How to Unlock Your Imagination as a Writer (Elif Shafak Interview)

Perell asks about craft and Shafak keeps answering about attention. She declines the label magical realism on the grounds that Istanbul does not sort itself into boxes — a moment of sorrow with absurdity underneath it, or the reverse — and offers instead that a novelist is “a bit like a linguistic cultural archaeologist,” digging “through layers of memory and amnesia, stories and silences.” The through-line is what goes unrecorded: she listens to how people say things as much as what they say, distrusts heroes in favour of the moment a timid person turns brave, and separates chronos, the measurable time of clocks, from kairos, the deep cyclical time she thinks storytellers actually work in. On meaning she is blunt — “we live in an age of clashing certainties,” readers are not passive, no two readings are ever the same, and a writer who preaches has failed. AI appears once, an hour in and in passing: large language models being used to trace how animals communicate, offered as evidence that nature knows more than we do. That single line is the whole of it, and the interview is better for not reaching. What it is instead is an hour on the faculty this site keeps approaching from the other side — how a mind attends to what was never said.