Khaled noticed his parents’ change of habits right away: Samir, after years of leaving for work at 8:00 a.m., started heading out a full half-hour earlier just so he would not run into Jim Bradstreet.
After a prologue, the novel begins by establishing a new routine following the murder:įor almost a year, the Bradstreets and the Al-Menshawys practiced elaborate avoidance tactics, living next door to each other yet hardly crossing paths. The novel follows the Al-Mehshawys, a Muslim couple who immigrates to the United States from Egypt, establishes a medical practice and home and family, and then watches it all fall apart after their son murders the girl next door. Rajia Hassib does exactly that with the strategy for establishing and breaking routines in her novel In the Language of Miracles. You can read the opening pages here. It’s partly true, as one of my high school English teachers used to say, that writers have been telling the same stories over and over since Shakespeare. Once we’ve developed that piece of our craft, then we can begin to play with it, adding variations. Watch: Every day she went out alone to pick flowers, but then one day someone was waiting for her… Or Every day he ate dinner alone at the corner restaurant where no one else ever ate, but then one day it was closed, so he… As writers, first we must learn the basics of how the strategy works: the set up and the twist. You probably know what it is: set up a routine for a character and then break it. If you have writer’s block and can’t break out, there’s one trick that is almost guaranteed to help. You can read two great essays about being an American Muslim, written in response to the novel at Books Are Not a Luxury. In the Language of Miracles is Rajia Hassib’s first novel.
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