Kiyash Monsef, "The Unbeatable Deck of Ronan Shin"

It’s December 20. Kiyash Monsef has a scratchy shiny rainbow rare, but his parents won’t let him bring it to school.

How would you describe your story?

KIYASH MONSEF: A coming-of-age story about two young outsiders, and the card game fantasy world that protects them from the horrors of high school.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

KM: I wrote this story over the course of a couple of weeks in the spring of 2017, but I think the idea of a narrative interwoven with flavor text from a collectible card game had been kicking around in my head for a while.

I think my process, when it comes to short stories, is to have a few elements crystal clear in my head—a character, a moment, a beginning, maybe an ending. Working from those elements, I start filling in the rest. In this case, I knew most of all how I wanted the story to feel, and I knew more or less how I wanted it to end. But the friendship between Ronan and Nima—particularly the character of Nima—was something that happened kind of organically as I wrote. Which, looking back, is interesting, because the end doesn't really work without that friendship informing it. But that's how it happened.

The cards were their own fun challenge. I wanted each one to tell a story, all by itself. I wanted each one to be surprising in its own way. And I wanted to keep hinting at the mechanics of the game, without spelling it all out. So there was a lot of really delicate work to make each one come across as both specific and self-contained, and at the same time evocative of a bigger world, in as few words as possible.

What kind of research went into this story?

KM: There wasn't a lot of official research involved. I was growing up just as Magic: the Gathering had its first wave of success, so I think I kind of leaned on my memory, and on experience with online card games like Hearthstone to suggest some of the mechanics of the game. I think I looked at a few bits of flavor text from different games to see how long they could realistically be, but I never gave myself a character limit or anything like that.

Honestly, I probably spent the majority of my "research" time on this story trying to find the exact right Persian name for the character of Nima.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

KM: I don't think the short story has a monopoly on any particular aspect of storytelling. But I do think there are things that short stories are particularly good at doing. I think they're a great vehicle for experimenting with form and voice. “Ronan Shin” is in part a conceptual experiment, and I think it's successful in 4,000 words. But I think the experiment would become tedious if it were stretched out over 20,000 words.

I also think short stories represent an interesting and unique dynamic between author and reader. A reader comes into a short story with the promise that it will be short, that its demands on their attention will be bounded. And so it's up to a writer to work within the constraints of that expectation. As a reader, I've noped out of short stories because they dragged, where I'd give a novel a lot more latitude. So there's something special to me about the dance that happens between author and reader in a really great short story, where every single word is a kind of triple threat: revealing a world and its characters, building towards a narrative payoff, and keeping the reader engaged.

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

KM: I have a website: www.kiyash.com.

I also have a Twitter: @kiyash.

I'm working on a novel, but there's nowhere to learn anything about it yet.

What's the best gift you've ever been given?

KM: I have two four-year-old daughters. The joy, creativity, comedy, and weirdness of their daily existences are the best gifts I've ever received.

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