Are you an aspiring writer? Do you want to write a controversial, agonising, heartwrenching bestseller? Are you the next Dan Brown? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, Satirical Muslim has some tips on how to make your dreams become reality.

Muslims are the religious community du jour and now is the best time to cash in on this phenomenon. Sure, the bookstores are very well stocked in books with covers featuring veiled women, but if there’s one thing Dan Brown’s success has shown the world, it’s that people can’t get enough of mediocrity.

If kidnapped children were the flavour of the 1980s and western women enslaved by Arab men who turn into monsters once they return home were the flavour of the 1990s, then honour killings are the leitmotif of the Noughties. Every book must have a beginning, an honour killing, and an end. If you can’t think where to include it, then maybe you are writing the wrong book.

Satirical Muslim offers some ideas on how to write a bestselling tragic story of forbidden love featuring oppressed Muslims.

Theme: Honour killings

Norma Khouri may be a lying, deceitful and disturbed personality – and a lousy writer to boot – but despite being exposed for fabricating her story Forbidden Love, she’s now starring in her own documentary. So don’t let facts and truth stand in your way when penning your tale of illicit love and honour killing. You too should strive for infamy, and who knows? Maybe you can be the next Norma Khouri.

It’s important to ensure your story has a decent amount of villainy and evil. The male protagonists alone will fill this quota. The only good male should be the forbidden love interest, who cannot be Muslim, because otherwise the story won’t make sense. Also, your struggling heroine must have a reason to believe in love and to see that not all men are bad – just the Muslim ones. Make her unemployed, poor, uneducated, and if you really want to make it interesting, deaf or dumb. This injects a wonderful amount of pathos.

It’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the country you’re setting your story in. Don’t do what Khouri did and imagine the places and people because otherwise a nosy journalist will cotton on, and your career will be over quicker than you can say “recalled”.

Just take a short vacation to your location. When you think about the money you’ll make from book sales and appearances, it’s a small investment.

If you really can’t afford to travel, there’s still hope. You don’t need to go to Amman or Riyadh to find abusive Arab males. You can find them right there in your imagination. If you need inspiration, catch a taxi or take a walk to your local convenience store. Take down the names of the swarthy males you see. They might not be wife beaters or woman haters, but you’re entitled to exercise artistic liberty.

What matters isn’t where you start but where you end up and, if you work at it, you could even end up scarred and, preferably, subjected to some sort of culturally insensitive abuse, in which case you will be better off writing an autobiography (see “The autobiography” below).

The autobiography

While autobiographies should be based on reality, fortunately the Muslim oppression genre allows for a more elastic interpretation of the bio.

Find a Western author (male or female, both have benefits). Tell your story truthfully to your ghost writer, leaving out the more positive moments and role models, and leave the rest up to him or her. The writer will weave his or her magic and before you know it, you’re a princess married into an even wealthier and more powerful family than your own.

Once again, it kind of steps on the story if you have too many good Muslim men in it. Make one good, but then he turns evil. You want it to be believable and to cater to existing ideas. This isn’t Chomsky, so don’t make things difficult for the demographic reading your tale of despair. Also, don’t try and invoke genuine Islamic provisions and ideas. This will only confuse and burden your reader with “the other side of the story”. Keep it simple.

Try and search for the worst moments in your life, even if they were simply normal events in youth. Awkward adolescent phases, everyone knows, are always worse for young Arab Muslims growing up in the sweltering heat of the Arabian desert.

This format is great for women (particularly non Muslim ones) who have been married to real bad Muslim men, especially if you were forced to leave your home for his and/or your child has been kidnapped by the father. These stories translate very well to visual media; if it’s not a big screen hit, HBO will probably pick it up and you’ll be at the Emmys before you can spit.

The self-serving journal

Lots of Western women do the next best thing to writing a fictitious account of forbidden love. They travel around the Muslim world and write about it, because they are very important and what they think is inspiring, moving and extremely formative.

Don’t worry too much about having connections there. Do what they all do: get there and find the first “normal” woman you can, interview her, crap on her existence and with furrowed brow and sighs explain why you’re glad you’re not her. Find an exceptional self-hater to be your ally; this makes the reader realise you’re not being prejudiced because even people there agree with you. Remember: these women living backward existences don’t know any better and if they realised they could have what you have, they would never want to dress modestly or be guided by religious principles.

This book is really about you and how great you are. You won’t even need to invent bad guys because you will find them everywhere: think of it as the domino effect. If you can find one sleazy male, he’ll lead you to the mother ship. Can you appreciate how easy it will be?

Try and find a controversial topic that readers will sympathise with. For example, the plight of belly dancers struggling for recognition in Ikhwani-plagued Egypt. Take lessons and protest. Or you can go to Jordan and have coffee out in the open with a man and defy anyone to say or do anything. You will be a hit.

Pure fiction

If you’re a novice, taking the fiction category route is probably the wisest decision. Sure, all other stories will have some flowery embellishment, but this way you can avoid nasty legal suits and having to explain yourself on current affairs programs.

The other good thing is that if you have one hit with fiction, you’ll seal a sweet book deal, which is harder with stories attempting to evoke reality.

Once again, you can’t go wrong with interreligious forbidden love, and if you know your region, add some provincial conflict; nothing says despair like warring villagers. Even better, if you’re willing to do some political research, have a conflict zone as the backdrop, such as Palestine or Chechnya.

Note: a controlling, hypocritical older brother is essential; your story will be a mess without one. But you can also have more than one good male character (he can even be Muslim) in this kind of story, because everyone knows it’s fiction. Since your heroine will be unemployed and unsocial, she’s unlikely to have any humorous friends to balance out the pathos. Nevermind – just give her an optimistic and simple sister.

If you’re short on ideas, read. There’s no better template than that which has been written before you.

The look

The cover can make or break your success as a burgeoning force to be reckoned with in the Muslim oppression genre. Graphics, title and font are all significant.

For the picture, some authors use the familiar camel, while others use evocative desert sands. Don’t use either. Nothing says you are serious and authentic like a veiled woman. Preferably completely veiled with only her frightened, beautiful eyes (go heavy on the kohl eyeliner) peering out, beseeching you to help her by forking out $32.95 for the book.

Keep titles simple and to the point. Don’t fear formulaic; it’s tried and true. Start with a word such as ‘forbidden’, ‘hidden’, ‘caged’, ‘veiled’ or ‘Arabian’ and follow with a word such as ‘love’, ‘lust’, ‘passion’ or ‘princess’. For example, Forbidden Princess, Hidden Lust, Caged Love, Veiled Passion, and so on. As you can see, all work well and guarantee you won’t lose the attention of the average Oprah viewer.

Finally, do not adopt Western fonts. Flowing, Arabic-looking scripts will accentuate the theme and message of your book. It looks exotic and screams danger, intrigue and honour killings, as well as displaying a healthy respect for Arab culture.