God and the Devil are at war, and their battlefield is the human heart.
This is one my favorite lines from literature. It’s from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a book I studied in a Russian literature course in college (shout out to all Dr Saeed Ghazi stans from LUMS, iykyk). I was 19 or 20 years old and enamored by the book’s exploration of morality, doubt, faith, spiritualist, and what it means to reject or believe in God.
At the time, I couldn’t relate personally to the themes. Sure, I studied the book diligently, highlighting and underlining passages and lines, memorizing sections to use in exams and essays, researching other scholars and their take on the novel, charting out ties between this book and Dostoevsky’s other works. I examined literary techniques, dove deep into Dostoevsky’s use of polyphony (having multiple, simultaneous narrative voices) and, of course, Mikhail Bakhtin’s take on it all – because you can’t fully taste Russian literature without a healthy dose of literary theory seasoning.
But, despite all the work I put in, my understanding of the book remained superficial. Yes, I’m realizing it 12 years after the fact because it’s only recently that I’ve come to understand how God and the devil use the human heart as a playground. And here, I don’t mean God as an almighty being and the devil as Satan of the fiery underworld. My understanding of the two differs from conventional theology – in spite growing up in a fairly conservative, Muslim household where I was raised to fear Allah, adhere to the five pillars of Islam and live a life that would be measured favorably on the Day of Judgment. My belief in all that is questionable, it wavers daily and I’m not interested in figuring it out yet.
I have come to think of God more as the pure, unblemished desire to create, the radiant burst of energy that comes when you’ve produced something to consider – a piece of art, a character, a scene, the unattainable plot twist that finally fits well within your narrative. It’s the elusive few minutes of fulfillment you chase after going through hundreds of pages, discarding words and paragraphs with apathy, because you want to produce something worth reading. Something deserving of shelf space. It’s a sense of astonishment, the moment of wonder in a story where you have to just put the book down for a second and think – how did that just happen, what even was that – before devouring the rest of the story. It’s more God as creation, less God as creator.
The opposite of this is the devil. It’s everything in life that comes in the way of creating. For me, the devil is multi-faceted. It arrives in the form of household chores that suddenly feel so urgent even though they can totally wait: laundry, vacuuming, sorting baby’s clothes, hanging up our raincoats that have been on the couch all week, arranging the shoe closet even though I know baby loves to get in there and toss out all the shoes every single day, chopping onions and tomatoes for meal prep, washing baby’s bottles even though she’s not done using them for the day. The devil is comprised of all these distractions and more. And the influence doesn’t stop there, it continues even after I’ve opened up my writing laptop and settled comfortably on the desk or couch to write. It’s the urge to check Instagram or work emails or Teams chats or the baby monitor app or WhatsApp or Tiktok or Reddit. Just all the damned apps. And when I finally do get started on something, I feel the devil creeping into my heart, preventing my full surrender to the words. It tells me to quickly Google something that could be useful for the story, a small detail about what kind of fans people had in their homes in Karachi in 1949, taking me down a research rabbit hole that is incredibly hard to climb out of. The devil is relentless, diverting my attention from the page, baiting me constantly.
God is the surrender to creation, the devil is everything that prevents that from happening. God is vulnerability, the harnessing of past emotion or current pain into my character’s life, the infusion of myself into my creation, the exacting, draining work of emotional and mental labor. The devil is the suppression of that pain, a barrier erected so the words on a page ring hollow, devoid of depth. God is alchemy and transformation; the devil is ennui and stagnation. Somehow, I embody both, simultaneously, all the time. I imagine that’s true for any artist, any creator but this post isn’t about them, it’s about me. And here’s how I’ve been trying to get closer to God lately:
Keeping my writing laptop charged and visible at all times. This serves as a necessary reminder that I have words waiting for me, that I need to carve out time to prioritize creation. It’s a change from past behavior for sure – I had my writing laptop packed away in a cupboard for the past year and finally dug it out this summer.
Carving out non-negotiable writing time. Ideally, I’d love to be the person who wakes up at 5am everyday to write for 2 hours before the day truly begins, but guess what? That’s not me right now. I hope to get there soon, but what helps me now is allocation 1-2 times during the week as my non-negotiable writing sessions. One happens every Sunday, when Taimur and baby go swimming, and another usually happens on a weeknight, after baby’s in bed and we’re all done with our dinner.
Setting a timer when I sit down to write. I’ve come to terms with myself, I don’t have the discipline to write for an hour every day, or create a strict regimen of producing X words each week. But when I do create the opportunity to write, I set a 30-minute timer – during this time, I just type. No distractions, no phones, no chores. My writing sessions are comprised of a couple 30-minute intervals and that’s good enough for now.
Having non-writing tasks to help me create even when I’m not writing fiction. This includes: developing and maintaining a short and long term list of goals (this has to be a living doc because life happens and I’m learning to be flexible in my writing journey), charting out my novel and its characters to understand and test key plot points, motivations, conflicts (this helps me see gaps in the stories), browsing Submittable for upcoming submission opps and obsessing over my current ones, finding writerly podcasts (Write Minded is my current fave) to listen to other people talk about craft.
Finding cool shit to read, like The Quotidian and the Code by Sofia Samatar, an article from Poets and Writers’ Craft Capsule series, or Hilary Mantel’s BBC Reith lectures on historical fiction – something that keeps me thinking about the work even when I am not actively creating. I used to avoid clicking on such things, used to shy away from cool reads because they would remind me of what I was avoiding, and make me feel like I was behind in some way. So it’s taken some internal work to be able to appreciate creation in general again, to see it as a gift for all to enjoy and not envy.
It’s not much, but it’s a practice. Just like true religion. The more I pray and understand the scriptures, the more I do the work and surrender bits of myself on a regular basis to the page, the stronger my connection becomes to the spirit. And for me, writing and creating is the ultimate spiritual act.