One Person’s Story of Storytelling: How War Affects Storytelling in Syria and Beyond
Sometimes, I receive messages from readers asking me why my stories no longer feel like they used to, why the shadows are darker, the silences heavier. That’s when I realize how much war affects storytelling has shaped my own writing. I didn’t start out wanting to write about war. I wanted to write about love, longing, and memory. But war entered, and then storytelling had no choice but to follow.
I learned early that conflict doesn’t just change a story’s plot, it transforms its purpose. In Syria, before exile and before destruction, stories began in cafés, light, hopeful, about family. Now, they begin with the ache of absence and the question: “How do you even speak when life is waiting to collapse again?”
From Romance to Reckoning- The Shift in Tone
When war affects storytelling, it teaches writers that innocence can vanish in a night. Characters no longer ask, “Will they love me?” but “Will they live?” My own characters transformed, and I realized they weren’t just searching for love, but truth, healing, and survival.
Researchers have noted that once conflict begins, narratives become more introspective, difficult, full of moral dilemmas, and the preciousness of each breath. That shift, toward raw emotion and moral urgency, changed my focus from elegant prose to emotional resonance.
When Choices Carry Consequences
Peaceful stories ask simple questions. War stories enlarge the stakes. In my writing, I now often ask: What do you keep when you lose everything? And what does it cost to hold onto it?
War doesn’t just affect storytelling. It demands ethics in every line. We can no longer ignore how our characters respond under pressure. Readers, too, sense this. They don’t want escape. They want honesty. They want the weight of a decision, fully felt.
Story as Memory: How Conflict Preserves What Might Be Lost
War reminds you that without words, memory withers. I’ve written about Palmyra, not because I saw the columns fall, but because I remembered them when they were still old and alive. Storytelling becomes an act of preservation.
Elegant criticism reminds us that war compels literature to carry memory for civilizations. That’s what I try to do: hold small things, the smell of jasmine in Damascus, the echo of laughter in a ruined courtyard, in language, so they outlast the rubble.
Storytelling Becomes Resistance
In times of war, even the act of telling becomes an act of defiance. I’ve read stories from other cultures, like war poets in Europe during WWI, where the simple act of naming tragedy became radical. This doesn’t just happen in history textbooks. It comes through pen, voice, or word. Here is the story. We are still here.
In Syria, every poem, every novel, is defiance, not of a regime, but of forgetting.
Story Carries What War Tries to Destroy
If you ask me how war affects storytelling, I’d say that it gives stories a task far greater than entertainment. It asks them to remember, to bear witness, to reckon with grief, to show us courage in darkness. And if a story can do that, even imperfectly, it becomes something more than fiction. It becomes a small victory.
So yes, war changed my storytelling, not by choice, but through necessity. And for that, I remain grateful the pen can still stand when bridges burn.