Always use the word "Middle East" or "Iraq" or "Pakistan" in your title. Subtitles may include the words "bombs," "nuclear war," "Osama Bin Laden," "terrorist," "Muslim," "Arab," "Saudi Arabia," "oil," "Allah," "turban," "Islam" or "Quran." Other useful are words such as "ISIS," "Al Qaeda," "Benghazi" and "Middle East," Note that "the West" means American soldiers, while "terrorists" means all Middle Easterners.
Never have a picture of a well-adjusted Middle Easterner on the cover of your book or in it, unless that Middle Easterner has won the trust of Barack Obama. AK-47s, C-4 bombs and explosions: use these. If you must include a Middle Easterner, make sure you get one wearing a turban or donning a beard.
Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Americans and Middle Easterners (unless a death is involved), Middle Eastern references to writers or intellectuals or mention of school-going children who are not suffering from a bomb explosion or are not a child soldier. Your Middle Eastern characters may include men wearing turbans and long robes, women in black dresses with their faces covered, diviners and seers and ancient wise men living in hermetic splendor. Or include corrupt politicians, men waving swords around and harems with scantily clad women.
The Genie always behaves like a best friend and needs a master. He is scared of commitment, bad with evil and good with creating elaborate love plots. The Genie always comes from a bottle (not the evil one like Jafar). He is blue and grants your three wishes. The Modern Middle Easterner is a fat man who prays to Allah all day and refuses to accept that our Lord and Savior Jesus is the real hero. He is an enemy of non-believers, is a bomb fanatic and is training to become an ISIS warrior. Or he is a servant to the political ruler and attempts to kill the ruler. He is a creep who likes the political leader’s 16-year-old daughter, and his best friend is a sassy, talking parrot.
Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the Middle Eastern characters laugh or have normal families with one wife who is not his sister or live normal lives like getting a cup of coffee from Starbucks. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in the Middle East. Middle Eastern characters should be violent, full of hatred and bitter – but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.
Among your characters, you must always include The Lost Traveler who wanders the deserts nearly naked and mourns the death of his sister wives. His children have guns and wounds from their past in the child army, and he awaits his entrance into paradise where his 99 virgins reside. He must look utterly helpless. He can have no past, no history. Such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Curses towards the West are good. He must never say anything about himself in the dialogue except to speak of his (unspeakable) suffering.
Also be sure to include a warm and calm man who has a rolling laugh and is concerned for your well being. Just call him Abba-Dabba. His other warriors all love the West. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can fight with them, joke with them and eat with them. He carries lots of war stories and has seen death. Your hero is you (if reportage) or an Austrian FBI agent, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, trapped with his wife or played by Jamie Lee Curtis, after he lied about being an agent.
Describe – in detail – warriors (young, old, conservative, violent, big, small) or orphan children. And dead bodies. Or better yet, dead bodies of children. And especially rotting dead bodies of children. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the "real Middle East," and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them escape the Middle East through the help of the West. The biggest taboo in writing about the Middle East is to describe or depict happy, mundane people.
In your text, treat the Middle East as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with deserts and camels and tall, bearded men who swing around swords. Or it is hot and dry, with very violent people who hate non-Muslims. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. The Middle East is big: 26 countries with a total of 50 million people who are too busy terrorizing and dying and warring and raping to read your book. The continent is full of cars, cities, suburbs and Starbucks, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and vague.
Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the deserts in the Middle East. And the sun–the sun of the desert. It is always big and bright yellow. There is always an empty sky. Wide empty spaces and lack of life are critical–the Middle East is the land of vast, empty deserts. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that only camels reside in the desert with their sword-wielding masters. When your main character is in a desert alone, it is OK to mention a mirage and the flashing of his life before his eyes. He has a sense of self-realization in those moments and is able to defeat anything.
You’ll also need an underground bunker called Abd al Hakim where terrorists, prophets, western hating people and the 99 virgins reside.
Always end your book with a quote from the Quran about the beauty of life or the revelation of God. Because you care.
