Said Sayrafiezadeh
Said Sayrafiezadeh
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is an American memoirist and fiction writer living in New York City. He won a 2010 Whiting Award for his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free. His short-story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, was short-listed for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction. He serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
CountryUnited States of America
real character political
I liked the push and pull of that, between the outer political world and the inner personal lives of the characters. It's also real life... Many of us are keenly aware of world events, but break your nose and I bet that's the main thing you'd be focused on.
mom dad writing
I don't feel any ethical dilemma when I write. In my memoir, I was able to write with candor about the two most difficult people in the world to write with candor about - mom and dad. Everything else is downhill from there.
country military war
I was trying to hold up a mirror to this country, to reflect the past years or so, and the varying degrees in which we've been affected by the war(s) that doesn't seem to end. And we've all been affected somehow, even if we have no connection to the military, even if we don't know anyone who's killed or been killed. No one escapes something so large.
war writing character
The benefit of writing a collection - as opposed to a novel - is that I'm able to have some version of the war in each story without having to comment on its all-encompassing nature. Turn the page and here are new characters and new situations, but the war remains... Isn't that how life has been for us for over a decade?
inspiration cities imagination
Of course, I had a paradigm of a certain city in my head when I wrote these stories, a city that inspired my imagination, but it was only inspiration.
character people fiction
This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.
character ideas symphony
I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin.
writing keys lines
I sometimes have to write for a while before I figure it out, pretend that I know what I'm doing, sort of like ad-libbing on stage until you remember your line - you hope you sound convincing to the audience. The key is to have enough material, enough threads, so that there's something that can be satisfyingly drawn to a conclusion.
enemy encounters stories
When the ending finally comes to me, I often have to backtrack and make the beginning point towards that ending. Other times, I know exactly what the ending will be before I begin, like with the story "A Brief Encounter With the Enemy." It was all about the ending - that's what motivated me.
loss thinking childhood
[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly drawn from my own childhood: violence and a loss of innocence. But keep in mind that, as a writer, I'm both the criminal and the victim. I'm not trying to get out of anything easy.
real writing character
But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.
war character wanted-love
Love and happiness inextricably combined? I wanted love stories to coincide with war stories, I wanted hope for my characters, I wanted a sense of a future. So do they. So does the reader. But perhaps I shouldn't speak for everyone when I say that love and happiness are interdependent. In my own experience, happiness came with love. Specifically, my wife. That's when my own apathy and stasis ended for good.