic­es and brought me to write from my char­ac­ters’ per­spec­tives in the ways that I did.