Naima B. Robert – Advice for Muslim Women Writers Leaving a Legacy your Book Lauren Booth
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Bismillah.
Let's go, guys.
Sister Lauren is here.
I'm gonna promote her to panelist.
Sha Allah so she can come on in
here
and share
her talk with us.
Salaam alaikum everyone welcome those of you who
are in youtube right now if you're watching
this live welcome
please please accept our apologies for the delay
We had some miscommunication,
so we were not able to yep. We
weren't able to start
Good luck.
How are you?
What a lovely surprise. Your mic is not.
I can't hear you, but that's because my
voice is off. Can't hear me?
My bad.
Can you hear me now?
Thank you so
much for joining us.
No. No. You're good. You're good.
It's
I see. Yes.
I'm completely
alright. I will introduce you and then, over
to you. I'll come off camera.
Give me give me 30 seconds. I just
need to find my notes.
Okay. 30 seconds, and I need to find
my Sure. If I come off camera then,
inshallah, and,
Okay, Johnny. Yeah. We'll do here. No worries.
Out to these folks out here for a
second.
Guys,
we've been we're on day 3, which is
crazy.
We're on day 3, and we have one
more day tomorrow.
So I'm really keen to hear from you
what you've
enjoyed with the summer. Which talks have you
attend? Have you been listening to the other
talks that have happened, or is this your
first one?
And, what's that for you? You know, what
have you taken from these 3 days so
far,
meeting all these other sisters who, masha'Allah, have
been writing, have been, you know, making their
dream come true. Let me know in the
chat how that's impacted you if in any
way.
I know for me, it's always very inspiring
to see other women who are, you know,
like,
doing things that I would like to be
doing. It's very inspiring. It's motivating.
And I guess it just makes you see
that, you know, it is possible. Right?
More
more is possible than we think.
So that's always, I think, a good takeaway
to get from any endeavor, inshallah, from any
exposure to what people are doing. So if
that is what you got out
these 3 days so far, I'm super grateful,
and I'm really, really proud of all the
sisters who came and shared their stories and
shared them because for many of them, it
was their first. And, I think they did
rather well. So,
Lauren, if you're ready, I am going to
introduce you and then I'm going to hand
you the mic. In sha Allah. So just
give me the thumbs up and then I'll
introduce you to our to our lovely audience
insha'Allah
oh
thumbs
up. So alright. Inshallah. Let's go. Right.
Welcome,
everyone, to this very, very special session in
the Muslim Writers Summit 2022.
Alhamdulillah,
we are blessed
to have, you know, somebody who is a
sister, who is a friend, who is a
colleague, a partner in crime,
a partner in arms, mashallah,
very very dear to me, Sister Lauren Booth.
Now Sister Lauren Booth has been motivating women
to explore their authentic voice
for more than 10 years.
As an internationally
recognized motivational speaker, broadcaster, and presenter,
Lauren draws upon skills from a 20 year
career
on stage and on TV to touch lives
across the world. From keynotes in
London, Texas and Toronto
to speaking tours of South Africa, Pakistan and
Malaysia, her ability to deliver
a straight to the heart call to action
sets her apart as a headline speaker, event
host, and workshop trainer.
She's spoken at conferences alongside leading lights, including
Dalia Mujahid,
Imamzadeh Sharqif, Khaled Siddiqui, I'm reading the list,
Sheikh Omar Suleiman and many more.
She is the author of the groundbreaking memoir,
Finding Peace in the Holy Land about accepting
Islam in the modern western context.
In 2019,
those of you who follow her you will
know it was adapted
into Accidentally Muslim, a one woman show she
performed
30 times at the 2019
Edinburgh Fringe
Festival to brilliant reviews.
And that memoir is now available as a
gorgeous
audio book. Masha'Allah. Sister Lauren Booth, welcome to
the Muslim writers summit 2022.
And Bismillah, the stage is yours. Insha'Allah.
Thanks so much, Sister Naima, for again putting
on something so worthwhile,
important and useful
for our sisters and,
you know, fellow travelers on the path of
creativity. I really appreciate you, sis. Jazakam Lecha.
Thanks for this invitation.
And to all of you out there, may
Allah bless you.
And, thank you so much for inviting me.
My topic this evening, I'm going to talk
for about 10 minutes, and then I'll maybe
a little bit longer,
see how it goes, and then do a
q and a because, I know sister Naima
asks some brilliant questions and really draws people
out. So I I think this is gonna
be a a very lively way to do
things, Inshallah.
So the topic I'm talking about this evening
is
leaving a
legacy with your book. So I thought, first
of all,
we'd look at,
how do you leave a legacy? What does
that actually mean?
Well, we leave a legacy by doing things
that make other people's lives better. Simple. Right?
There are many ways to make other people's
lives better, of course. And a book is
one of the best ways to do that
because, well, simply put, it lives on beyond
us. It lives on further and can be
reprinted and talked about and
spoken about and becomes the stuff of legend
or at least talked about in our own
families.
Even that in its own way is a
legacy.
Now, historically,
the word legacy is used to describe a
financial
bequest. So something was
left to people in a will, an amount
of money, or property. These are under things
that are understood
in the islamic context as well, of course,
spoken about in holy Quran.
But this very
narrow interpretation
has gradually given way to a much broader
definition, and that's where, inshallah, you and I
come in.
And this includes anything that is shared
or received from someone who went before. So
a legacy is simply something that is passed
on, passed down. The baton is being passed.
That's an analogy
I'm gonna use a lot because I just
love it. Passing on the baton.
So a legacy
is something,
anything,
that a person leaves behind
that they can be remembered by. So I
want this to really embed itself in Charlotte
in our hearts when we're doing our writing
or our creative works.
What is what are people taking away from
this, and what is the point of this
being remembered?
Because our gifts to the generations
that follow us
are about
values. They're not about our valuables.
And, again, you know, it's just fascinating to
think that this is very much in the
Islamic
context.
SubhanAllah, when the feet walk away
from the grave,
it isn't going to be the divvying up
of whatever mementos
of dunya we leave behind.
It is the good works that are gonna
be the sadaqa jariyah.
So when we're talking about legacy
and you're writing your book, the question is,
can we inspire others to see something
to its end, to its fruition?
What do we have, what can we do
that will outlast our time on earth by
pleasing a light in the surface of, 1st,
his message,
or, b, service to his creation. Now that's
a really wide remit.
We don't all have to be, or have
the knowledge, or the, the, the calling to
be dayir,
dayi,
but we have knowledge in certain areas that
can be useful,
inshallah.
It basically means putting a stamp on the
future and making a contribution to future
generations.
Now in non spiritual terms,
I guess when I was at drama school,
I wanted my legacy to be
in film.
That incredible moment when you are watching somebody
in a movie and you think they no.
They're not alive anymore.
You know, Sidney Poitier
died recently
and watching one of his films is incredible
because you think he's physically no longer in
this world, in this state,
but
his lexicon of work
still exists to be appreciated.
So the other thing, I guess, we do
is we can get a bit self obsessed
in that way. At drama
school, I went to show off school. I
didn't go to,
university.
I went to
the show off school, which is drama school.
It's Russell Brand calls it that. And I
think that's absolutely brilliant.
That leads us sometimes to become a bit
maudlin and self obsessed.
The wrong side of legacy, the imagining of
people crying by our grave. I knew she
was good, really. I fully I'd told her
at the time.
That's not the legacy we're talking about. Because
Islamically
and as Muslims,
as Muslim creatives with the gifts that Allah
has given us,
Our graves
can be unmarked, sisters.
In fact,
truly, our graves should be unmarked.
One of my grandmother's
favorite,
pieces of poetry was, she said she wanted
it on her grave, actually. I wonder if
we did that.
Here lies one
whose name was writ in water.
Imagine
you carve something out in the sand. Here
is the name, Lauren Booth. Here is your
name. And the sands of time, the waves
of time come and wash it away.
So it's not our name that's important. It's
the promotion of goodness
and the positive change. These
are what became my interest. And, Inshallah,
they'll be your legacy too.
So the first question when you're creating your
book with a legacy in mind is the
why.
This is the consideration when writing anything about
our own experience.
A first person description of an event or
a period of life or using our narrative
as the base of fiction is the why.
So I've written my first book is an
autobiography.
Actually, it's a memoir.
And I had to ask myself, why am
I writing this memoir?
I first wrote it when I was 20
years old. That's when I started to do
a draft.
And it was
really
score settling,
self pity.
There was a lot of, do you remember
in the 80s 90s,
pity lit it was called? There was a
whole deluge of really, really sad experiences of
people who'd been had these traumatic childhoods and
turned them into books. And they were kind
of,
you know, lusted after at the time, but
really it was misery lit. It was called
misery lit. It was a whole genre.
And so
what I originally wrote was about settling scores.
Dealing with things that at that moment I
didn't have the
spiritual or the emotional capacity to deal with
prophecy
properly.
It was a pretty painful read when I
found the draft years later.
But instead of billing it completely,
I felt that there was a nub of
a story there.
That there was some good writing,
but there was no why.
There was no reason beyond myself.
And to any of you watching this, if
you're considering
writing about your own experience,
What I
enjoyed doing
was
writing myself out
of the narrative.
It was a book
about me.
It's a book about my experiences.
But it was from a much wider perspective.
Which brings me on to the difference between
an autobiography and a memoir.
I'm sure Neymar will have some chat going
on somewhere, or perhaps there's some comments underneath
this. So here's a question I like to
ask when I do,
talking workshops
or writing workshops? What's the difference between an
autobiography and a memoir? It's okay if you
don't know. I started writing my book and
I didn't know,
but I found out. I figured out that
I was writing a memoir.
Now here's the difference.
An autobiography
is, number 1,
usually by someone super famous.
Someone who is so well known around the
world that they only have one name.
Let's think. Who lives with one name?
Ronaldo?
Madonna?
Who else? Beckham?
Yeah?
Okay. We get the idea. Super famous people.
They only need one name. They can put
it. It's an autobiography.
And then people just want a chronological
view of events of their lives.
Born, did a bit of football, became a
football star, then became a model, married someone
else famous, had kids, da da da, a
few dramas along the way,
autobiography.
Oh, but a memoir.
Memoir is something really interesting.
Because a memoir
are the events of somebody's life,
but with a purpose, with a theme.
Yeah?
The theme is bigger than the story of
the person.
That's the difference between an autobiography
and a memoir.
Getting out of the way of the real
story and the bigger
message is a really fun way
to write a book about
your experiences.
Many authors mention this saying something like,
I just want my book to help people.
But the only problem is that when pressed,
they often haven't thought about how their book
will help.
It's not that it can't. It's just maybe
we don't know specifically how.
So the why of the book, why am
I writing it? And the how of the
book, how will it help?
These are important elements
for writing
a legacy book, Insha'Allah.
Now here are some common ways books can
serve readers which I looked at.
The first one is, you're solving a problem.
This is usually the big one and it
can go across a range of benefits. But
the point is that every reader is buying
a book because they anticipate it's gonna get
something that they want. They're going to get
something they want out of it. Does that
make sense?
So what is the thing that your book
will help them get?
The second
main
genre,
main
topic in that area
for a legacy book is that you're writing
to
give people knowledge, wisdom, or information
on a specialized subject
that you know something about.
So sometimes the reader wants to deep dive
into an area.
Sometimes
this is tied with solving a problem, but
not always. So a reader will want to
learn for many different reasons.
Can you give them that?
And then 3rd,
inspire, motivate, and empower.
This is about how the readers will feel
coming out of your book. You want to
help them change their mindset or their emotional
state. You're going to empower them. You're going
to take them forward in some way on
their journey. And then finally, offering a new
perspective. This is not as common as the
the other ones above,
but they're still very frequent. Many readers are
looking just for an entirely new way to
to do things.
Now the 4 are not mutually exclusive, and
when I
decided finally to revisit
the story of how I came to Islam
and my travels to Palestine and the Muslim
world,
I sought to fulfill
3 of the 4 by the grace of
Allah.
I wanted to give people knowledge
and information
about the realities of the situation for the
people of Palestine.
I wanted to
motivate and empower,
to remind people that
we are able to
be active,
even as mothers.
As
people locked into our own way of life,
we don't have to be locked out of
helping others. And I definitely wanted to give
non Muslims a new perspective
on the realities
of,
meeting Muslim people, life in Muslim lands.
I hope I succeeded, Insha'Allah. I believe I
did.
I wrote in search of a holy man,
I wrote in search of a holy land.
I wrote it who for? That's something else
we need to consider for a legacy book,
for any book, actually.
Who is it for? Who's your demographic?
Who's your readership? This is
something that, can be very
time consuming to work out, but it's absolutely
vital. If you say you're writing for everyone,
you're writing for nobody, and that is the
truth.
I wrote in search for holy land. I
wrote it, firstly, for myself at 25.
What I didn't know about the world. What
I didn't know about God.
What I didn't know about,
the condition
of women in different places in the world.
And I also wrote it for non Muslims
who were dubious about women in hijab,
who would, unbeknownst to them,
within a good story,
get schooled in the Muslim and Palestinian reality.
That was really something exciting. And I got
a lot of feedback from people who came
to see the play
of all different faiths
saying that,
wow.
We were amused. It was fun. We enjoyed
it. But I'd never thought of it like
that.
If you get any readers who come to
you after
interacting with your work and say, I'd never
thought of it like that,
bingo.
Bit of a legacy right there.
That's the transformation
that I was looking for. And so this
is how you as an author and your
books can help people.
You can give them information to transform themselves
and the world around them.
And we do this all by Allah's grace,
of course. And to him, we turn in
humility
and gratitude because all outcomes
are with him.
A lot of people do important work but
not a lot of people write books about
it. Writing a book means that other people
will learn from you and improve on the
foundations
you have provided.
You will have made the world better, and
that will be a great blessing
pleasing Allah to Allah. And that
is a legacy.
Yay.
Sis. Thank you so much
for that
lovely talk. I
super, super enjoyed that, and I appreciated it
because
you have been through the journey that so
many of our authors, you know, are going
through twice.
And, I wanna pick up on a few
things that you mentioned.
You brought there.
A lot of the things that I, you
know, I love to tell others you've just
reinforced them and given them, hopefully
you'd
understand
a bit more of a deepening and the
higher purpose of them
telling their story.
Now
you mentioned something that I find very, very
interesting, which was that you wrote your memoir
in your twenties,
and it was,
you know, as you say,
it was full of
These we can call them I guess of
negative emotions, right? It was you know point
scoring it was you know, you had some
you know, you had Stuff you needed to
work through right you had stuff you need
to work through there was self pity there
There was you know frustration there. There was
probably a lot of anger there if I
if I'm if I if I'm getting the
right gist here
And it sounds to me like that was
your cathartic draft.
That's what we call it in our programme.
Sometimes we're carrying stuff
that is part of our journey,
part of who we have become
but it's ugly you know. It's it's it's
it's bitterness. It's anger. It's it's disappointment.
It's, like you said, you know, point scoring,
maybe even just hubris. Right?
But it's stuff that needs to come out.
Right.
In order for you to get the clarity
to then be able to write something that's
actually presentable to the world.
And a lot of a lot of sisters
want to tell their stories.
It's interesting to me and I I love
the way that you said that, you know,
you've done you know, every a lot of
people do good work, but very few people
write books about it. That's a huge thing
for me because I believe people who have
done good work are the ones who should
write a book. Right?
But many people who many especially sisters who
come and they say I want to write
a a you know, tell my story.
It's usually because they've been through something difficult
and they've overcome it and they want to
share their journey I guess of triumph and
inspiration and hope with you know, with with
other women, other sisters with the world.
Along the way, there is often a need
for catharsis
because most sisters, most women I speak to
have not
ever told the full story to anyone.
They've not
told you know there's this stuff that's happened
to them that they have not told family
members that they've not told their spouse
that they've never articulated
you know what I
mean and and and a lot of that
stuff they're still carrying they haven't had therapy
a lot of the time they haven't had
counselling a lot of the time so there
is often a need for some bloodletting
right so when you wrote your first draft
of what you thought was your memoir, were
you aware that you needed to work through
some issues,
or was it you thought that you were
writing the real thing? Because that happens too.
Well,
I was a performer at the time, so
I was an actor. And that kind of
does give you a third eye, but it
doesn't it doesn't necessarily mean you make a
good judgment. Right?
You only have to see what Hollywood is
like to know that actors are appalling judges
of
of technical and business life most of the
time.
So, I did feel that I was
venting.
I did feel that there was there was
some good characters in there. But what I
realized after I got about
6,
about 6 chapters in
was that
it was
it was very much from a child's perspective
a wounded child or a wounded person's perspective.
Mhmm. And that that
So as a performer, I looked at it
and I went if I'm reading this out
loud, and this is a very important thing
to do, to read it out loud,
to hear the sounds
of the sentences
that it, I wasn't
pleased with the writing. I wasn't pleased with
the creativity.
I was, I was hearing a whine
and and honestly
nobody wants to read a wine. It's it's
you wouldn't.
Okay?
So, you know,
dynamic experiences can come from pain. There's no
doubt about it. Most music is made,
from pain. There was a famous group I
used to know called Spiritualised and,
you know, the poor guy was just going
through breakups and drug addiction and I remember
an actor saying to me when we were
watching them live at the Albert Hall, we're
literally watching someone in pain. Isn't it beautiful?
And it's very, very strange.
But he was making
beautiful art that was that was incredible music
that I was listening to at that time.
Don't listen to music now. No fatwas.
So the point No fatwas. Your hashtag no
fatwas. Right? But the the point here is,
how are you going to develop that? I
I'm glad I didn't bin it. Don't bin
it. Yeah. Okay? Don't hate it so much
that you bin it because all of that
is really, really good information, and I came
back to
it 25 years later. Wow.
I think that you have to take the
prize then for this year's Muslim Writers Summit
because,
the longest we've had so far
for any of our speakers
from the day they started writing to the
day they published
was 8 years for Khoso, who was in
our panel yesterday.
So she had 8 years. She was the
longest on the panel, but you are was
it 20 years?
20 years. Yeah. It would have been 20
years. And it's and it was rumbling around
and taking shape. And, you know, I mean
and also why why would a 20 year
old think they'd had an interesting enough life?
I mean, you have you have to think.
Yeah? You have to really be able to
to to put your experiences into perspective.
If you've had if if it's if it's
a very
tough emotional
year,
let's say it's a very compacted time,
How is that going to stretch out? How
is it going to be deep enough?
How are there going to be enough
moments and characters
and people other than ourselves
to to get interested in? Yeah. Because, you
know, you'd have to be some dynamic character
for someone to want to hear about us
for 400 pages.
For sure. For sure. And I think
just as you said there, you know, a
year in a life can make an amazing
memoir but only if you're writing in hindsight
only if you have you had a chance
to get some distance from it I want
to say this to everybody who's listening who's
I say this to to my clients you
know when it comes to the book that
you want to publish because we have ladies
with us who write for healing
with no intention of publishing
and ones who come in wanting to publish
and some of the ones who come in
expecting and wanting to publish
find that they actually
need to write
appeal first
in order for them to get that sense
of distance from the story to decide what
they want to publish
but what we say to them is that
the book that you put out into the
world should be written from your scars not
from your wounds
So if you are writing from your wounds,
what what is a wound? A wound is
still
it's still active right? It still can be
you know can can be opened up again.
It's you know it's bleed it's * it's
pussy it hurts.
Right? It's raw.
Right? Now
in your pre cathartic draft, if you're writing
from your wounds and you're writing from that
place of honesty and vulnerability and it's raw,
you may have some really good writing in
there. You may get some really you may
you may get some really good pieces of
of honest, you know, kind of gut wrenching
writing, which is wonderful,
but no one wants a whole book full
of raw gut wrenching you know kind of
venting of your pain working through your issue
so a lot of the time what our
clients end up doing is they do the
cathartic draft they get it out of their
system
get a bit of distance and then they're
able to go back in and take portions
and use portions of it which is why
I loved your advice of not throwing it
away because you may still be able to
use that but writing from a place of
hindsight
from a place of a little bit of
distance
and like you said having some wisdom, having
gained something from the experience
because if you've been through a painful situation
but you haven't learned anything
you don t move into other world. You
know what I m saying? That s my
opinion because the fact that you ve been
through pain
we've all been through pain. You know what
I mean? The reason we share those stories
because the pain has given us something in
return,
something that can actually be of use to
other people. I don't know. Do you think
that that that there is, like, a criteria
for things that you should share
and can share or, you know, and things
you should keep private? Or do you think
everything should be shared, like, you know, there
isn't a different I liked what you said
about your why. That that's what made me
think about that. Mhmm. So there's 2 things
here. I think I think you've put your
finger on something brilliant, the cathartic
historic.
The cathartic
historic.
It's it's now you're you're now the other
side of the experience and you've got an
overview of it. And and what will help
is to read, read, read.
What I started to do was to, 20
years later on, go, you know what? I
know there's a good story in there and
now there's enough real experiences
and I and I've got these other tales
coming through.
But I don't really
understand
how a memoir would work. So I read
other people's memoirs.
I read things in the same field.
Yes. And especially
if you're going to be a writer,
we have to have some respect for this.
We must. We must have some, you know,
respect for ourselves
not to put things that are unfinished out
there
or uncrafted.
And we must have some respect for for
for the creative field that we want to
enter in and some respect for other people's
time. If we are just, if I'd have
been sending out
that cathartic,
but not historic
wound,
you know, I've just wasted people's time and
I frankly embarrassed myself with too much information.
Yeah. And often here's the thing as well,
if you're writing about a situation,
who are you implicating? This really helped me.
Coming
I don't think I could have done
I wouldn't have done as good a job
if it weren't
for, coming to Islam, alhamdulillah,
because Yeah. You know, you have certain criteria.
Don't cause any harm.
You know?
Don't put other people in harm's way.
Educate and help. Don't backbite.
Mhmm. You know, don't backbite.
You know, I took out great chunks because
I just thought, I'm just I'm back I'm
not this is not nice stuff. Yeah. Where's
the and where is the good stuff?
Yeah. So I think read, read, read. Get
get you know, look at things in your
genre. I read Muhammad Assad's Road to Mecca.
I was just about to mention that, SubhanAllah.
You too. And you know what? And I
took from it.
Like, he starts
at in in,
in the middle and then goes back and
then comes forward and he jumps about. And
Yeah. And at first, it's a bit disorientating.
But when you get into the rhythm of
it, you're like, wow. It's the camel. It's
the camel. It's the dramaturities that he mentions,
yes, in every the beginning of the captions.
Yeah. I love it. It's that so
everyone is watching,
especially those of you who are either clients
of mine writing your memoir or who are
thinking of writing a memoir,
please do
get,
sister Lauren's book. Okay? It has a new
title now, Lauren. What's the new title? It's
called In Search of a Holy Land.
Because I went searching for the holy land
of my heart, that truth, and I was
taken to the holy land of Palestine and
to the holy land,
by the Kaaba as well. And so it's
those 3 holy lands all in 1 on
a real spiritual journey. And you can find
it on Amazon, on Goodreads.
I really recommend,
if you don't have time to read right
now, listen to the audio book which I've
recorded myself, and it's really good fun if
you can listen to it with the family.
Yeah. And, yeah.
I I just wanted to just reiterate because
why I'm saying it's not just because she's
a guest here that I'm telling you to
read her book,
especially for, you know, those of you who
are interested in writing a memoir and you're
just not sure how a memoir works.
Sister Lauren you can cover your ears if
you like but
she can really write you know like like
really
Sister Lauren's writing,
her storytelling
skills
are top notch.
So, you know, we have a list, and
we're creating a list actually of memoirs that
our clients can kind of dip into to
get a feel for what is out there.
Sister Lawrence is definitely one of them. I
think Muhammad Asad as well from my sister's
lips is also a memoir so if you're
not sure of the genre
that's another one and there are a few
others that we recommend
But definitely, Lauren, your one is, is in
terms especially the story itself is interesting. Of
course, it's fantastic.
So many rollicking tales in there.
But specifically your your writing voice and your
storytelling style
I would love more sisters to just absorb
that because you know this is a writing
conference so the right summit so I want
to reiterate what sister Lawrence said which is
that
your writing
oh, I've put my teacher's garb on now.
Your writing
cannot transcend your reading.
Your
your level of writing your writing voice will
not so
you'll find that people who typically I remember
when I was, you know, I had my
baby girl, Miriam and I was you know
in my, what's it called me first whatever
and I had the whole collection of Jane
Austen's novels
and I just read them all in one
and
I started writing emails
how they speak in Jane Austen's novels, you
know. Yeah. I started
You read. Words, the vocabulary.
Right? The cadence changes. Yeah. Your syntax changes.
And
while lucky, I know even to today
some of the books I've had published out
there, I recognize
where I got that ideology from. I recognize
and I remember
from books from childhood or magazines that I
used to go into was, you know, even
though in the time in the moment when
I was writing it, I didn't actively copy
anything When I read it back after it
was published, I was like, hold on a
minute. This sounds familiar. This refrain is familiar.
And I realized, oh,
it's from that book that I used to
read to the children. These things impact you,
you know, and it's almost like you are
you're filling your mind with
tools,
images,
you know, words, descriptions, adjectives, verbs,
characters,
descriptions, settings, you know, ways to Let let
let let me jump in here.
Please do. Yeah. Let me let me jump
in here, Habibati, because I I'd like to
say this. If you're going to write a
movie script and you've never been to the
cinema and you've never watched a film, would
that make any sense? There are too,
many,
people wanting to be authors who say I
don't like reading.
People will not like reading what you write
in that case.
Now it doesn't mean that there's no chance
for you, but it does mean that you're
gonna need to find a way of accessing
great works of literature. And if you're an
oral person, if you really find that difficult,
if you're gonna get someone to help you
write, that can still work. But you must
start listening to the spoken word. You must
start listening
in a creative way. You must start using
that time, and you must start taking those
tips because we basically stand on the shoulders
of giants.
You know, from from Mohammed Assad,
I took the start of my book. I
read his book again recently and I went,
oh my God.
That's literally what I wrote. I started my
book in Iran
when I wake up in a mosque.
And it's at the end, and then I
go back to to, you know, North London
in 1970.
And, you know, it's like, you know, my
my my daughter said, that's really disorientating. And
I said, no. It's a technique.
It's a brilliant technique. It works in movies.
It works in plays, and it works in
books. But if I hadn't been reading around,
I'd have been so lost in my own
story. I wouldn't have had those techniques. So
we all need to learn on this journey.
Yes. Yeah. 100%. I love that. And really
what it's about,
you know, for everyone listening, it's really about
elevating
your writing,
the actual skill of writing, the craft of
writing and like you said and like I've
just said, you know your writing will never
be better than your reading you will never
be able to transcend that because you just
don't have the vocabulary like the the tools
of the the raw material isn't there
so Whatever it is that you want to
write
whatever genre,
whatever style
Read the best books in that category read
the best books in that genre whether it's
memoir whether it's children's books whether it's middle
grade fiction
You know mystery,
You whatever it is.
I remember how many, ladies used to say
to us that they wanted to write children's
books and then when we would have the
workshop, we'd ask them, you know, what are
some of your favorite children's books? And just
as you said, they said, oh, I don't
read children's books.
You got no business writing children's books if
you don't read children's books because you don't
know what's you don't know what this genre
requires, you don't know what it sounds like,
what it looks like, what the possibilities are
and similarly with memoir I love the fact
that you know you were reading Muhammad Asad
and then you you saw it coming back
to you in the books that you ended
up publishing.
I love it.
Lauren
how can people continue to learn from you
because you are as we everybody heard at
the beginning
you know very well rounded
system mashallah you know lots of skill sets,
lots of, you know, wonderful accomplishments.
How can people learn from you? So
learn? Yeah. Well, you can learn with me
at laurenbooths.co.uk.
You can sign up. I've got new courses
coming through after Ramadan via Nelita Allah.
And, you can also go to kcmedia.co.uk.
And kcmedia is where we do media training.
And that is if you're a professional already
or you are looking to,
improve your interview skills, you want to get
on your your face on TV or on
your voice on the radio,
and you want to know the how, the
what, and the why from people who have
been doing it. We're 2 trainers, and between
us, we've got 60 years, 70 years experience
in the media.
So, you know, in in all different areas,
but a lot of news and a lot
of commentary
and, a lot of, commercial TV. So,
you can go to those two places. There's
2 websites there. And, of course, follow me
on Instagram as well. Send me a message.
Let me know. I've got a YouTube channel,
which is mostly for my dower, but it's
some of my thoughts as well on, the
way the world is today. And so Lauren
Booth
official on YouTube.
I think, sister Naima has either sister Naima
has frozen or I've frozen,
but I've loved this love love love love
this session. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Lauren, and we will
put the links to all of those in
the description once the video goes up.
And I hope that you guys can hear
me. But, Lauren, thank you so much for
that brilliant session.
I certainly learned a lot. I know that
our audience did too. We've got over a
100 people watching live on YouTube, which is
great. Oh, no. Over 200 actually watching live,
which is fantastic.
We will put the disc the all the
links guys will be in the description. Make
sure that you do take sister Lauren up.
We are so blessed to have so many
amazing sisters in the community who are sharing
their skills who are opening their doors to
share what they've learned
in all their years of doing this work
masha'Allah. So please make dua for sister Lauren
and her family and all her work and
My dear friend, you know, I love you.
I love you and I continue to bless
you May Allah continue to bless you bless
your work allow us to continue working together
for his sake and the evening just kind
of bring a whole army of, you know,
of sisters along with us, inshallah. May Allah.
I mean, inshallah.
Mhmm. I mean I mean, may we be
Is that okay though? Will we all be
beloved by Allah to Allah? Lots of love
to you, sisters. Keep up the great work.
And, you know, may may may Ramadan bring
blessings to you.
Oh, yes.
Shalom Habibti.
Assalamu alaikum, guys.