FLAMINGO WRITER
FLAMINGO WRITER
American Stories: Writer in Residence: SOHRAB HOMI
FRACIS
In October, Sohrab’s first collection of
short stories, “Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America,” will reach
bookstores as this year’s winner of the nationwide Iowa Short Fiction
Award. A collection of stories set in
India and America, this book is the result of ten years ’dedication to the
craft of writing. Sohrab, a civil
engineer by education, born and raised in India, settled in Jacksonville after
a career as a computer programmer and received a masters in English with
concentration in creative writing from University of North Florida. He wrote a novel that won the First Coast
Writer’s novel contest, and then went on to apply for and receive a Florida
Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Arts Council to work on his
writing. He is currently working on a non-fiction book of literary philosophy.
An Interview with Sohrab Fracis, author, “A Ticket to
Minto: Stories of India and America”
FW : What
does it take to be a successful writer?
FRACIS: It takes hard work, a little talent, a
willingness to take risks, and eventually some luck. You have to be both thick skinned and thin skinned.
FW: What does that mean, to be thick skinned
and thin skinned?
FRACIS: To be thin skinned means you have to be
sensitive to your own perceptions. You have to be conscious of your impressions
and emotions and ideas and then allow them to flow outward.
Writers are self-conscious. You have to be sensitive to write. A writer can have a nucleus of an idea, a
character, even a plan, but the story has to percolate from the inside out.
Then, a writer has to be gutsy with the
material, push the envelope for the good of the writing. Worrying about what
people might think of you, the story’s author, is a big inhibitor of
creativity. Writers have to think
fearlessly.
Writers can become overwhelmed. They
want to find a formula or a style, but it’s the story that matters most. Sure, form does reflect content, but the
content dictates the form. So it takes
time to develop.
FW: Taking time. Is that the hard work?
FRACIS: Yes. Writers should realize that writing is
not a performance art. There’s no
immediate pressure of pleasing an audience, no on the spot pressure to pull it
off or else! When you’ve thought through the idea, then you should write a
first draft and make it as good as you can.
Then rework the piece as many times, over a long period, as it takes to
get rid of the weak spots and problem areas, improve on its strengths.
You have to be willing to approach
your projects as a professional would.
You should do research, and be alert for areas that require authentic
details. Read about your topic. If it’s a book length project, you should
try to take a writing vacation or a sabbatical from your job. If the project is past the incubation stage,
the story wants to come out of you and you don’t want to be distracted. You want to allow yourself to be obsessed.
FW: How can you know what the problem areas are?
FRACIS: Learn the craft. Read “how-to” books on writing, writer’s magazines (Mr. Fracis
recommends Poets & Writers magazine), genre magazines. Attend writing seminars or panel
discussions. Join a good writers’ group
which fits your genre and have your writing critiqued. Take classes. Be willing to find out your writing needs,
to find your strengths and your weaknesses.
Be willing to learn how to use your strengths and overcome or circumvent
your weaknesses.
FW: All this sounds like you have to be thin
skinned enough to be perceptive and thick skinned enough to risk criticism
without crumbling. And patient,
too. You talk about finding your
writing identity. How do you do that?
How did you find yours?
FRACIS: For me, writing fiction is pure freedom in
many ways. Like computer programming,
it’s code, but it’s also free form and there are no restrictions on content. You select what’s going to be in your story.
You have to shape it, but at some point, you also have to give up some
control.
FW: So you decided to stop writing code and
write fiction?
FRACIS: I was tired of the nature of computer
programming. It was becoming too dry
for me, personally, to do for the rest of my life. I was also tired of the
uncertainty of my job. I worked on a
contract basis for companies and moved every two or three years, when the
project was done. When I got to
Jacksonville, and my contract ended, I decided to return to my first love of
books and reading. So I went to get another MA, this time in English with a
concentration in creative writing, at UNF.
FW: It sounds like your writing identity and
your personal identity are closely related.
FRACIS: My writing area, my background material, is
my experience living in India and in America.
My stories are set in both places. I sequenced the stories in my book
this way: one is set in India, the next one set in America. So they function roughly as companion
stories: sometimes the two stories in the sequence might share a similar theme
or maybe a character reappears. You
have to know what your background is, what it is that you have a unique point
of view about, to find your writing identity.
FW: Writers, it seems to me, are natural risk
takers.
FRACIS: In some ways, yes. I think I’m fairly conservative in other
ways. I like to have some sense of
continuity in my life. And yet, I
definitely have stepped up to the plate and taken huge risks with my life and
career.
FW: I think people are fascinated by the way
writers work. Do you follow a writing
schedule? For instance, I know you like to work at night and that you’re very
protective about your writing time.
FRACIS: I don’t have a rigid schedule. Sometimes I’m in the incubation stage,
sometimes I’m researching. But I do
write something everyday once a project is past its conceptual stage.
FW: Do you read a great deal?
FRACIS: I have to be selective about what I
read. I don’t have time to read
everything. I read the books and the
writers that are in my field. For
instance, when I was in London, I saw that the work of Arundhati Roy ( THE GOD
OF SMALL THINGS, winner of the Booker Prize 2000) was all over the place, but no one had heard of her in
Jacksonville. I knew it was very good
when I reviewed it for the Times-Union well before it received the Booker
Prize. I also reviewed the story
collection Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, before it became a
surprise winner of last year’s Pulitzer in fiction. A writer needs to read well reviewed books and the cutting edge
anthologies and magazines, to get a feel for what’s out there, for what readers
of your genre are reading and to find role models… not to imitate but to get a
feel for the quality of the writing.
FW: So you read to keep up with the state of
the art in your genre. You say it takes
luck to be a successful writer. What
does that entail?
FRACIS: Being persistent for as long as it takes to
allow your big break to come along. For
example, it took about a dozen entries of my book in university press or small
press contests across the period of a couple of years to manage to win one.
When I first submitted it to the Sandstone Prize fiction contest, it got to the
semi finalist stage. I worked on it
some more and submitted the manuscript for the Flannery O’Connor Award the next
year. I got to the finalist stage that
time. You have to remember that the
short story collection market in mainstream presses is almost closed to
first-time book authors. So there are
hundreds of fine story-writers out there in terrific literary magazines, whose
only avenue for book publication is to somehow manage to win a university press
contest outright against fierce and brilliant competition. Well,[I still couldn’t find a mainstream
press to publish the book, so the next year I submitted it to the Iowa contest,
hardly daring to hope it could even make the finals, let alone win.
FW: Your first novel won the First Coast
Writer’s Conference novel contest. What
was that like?
FRACIS: The contest enabled me to get a New York
literary agent for the book and she liked it very much, but after it was sent
around to several publishers, it was not accepted as it was. It’s remained unpublished, though a total
reconception and rewrite from scratch is one of my upcoming projects. My agent
asked me if I was working on my next novel, but when I told her that it was a
story collection, she said flatly that she didn’t know of any New York editors
who’d be interested in one. So that was
the end of our partnership.
FW: Our theme for this year is American
Stories. Do you think there is such a
thing as an
American story?
FRACIS: America is a story of myriad backgrounds,
about different cultures all emigrating to one larger country. In my book, Ticket to Minto, my stories are
about a divided sense of place and identity, an Indian American sense of
place. To put it simply enough, an American
setting or sense of place could make a story American. But a great story has a global appeal, not
merely a cultural one.
FW: I feel that English stories are known for
their sense of society; Russian stories have this great existential
soulfulness. Japanese stories I’ve read
strike me as being very conscious of personal honor. When I was growing up, I heard stories about ancestors from three
different countries; some of the stories about my Irish grandmother, I’m
positive, were elaborated upon in order to create a more colorful family story.
FRACIS: In India, every group is quite separate
(though that’s beginning to change).
For instance, in my first novel, I wrote about a Hindu central
character, because I wanted to explore a characteristically Hindu theme of
oneness, but I am not a Hindu. It was
not a character with my background. In
America, ancestries are often more mixed together. I think, in the case of America, the distinctive mark might well
be the matter of an identity, the search for identity. That’s an American
story.
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