![]() ![]() "The thing about the Arab world,” Faizal says, “is that it's always demonized or romanticized." “That's when the story really took off and everything sort of clicked into place,” she says. For the Sri Lankan and Arab author, it made all the difference. She changed the setting to a once-magical country called Arawiya, swapped the main character’s name from Ember to Zafira, and started anew. ![]() “And I thought, you know, why don't I just go further south to set it in the Middle East?” “When I was getting together, I saw that it closely imitated the map of the Mediterranean, with an island in the middle surrounded by countries,” Faizal tells Bustle. ![]() A designer and the founder of the web-design company Icey Designs, Faizal says her creative process tends to start with images and color palettes, not words. She was writing a young adult fantasy about a teenage girl who defies the status quo in a Eurocentric world - the basic descriptor that could apply to most young adult fantasies that have hit bestseller lists in the last 10 years. There wasn’t anything ostensibly wrong with what she was doing. ![]() As she was writing the first draft of what would eventually become her debut novel, Hafsah Faizal couldn’t make it past the first act. ![]()
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