hika.

First year Rayaan Shaik is the author of “Five Prayers,” “The Silent Witness,” and “Journal Entry: The Gray Heron.” All three pieces will be included in the 2025 HIKA fall preview.

You have submitted multiple pieces for this semester’s edition of HIKA. Two were poems and one was a short fiction piece. When you get an idea for writing, how do you decide which genre or form to work with?

That’s a really good question. It kinda depends on what’s expected of me, because some of these were for assignments or contests. My “Five Prayers” poem was for a contest. My other poem that I submitted that got accepted was for a workshop in our creative writing class, which was for poetry. So, it kinda just depends on what’s expected from an administrator of what I need to write, but I have always found that poetry is a much more rule-bending writing medium. And so, I definitely think I like writing in poetry more, and then personal essays, prose, memoirs have always been to highlight longer anecdotes or personal experiences. 

Your three accepted pieces are “Five Prayers,” “The Silent Witness,” and “Journal Entry: The Gray Heron.” Can you walk me through your writing process for each piece? 

For “Five Prayers,” that was for a contest in my AP Lang class. I believe the contest was called NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) or something. I can’t remember the prompt for the life of me, but I know it was something personal, and I also remember for that one, it didn’t matter the format of writing. So if you wanted to write a personal essay, you could do that, or poetry, they weren’t very specific on the guidelines for how to write it. So I think, what I mentioned before about poetry sort of bending the rules, I lean more towards that and I think for the personal part, I always trace back to my religion.  I’ve had a very devout upbringing. I think another thing I submitted that wasn’t accepted was a personal essay about seeing the Kaaba, so it’s just another example of my religious roots. I just really like writing about my spiritual experiences. I think with “Five Prayers,” I decided to separate them into each of the five Prayers, like each page was a prayer, and so I wanted to give each prayer an identity. My personal experiences for each one express some type of mood in each poem, while tracing back to those very trivial stuff that I think is important. 

“The Silent Witness,” that was for a poetry workshop in my high school. That was for creative writing. I was a senior. I remember we had to incorporate the word “bell” into our poem, and so I wanted to sort of think outside the box. I knew people were gonna go down the visual imagery route of the bell, like chimes, onomatopoeia, or loud noises. I decided to search up people with “bell” in their names. I found Joshua Bell, he was a violinist, and I found that very interesting because I’ve never played the violin before, but it can be a very quiet background, not as forceful, a very subtle imagery. I sort of wanted to incorporate that into the background in the midst of everything that happens. And so, that’s sort of “The Silent Witness.” I think I just wanted to put something into the background layer in the midst of everything. Sort of, the chaos in the front and that in the back, because I didn’t want it to be the focal point of my poem. I talk about coins or something, and just a series of images. I think it was more of a stream of consciousness type of writing. I don’t know if I was very intentional when I was writing like with “Five Prayers,” but that’s what I got from that experience. 

“The Gray Heron,” that was for the fiction workshop of that same writing class. Very short piece. I forget if there was a prompt for that, a one word prompt, but there was a movie called The Boy and the Heron. I haven’t seen it. It was a Studio Ghibli film. I always thought the creature was cool and so I wanted to take this anonymous individual, and give him a set of binoculars, and have him inspect this heron, and sort of get a glimpse into his life. Then we can see what he sees in this heron. Obviously the heron goes away and there’s all this meaningless stuff, but he still writes it down because he’s looking forward to the next sighting. That was just a day in the life type of thing. 

Since we’ve talked about how you try out different types of writing, is there some craft element you think you will always include in your work?  

I’ve actually tried to do the opposite. I try to make all my writing very distinct from one another, and so I never try to grab one thing I liked in one thing and try to put it in the other. Where I think I found that type of realization, of where I want to make everything different, I went to this summer creative writing seminar program in my junior year. These are writers from all over the nation and they have all these different styles. This one person was just using the page, the page was part of the poem. I don’t know how to describe it but it was very bizarre and very weird and you could tell that was their voice. I didn’t really like the idea of giving a voice to my writing. Maybe they have some similar themes. Like I’ve mentioned, I’ve written a lot of things similar to my religious stuff, things about anonymous individuals that are caught up in these situations, or making the background of something else using subtle stuff. Maybe I’ll just repeat those types of themes or topics, but I can’t say there is something I try to bring into everything.  

Do you have a piece that you are most proud of? 

It would probably be the “Five Prayers” one. My mom has shown it to all the aunties and uncles, my grandparents have read it as well, and whenever I read it I get kinda sad because that was the pinnacle of my writing abilities. I don’t think I’ll write anything as good as that again. And it was for a contest as well, which is crazy. There weren’t any strict guidelines but I was still confined into this thing. But that would probably be the one because it was very personal. 

How did you first get into writing? 

I think my older brother was really into poetry, he was really into writing. He taught me how to write my first poem, so I’m definitely inspired by him. He’s written a lot about our culture, and our religion as well, and I always think that’s super neat and cool. I don’t think I took a real interest in writing until middle school. The thing is, people are always like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I always think, “What am I good at?” I’ve always found that I’m better at my English classes than my STEM classes, so maybe that’s what this is all for. Going into college, I told people that I want to be an English major and they were like, “Are you sure? With the job market? Are you sure about that?” But yeah, I think middle school. And all the best teachers I’ve had were English teachers. I’ve never really felt they were trying to pull something out of me, but they let me express what I want into my papers. Even the most rigid essays about novels I barely even read, there was a bit of personal expression in it. I guess just writing essays in middle school was when I realized I like writing.

How do you think you’ve grown or changed as a writer?

I think when I got into creative writing as opposed to writing in general, that was maybe late middle school/early high school. I started taking a look at other people’s works and other people’s pieces, and this is something I’ve inserted into myself that I don’t like, but I’ve always compared my stuff to other people. I subject what I write to other people’s writing, and I’m like, “Oh my god, how do I reach this level?” But it’s definitely been super inspiring, for sure. I’m taking this course, Writing the Mind, and we read a lot of cool stuff. A lot of poems. They have allusions to mental health, or the writers have gone insane with lots of mental instability in their poems. Sometimes I read their stuff and they don’t even make sense to me, there’s not a lot of clarity there and I don’t understand the author’s message, but I think with that type of writing, I’ve noticed that writing doesn’t have to be for a certain individual or certain audience. I don’t know when this happened, but I realized I started writing more for myself than for other people. I think that’s really important; I don’t think it’s selfish. I think Quentin Tarantino said “I make films for myself and everyone else is invited.” I think that’s sort of how I view it as well. I guess the question would be why publish it then? But the inspiration I get from other people’s writing, hopefully I can emulate that into my writing, so maybe indirectly this writing is for a certain someone, but I’m not trying to write for a certain someone.  

Finally, do you have any other writing aspirations going forward? 

Yeah, I’ve been trying to write a novel. I’ve started, I’ve scrapped it. I’ve started again, scrapped. It’s a bit of an arduous process. I guess just starting small, I’d like to start writing a novel. We’ll see if I can cook something up. I think a novel, a full length play for sure, some playwriting. And of course, the journey of my writing has always been poems, because my brother wrote poems, I modeled mine after his, and then I think in middle school you have those units in English classes where you write short stories, essays, rhetorical analyses, and then it evolved to longer personal essays and playwriting, and I’ve always felt like the culmination of my writing, apart from a novel, would be a screenplay. I’ve always wanted to write a screenplay. I’ve always loved films in general, so films and writing together…it’s the same thing with playwriting. I like theatre and I like writing so playwriting is that medium. So yeah, writing a screen play, and then a novel and a full length play. I guess I want to do a lot of stuff.