Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on the Performance of Fiction

Editor’s Note: Read Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s new short story, “A Substitution.”

“A Substitution” is a new story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Sayrafiezadeh and Oliver Munday, the design director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Oliver Munday: In your story “A Substitution,” a playwright struggles to figure out his next project. You’ve written other fiction concerned with theater, and you’re a playwright yourself. What about the relationship between playwriting and fiction writing do you find most interesting?

Let’s start with the fact that playwriting is ultimately a collaborative process, while fiction writing, sadly, is almost entirely solitary. Often painfully so. Yes, the playwright in this story stares at a blank computer screen late into the night, for weeks on end—just like every writer in the world—but eventually he gets to be in a rehearsal room with 20 actors and a director, socializing over muffins. This, of course, is the behind-the-scenes of the process, the part that the reader—or audience member—isn’t privy to, but which I think must inform the finished product. Moreover, playwrights are dependent on others to bring their artistic vision to life, which includes the audience’s imaginative ability to fill in blanks where blanks exist. And never are there more “blanks” than in the world of low-budget theater, where there’s no sound, no set, no lighting, and you’re lucky if the actors have something in their closet at home that might approximate the necessary costume. On a side note, some of the best performances I’ve seen have been in stripped-down spaces,