376. A Family Affair: How to Portray Sibling Relationships, with Farah Naz Rishi

Hello, I am Jenga Delima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that

takes a whole person approach to everything relating to both writing and editing. Writing

advice about relationships often takes a deep dive into romances, friendships, or maybe

the relationship between a child and a parent. But what about sibling relationships? With

siblings, their shared history, experiences that are unique to this kind of dynamic, and

as time passes, there may also be grief that shared, but also uniquely felt. Here to

help us explore how to write these relationships authentically is author Farah Nasrishi.

Well, first, I'm so thankful to have you here today.

No, thank you so much for having me. So what do you think makes sibling relationships

different from other types of close connections?

At least in my experience, for better or worse, I think siblings tend to know each other

better, the good, and the bad. It's really difficult to filter yourself, because they're

seeing you at home all the time, and at least with my younger brother, he would see the

good, the bad, and the ugly, and could weaponize that against me, or could lift me up in ways

that other people couldn't, because he would know exactly what we were going through,

or understanding parent dynamics better than anyone else could. With came to friends,

you have to explain the backstory and stuff, but there's just an inherent knowing that

they have, and they can work from that context. It's a whole different beast of relationship,

I think.

No, I completely agree, and it's almost like this person probably has better insights

into you sometimes than anyone else, including yourself, because they have seen every single

aspect of who you are, and they probably also have a pretty good idea of the events that

shape you, or even what those family dynamics were like within the family that no one else

really has a clue about.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, since you mentioned having a younger brother, did you ever use any real life examples

or scenarios in your writing, or as inspiration?

So, for a lot of the dialogue, the anger, and I think the longing to reconnect that happened

specifically between Aden and Eliza. I think I channeled some of those feelings into

the conversations and the dialogue. My brother actually passed away, so along with the two of

them, thank you, were exchanging, I think, came from those feelings of abandonment and feeling

like, oh, you left, right? And so, in a way, I think subconsciously, I think I was writing

from that perspective as well, even though, of course, their circumstances were completely

and utterly different, and my brother and I were a lot closer, so, yeah, slightly different,

but also, I think we can't help but insert some of that into the book.

Could you share a little bit more about the siblings in your book, and maybe where that

feeling of abandonment comes from, but even why that type of abandonment isn't maybe

what we would normally associate the word abandonment with?

Yeah, so we have Aden, who is essentially the main character, I think, who is probably

the best way to put it. He is the eldest brother, who has a lot of issues on his plates.

Suddenly, he, being the eldest, was essentially forced by his parents to take care of their

prize-winning cockatoo, and so he didn't really have much of a childhood, and so he holds

on to a lot of bitterness and resentment because of that. And then we have Eliza, who is

the middle child, the younger sister, and her story is really the one about abandonment.

She not only abandons her dreams of becoming a veterinarian, but she also feels abandoned

by her older brother, who she felt was essentially a buffer between the parents and the siblings,

and I think she has a lot of grief that she's grappling with, and then we have the youngest

brother, who is Summy, and he is just kind of stuck in the middle of their fight and tries

very hard to be a peacemaker. So he's as we know.

You just touched on this a little bit, but I wanted to talk to you about the individual

roles that each sibling plays. So maybe one is the peacemaker, or one is more of the adult

figure, and then even how these roles might change as they age.

So Eliza, I think, is a great example of that emotion because she very much was shielded

whether she realized her not by Aiden, who was the main victim, I think, of their parents

control and obsession over this bird, essentially. So when he left, she kind of had to start

fulfilling that role and take on almost a mother role for Summy and kind of be the glue

that kept the family together after Aiden left. So I think she goes through probably the

biggest evolution, whereas Aiden, who was the big brother and the caretaker, when he

leaves, he kind of, you know, is set free and doesn't have that kind of big brother mentality

anymore. He becomes way more selfish, I think, maybe it was independently. And then Summy

Watt, he really does. And he's not always that understanding either about why his siblings

feel the way they do. And I think that that's kind of commonly see people who haven't had

a typical childhood, or they feel that they haven't, or that they've been denied something.

Yeah, he definitely has the emotional capacity of a potato. And I think it's really difficult

because, you know, as I'm writing it, you know, I know, obviously, obviously his siblings

at the end of the day just just missed him. And, you know, there is that abandonment and

that bitterness that he got to leave this dysfunctional family. But I think the core of the feeling

was really just we miss you. And he has no idea. I think the idea that anyone would miss him

is something that's so foreign to him because he's never, you know, had any sort of healthy

relationship with anyone. Yeah. So can we talk to you then about how you might have a childhood

that is shared, but how you each have your own unique perspective of what that was like,

and maybe apply that to each of your three siblings in this book? Yeah, I mean, when you,

it's so fascinating, right? Even as siblings, when you're raising the same household with a lot

of the same ideas and rules by the same two people, sometimes one person, whenever you have a

parent figure, a lot of that does shape you, but because you're just inherently different people,

how you react to it, I think, is really the big difference there. In Aidan's case, he

had the brunt of it. So he and had no outlet for a lot of his emotions, I think, because he felt

so isolated. He had no one else to talk to because he was so much older than his siblings. He couldn't

exactly talk to them. So that's why it was easy for him, I think, to some degree, to make that

decision to leave what he viewed as a toxic household. And for his siblings, you know, because they

were shielded from that, they kind of viewed the household as maybe not as toxic as he did,

because they didn't really have to see that side of their parents so much. They were allowed

to be children at least a little bit more so, I think, than he was. So I think Aidan also has

a little bit of bitterness toward them too, because they were allowed the childhood, and that

perspective that he was never allowed. Yeah, I completely agree with that. So moving more toward

a craft-focused question, what did you do or what techniques did you employ to make sure that

this relationship felt believable? And also, is there anything you've seen in other writing where

the relationships feel unbelievable? Yeah, for me, when I'm writing, when I am thinking about the

relationships between characters, I think the biggest point of focus for me is to think about

the different relationships in my life, and to talk to friends who are also experiencing, you know,

say issues with their siblings, and it all kind of becomes this messy soup essentially in my head

of these thoughts and ideas and bits of dialogue that people have said that like, oh, my siblings

had this, and we fought about this, or my sibling did this for me, and I totally didn't expect it,

and it was so sweet. All of these things kind of start to churn in my head, and I think that's

inevitably what gets put on the page, whether I even almost realize it or not. And so a lot of the

characters that I make and the relationships that, you know, I put on the page, I think are just

huge amalgamations of my own personal relationships and the stories that I've heard other people talk

about, and it all just becomes its own, its own thing in a way. So that was definitely the case for

for this book. And then is there anything that you have ever seen in maybe a book or a movie

where the sibling relationship something about just feels off, or like maybe the creator

hasn't really grasped what that is like, and it's just not coming across?

It's so funny that you mentioned that. I think there was some TV show that people were talking

about when it comes to sibling relationships, and why it's really difficult sometimes to get

that across on on TV, because you don't have real siblings, or there's things happening behind

the scenes, I cannot for the life of me. And so if someone who's listening to this knows what

I'm talking about, but apparently there was this TV show where these two siblings were actually

married in real life. Oh, so. Oh, unfortunately, that dynamic apparently played out a little bit

on the screen where that's really unfortunate. It's like that should be illegal. Like I've,

oh, my God. Yeah. So apparently that happens. But that's that's probably an extreme, extreme case.

Yeah. Hopefully that's not something that explains why I never watched this show.

Yeah. But that was honestly the most egregious example that I can think of.

Thankfully, I am very much a proponent of, you know, DNFing books that aren't working for you,

because life is short. So yeah. There are so many books out there why

force yourself to read something that's clearly not for you. Exactly. Exactly. And it's like,

okay, this this one clearly isn't for me. But thankfully, I think because of that, I have not

run into the the problem that would definitely hurt me, which is unrealistic sibling relationships.

Yeah. So this can go back to your book a little bit too, with the part that various personalities,

play and how did you develop a personality for each character that made sense within the

sibling relationship and that shared upbringing, but also acknowledged that they had their own

unique experiences. Yeah. When I think of book ideas, usually it starts off with a character kind

of sitting in my head. Usually I'll have like a dream or I'll ask, like I'll see someone walking

on the street and start asking myself questions about this person. Like, what are they doing?

What are they thinking? You know, what does their day to day look like? And so I start to

formulate this character in my head. And the first two characters that popped in my head,

where we're in Eliza, as wild as it sounds, as soon as they kind of like appear in my head,

they already are very close to how they're going to essentially be on the page. There's like an

essence that you just know, like this character has to be a jerk, an absolute unlikeable jerk.

And this, the his sister needs to be a lot softer, but thornier and holds that bitterness. And

then that's when more questions start forming in my head, well, why? Why is this dynamic so appealing

and interesting? Why are they angry at each other? And so that's how the story kind of popped

on my head originally. It was just Aiden and Eliza on a road trip to go after their parents'

bird. And that's that's really the image that I had of these two siblings bickering angrily

as trying to find a bird, which the situation was so absurd and ridiculous. I was like, oh,

that would be, that would make a pretty funny book. And then, you know, I started to interrogate

it like, why a bird? I don't even know. Before we were recording as far as I'm not a huge fan of

a bird's or say, so why birds? Those questions really do start to help me formulate what the story

is going to look like. So when did you then add the younger brother in? Or when would you feel that

he would complete this sibling circle? Well, so these two characters are obviously very angry.

They have a lot of emotions. The whole time in the car originally, it was just like a beat up

car. I was imagining what that would look like in a screenplay or on, you know, TV screen. And I

was like, that's exhausting. That would be so exhausting to see these two siblings just going

at it, yelling at each other the entire time. And so what happens if you put in a character

who's way softer and more, you know, like less broken, you know, broken from the parents? And

and really just wants everyone to get along. And, you know, so that that came,

Somme came a little bit later as I was trying to think about what the story would look like.

He was always intended to be a peacemaker. So he kind of came as like, okay, well, what would a

peacemaker character look like? Someone that would be able to control these two very big personalities.

And that's when Somme started to form. And then how did you make Aidan unlikable,

but not so unlikable that readers started to wonder why his siblings didn't just write him off

instead of wanting that reconciliation? It's so hard. It's really hard.

When I was younger, I would DNF books with unlikable characters because I had difficulty

convincing myself why it would be worth following their story. And now as I've gotten older,

I think those are the only stories that I really gravitate to because I'm so interested in

how this character going to evolve and how is the author going to be able to pull off me

rooting for them in the end because that is so fascinating and interesting. How we can completely

change our minds about a person. And I think it's also just more human and realistic to have characters

that, you know, haven't beat up by the world and hold on to a lot of baggage, but deep down,

maybe still have that heart. So for Aidan, as I was writing him, he was way too soft. I think that was

just kind of the character that I always wanted him to be a jerk, but I just didn't know how to

be bad than being a jerk, but still, you know, not making the reader be like, oh my god, he's so unlikable.

I need to throw this book across the room. No, right. Too bad he's not lost instead of the bird.

But as soon as I first started writing that scene of him getting the news,

I had hoped that, okay, we were showing that he has already gone through such significant loss

and he clearly has a very strange reaction to hearing about it. Would that at least be intriguing

enough to continue reading? And so, you know, as someone who didn't necessarily always love

unlikable characters, I had to ask myself, well, is it enough for me? And at some point,

after writing and rewriting and rewriting, I hit a point where I was like, no, yeah, no, I am

really curious about this character, even though he clearly is a jerk. He doesn't even seem to react,

have much of a reaction to his parents' death. Oh, yeah, no, that's true. Yeah, let's talk about

that too, the different ways that they feel about their parents' death and the different ways

that they grieve. Right. So, that was a really cathartic thing for me to write. I've also lost

both of my parents. So, a lot of what Aiden was experiencing, I think also came a little bit

from that of just this feeling of numbness. And I think that's for me the biggest thing where

it was such a shock losing both of my parents that I almost couldn't grieve at first,

and for weeks on end, I barely cried. It was more just feeling completely numb.

But like, it was so insensible that, you know, my parents had died. And I was still, you know,

28 at the time. Oh, no, that's so young for that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, I think that's where

I was able to write and pull from for Aiden. And I think it made sense for him because

how do you, I also had a complicated relationship with my, with my mom in particular. So, I,

I understood the the unique discomfort of losing a parent at a young age that you don't have a

healthy relationship with. On one hand, you're, you're grieving the parent, but you're also maybe

more so even grieving the loss of a relationship that could have been. Right. Yeah. Now there's no

chance to remedy that or to form that connection when you may have hoped that in later life, you would,

yeah. Exactly. So, you feel like you've lost out on this chance not only to potentially heal

from the relationship, but also to hear any sort of acknowledgement of the pain. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So, that, that would ultimately, I think, also bring up a lot of, you know, anger and

resentment too. And so, all of those feelings, I think, is, is what Aiden is grappling with and why

he just seems so frozen almost in the beginning. You know, he, he thanks the officer that, that

called him in the beginning and recognizes that that was a weird conversation. Oh, yes. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you so much for telling me that my parents are dead.

But he's, he's essentially a robot at the, at the time. So, that, that part was easier to write,

because I, I had that background and Eliza was a little bit different because she, despite having

these, you know, from, from how I wrote them, very terrible toxic parents, she was still clearly

grieving them. So, so it was hard to write that part, I think. She's obviously grieving,

some he's obviously grieving, but that's also understanding that they, these, these parents are

completely different characters to those two. Right. And then how do these various reactions

to grief add to the tension or friction in between the three of them? Oh, yeah. For, for Aiden, he's,

I think Fury, almost saying these two, something. Oh, no, our parents.

I was sad. This is terrible. I was like, why are you sad about this?

Not remember all the horrible things that they did to us. Like, we, we basically didn't have

a childhood. They would be us constantly while they, they go travel. They spent all of the money

that was meant for our college funds. Oh, right. Yeah. You know, all of this stuff, I feel like,

for him, a lot of that, that frustration would come out. And they were like, how could you be so

heartless that don't feel seemingly anything for lots of spare parents? So that, that tension,

I think was, was really fun to write on the page. And then how do you let also tensions from the past

filter in as they're having these moments where it's not really all about grief? It's also that

unresolved history between them. Yeah, it's hard. There's so many pieces to a single life and how

they intertwine with the pieces of your siblings lives. There's all of these unspoken

resentments and words just, I almost feel like there's a lot of unspoken appreciation for siblings

too that happens. And, and sometimes you don't have to say it because it's just felt.

So, so the thing about these kind of more complicated emotions when I'm writing,

I usually just focus on the bare bones of it. And then I go back and layer, I think of it as a

painting you put on the base colors and you go back in and you seed more and you seed more.

And then eventually you get to a place where it's like, okay, I think I'm feeling the intensity

of all of these different emotions on the page. But in the beginning, it's just ugly base color

after base color. And it's like, wow, these, these characters have very singular emotions. And

there's no depth to it. But that's, that's to me, I think the easiest way for me to keep track of it

all and to really make sure that we're feeling the depth, or at least I'm feeling the depth of

while I'm writing it. And then how did you balance that with having to shift yourself from what

one character is feeling to another? So it didn't feel like one was maybe taking up

more page-based meaning that they deserve or that they became the focal point.

When I'm thinking about putting those, we'll say, base layer emotions, I'm also thinking about

how they're interacting with each other. So if we're going with this, you know, base color

analogy, you're thinking about colors that work best together and need to be deepened later.

So when I, when I write first, I'm thinking about, okay, we'll just look at Aiden, what is Aiden

thinking? Okay, look at Eliza, what is she thinking in feeling? What is somebody thinking in

feeling? What can I do now as I go back to make those feelings more intense and even more at odds

each other? And so that's, that kind of is all part of the organic process of intensifying those

emotions and then maybe specifically pushing them to have to interact with each other in interesting

ways. And what are some of the miserable? And what are some of the interesting ways that you

did force them to interact? I have this, this fainting couch is really the best way that I can call

it. And part of the process for me is closing my eyes, listening to music that feels very much

in line with the theme of the story and trying to visualize it again like a, like a screenplay.

And that's, that's for me the easiest way that I can write. I'm, I'm essentially trying to

watch a movie in my head and see, okay, if I were watching this as a movie, what would be most

interesting to, to witness, to see, to be that fly on the wall seeing this scene between these

symbolings. And as soon as I give myself space, I consider that part of the writing process for

the day. And sometimes I have to pull myself away from the computer and just be like, okay, time to

sit in my imagination, fellas. That's good. I think about that one.

Dagerie really hard about this because otherwise when I'm sitting at the computer and the words

aren't coming out, I started to, to feel this sensation of, of writer's block or fear that, oh no,

this is it. Time to kiss my writing career goodbye because I can't do anything. But the visuals

in my head, as long as I, I focus on that, I think the rest of the story usually comes.

And then do you, do you have a favorite of these scenes, maybe, or one that you are particularly proud

of? Oh gosh, I really do love the, the opening scene because I think it does give such a fun

insight into Aidan and the tone of the story, but as ridiculous as, I mean, I won't spoil it,

but as ridiculous as the RV scene with the Grand Canyon is, I think I had the most fun visualizing

that and, and writing that, seeing it come to life on the page, I think was ridiculous.

I hesitated a lot too because I was like, this is so absurd. And then I remember that sometimes

real life is, yes, so why, why the hell not? I had a lot of fun writing that.

Well, and before we end, or as our last question, if you had to use one word to describe Aidan,

Eliza, and Sunny, what word would you give each of them?

Jerk was the first word. I think, I wonder if that's like Eliza speaking through,

could be Aidan probably wouldn't call himself that. And then he just shrug it off, so what?

Do deal with it. Like, he is, he is truly a jerk, but I think he's a big hearted jerk.

Eliza is like, when I envision her, I always think of her as a rose, like very barbed, a little bit

bony, but still there's something about her that's very compelling and, and inspiring, I think,

because of how she's worked so hard to keep the family together. So, so maybe bony,

bony, like tough. And Sunny, I think I would say empathetic, for sure. I think he's the only one

that really tries to think about where everyone else is coming from, and how to keep everyone

together in the most, like the sweetest of ways. Like Eliza obviously works very hard,

is the glue, but Sunny really just does it naturally. Yeah, I thought Mellow, but I think that might

just be because in contrast to his two older siblings, I like that. Well, thank you again,

this has been great. Thank you so much for having me. This is so fun. Thanks.

And to listeners, thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for additional

information, including links to the flightless birds of new hope. And if you enjoyed today's

episode, please subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Thanks again.