The other kind

I'm a digital journalist in Amman and I know how to write a story that cannot get anyone in trouble. I know which facts to lead with, which context to include, where to stop. I am very good at navigating the constraint. This account is for the fiction. The fiction has the other things in it: the parts that don't fit in a reported piece because they're too specific, too close to someone still living, too rooted in anger or fear or a kind of dark comedy I don't have room for in a news format. I write under a pseudonym, which is what this alias is, and the people who know me in journalism don't know I write fiction and I prefer it that way. The short fiction I'm working on is set in Amman, in a neighbourhood I know well near Jabal Luweibdeh, and it concerns people making decisions in conditions of political uncertainty, which is not a fiction premise but a lived reality, and turning it into a story requires finding the specific human detail that makes the general legible. I read Randa Jarrar and Hisham Matar for this, the way both writers carry political weight inside intimate domestic scenes. The craft is in the proportion. I'm still learning the proportion.