Editor's Note: Shahan Mufti is the author of The Faithful Scribe, a sharply told account of family and faith in Pakistan, using the stories of his ancient ancestors to excavate the country's complex Islamic roots. Here, as part of Biographile's Lessons Learned month, a month of authors sharing lessons learned while writing, Shahan addresses the rift between the thoughts that rattle in our minds and the words that make them real. By committing our ideas to paper, he concludes, life becomes that much truer.

I originally set out to write a book about my family and Pakistan, and how Islam and war had molded each over time. But somewhere along the way the book also became about the act of writing. My encounter with my family’s long and fantastical past -- much of it is recorded as written stories -- began while I was working as a war reporter, writing stories of my own about Pakistan for readers in America. So, it didn’t take very long for me to realize that until I explored what it means to remember and commit memories to paper, my book would be incomplete.

I met many of my ancestors through their written word. Between the pages of his employment record from the British colonial bureaucracy, my grandfather had captured some nasty workplace politics between Muslims and non-Muslims. My grandmother kept a diary as a teenager during WWI, and she revealed some heartfelt emotion about the fall of the Islamic caliphate. The most striking artifact was a tattered leather-bound volume written by one of my ancestors more than a century ago, which described his diminishing fortunes during the British colonial period, when the Islamic and Western civilizations first collided along the banks of the Indus River.

Curiously, my parents, the people who linked me to these stories of my family’s past, had written little about their lives. But they are both alive and well, so I began to interview them, notepad and voice recorder in hand, ready to include their tale. For some sessions, I sat them down together. At other times I split them up, and I had the Rashomon-esque experience of hearing the same stories from different vantage points. I ended up with hours of recordings and reams of transcription. But when it came time to write their stories, I felt strangely deflated. I had so much rich detail but their stories appeared flat on the page, and they appeared dimmer than the other vibrant characters of the past.

I moved back to New York City for some time, and I continued interviewing my parents, but now mostly through letters and emails. Sometimes I would just put a simple question in the subject line of an email: “What does Islam mean to you?” or something more pointed in a list of questions like “What were the early days of the war like?” And I started getting pages upon pages of responses. Without planning it, I had asked my parents to become, like our many ancestors and me, memoirists. And it was a breakthrough.

With the gentle heft of the written word, my parents’ stories were now compelling. As writers they placed themselves at the center of the story of their own life, and I was able to see clearly their place in the longer family history that I was writing. I knew that we are all born storytellers, but in attempting to write about my parents I learned that we are all also born memoirists. In the translation that occurs between the mind, where we imagine the narrative of our lives, and the page onto which we etch our tales, I learned that our stories become permanent and potent. They become truer.

For all Lessons Learned articles, visit the archive.