I liked the push and pull of that, between the outer political world and the inner personal lives … - Said Sayrafiezadeh

Same topic Authors

Quote of the day

Inspiration comes from displacement. Get out of your comfort zone, the rewards are legion.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

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.

Character, Focused, Outer, Personal, Political, Real

Same Author Quotes

An initial impulse of mine was to portray the way in which a city is impacted by war. But this is vague, no? After all, how do you actually have an entire city - or country, for that matter - be a character a reader can follow? One way is by making it smaller and personalizing it, by writing specifically about the citizens and the way they contend with the reality, even minutiae, especially minutiae, of their lives.

Actually, Country, Smaller, Specifically, War, Writing

The thematic links came a little later, after I noticed I was gravitating towards certain elements - war, city, weather. So it wasn't all planned out from the start, it came out of the process.

Cities, Gravitating, Start, War, Weather

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.

Character, Characters, Ended, Good, Wanted Love, War

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.

Character, Real, Stories, Think, Woman, Writing

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?

Character, Page, Turn, War, Writing