The author of two books and numerous flash fiction and micro fiction stories, Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer based in Columbus, Ohio. Her flash fiction and microfiction, including her debut collection Morsels of Purple, explore the nuances of womanhood across cultural and geographic boundaries. Her novel Skin Over Milk tells the story of three girls “who bear the weight of being unwanted daughters in 1990s India.” Sara’s writings have appeared in several print and online literary journals, including Ghost Parachute, SmokeLong Quarterly, Reflex Press, and Flash Fiction Online, and have earned nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. She also is a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly.
In addition to her writing, Sara is a mother, wife, and IT leader who holds an electronics engineer degree and an MBA. Read on to learn how she balances the many facets of her life to consistently create wonderful stories.
1. Your technical background and MBA are quite unusual for someone so successful as a a flash fiction writer. How have your technical education and career, as well as your business education, influenced your approach to crafting concise, evocative stories, and do you see any parallels between your IT work and writing flash fiction?
My engineering background enables me to critically analyze what I have written and rectify the parts that are not working in a story. That helps me with flash because, with the limited number of words in flash, a writer needs to find the weak spots and fix them to make the narrative whole and convincing. Although my IT job is not directly related to my writing, I work on deliverables against a timeline. That mindset has thus far enabled me to produce stories for submission or contest deadlines. My novel is not gathering the same kind of momentum, though. Need to work on it more.
2. What one or two stories are you most proud of, and what makes them particularly meaningful to you?
I am proud of my story, “The Goat in the Math Problem” (SmokeLong Quarterly). It’s a hermit crab style of flash and is different from the themes I usually write about. This one is about being human, being kind, taking the right decisions to protect others. Its ending evaded me for a long time. I tried it in many ways until I knew the point at which it should end, and the final image to accompany it. The readers have told me that it packs a surprise they did not expect, and I’m happy I could do that with this story.
Another one is a recent story “Binary Stars” (Ghost Parachute). This one draws a parallelism between stars and human lives–a reminder that the universe is connected at a base level. From a resilient blade of grass outside my door to the objects hanging light years away in the sky, there’s so much to observe, so much to learn from nature.
3. As a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, what qualities or elements do you look for in a standout flash fiction submission, and how has your editorial role shaped your perspective as a writer?
I look for a narrative that contains a full arc which resonates with me, makes me believe in the characters as real people, makes me care for them, makes me think of them long after I’ve left the page. It’s not language or metaphors; it’s the honesty, the beating heart that I am looking for.
The “So what?” that I look for in others’ stories helps me shape my own writing. I ask myself the question, Why would someone care if I submitted this story to readers/editors of a journal? If I don’t get that answer, the story is not ready yet.
4. Why do you use @PunyFingers as your X/Twitter handle? There must be a story there.
Unfortunately, no gripping story here. When I was browsing Twitter, I found many writers using interesting aliases for their handles. I looked around for inspiration, and ended up staring at my hands on the keyboard. A person of short stature, my fingers are tiny, yet they do all the writing for me. With that in mind, I used @PunyFingers as my Twitter handle. It was an in-the-moment decision, not something I had applied a lot of thought to.
5 For aspiring flash fiction writers looking to break into the genre, what advice would you offer to help them hone their craft and create compelling, compact narratives?
As I said in an earlier question, keep the narrative honest. If you have a story that has a heart and a convincing ending, the other elements like language or sequence of paragraphs can be fixed easily. Another important aspect is to not give up after rejections. Modify your story, make it real, make it whole, but don’t give up if you believe in the tale you are trying to tell.
Follow Sara on X/Twitter at @PunyFingers, on Instagram at @sara_siddiqui24, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/sara.siddiqui.3954.
Andy writes! 