Q&A the Second

Q: How does it feel to walk away? You’ve just complete a ginormous four book cycle (well, you finished it a while ago). Is it refreshing to turn back to other things, or do you light-headed?

A: The answer, of course, is yes. I am tremendously grateful to be done with the Doctrine of Labyrinths, but I’m also a little bewildered and finding it difficult to settle down to work on anything else. On the third hand, I know, down to the very bottom of my soul, that this story is done. Unlike with the previous three books, there’s nothing leftover, for me, at the end of Corambis. I have no desire, temptation, inclination, or other impulse to keep telling Felix, Mildmay, and Kay’s stories. I love them dearly, don’t get me wrong, and I hope I’ve made it clear that their lives continue past the end of the book, but the story is over–just as, for me, the stories of most of the characters in The Mirador are over at the end of that book, even though many readers seem to feel that there are a lot of loose ends. I don’t want my characters’ lives to end with the end of the story, so I actually go to a good deal of trouble to make it clear that everything isn’t tied up neatly with a big red bow. Their lives go on, and they have more problems to solve and consequences to deal with, but the story I am telling is over. And I am grateful for the chance to move on to different stories in different worlds.

Q: Do you ever find it difficult to accurately and sympathetically portray trauma/PTSD in fiction without getting too dramatic? It’s a pretty delicate balance, and one I think you manage well.

A: Thank you. And, yes, it is difficult. I generally end up writing a very cathartic emo draft and then going back and taking out all the melodrama–letting the characters tell me how they react instead of moving them around like puppets of Angst, Despair, and Woe. The difference is frequently remarkable, so I suppose if I have anything resembling advice on the subject, that would be it. Each character is going to react to trauma differently, based on personality and experience and cultural expectations–and the particulars of the situation. It’s never one-size-fits-all.

Q: How do you turn ideas into short stories?

A: The same way you get to Carnegie Hall.

Okay, now that I’ve got the flip answer out of my system . . . unfortunately, I don’t have anything better to take its place. It depends on the idea and the story. Sometimes it’s very straightforward: my short story “Straw” was a dream. I turned it into a rational narrative mostly by unpacking things the dream compressed and compressing things the dream overelaborated. It took me most of a Sunday morning, and what I had when I’d finished is almost word for word what Strange Horizons published. That is, however, simple and painless and lovely, is not even remotely the norm. The other story of mine that Strange Horizons has published, “Draco campestris,” is a story that accreted, grain by grain, over the course of several years–actually, it must be more than a decade, since the idea of the Centre and the arcs of the Circumference is from Emily Dickinson, and I think it’s from reading Dickinson in high school, rather than in graduate school. Another part of the story, including the title, comes from a necklace made by Elise Matthesen, which I admired for two or three years before I found the story in it–and then it took me another two years to get the story out of it. Which happened by writing all those disconnected fragments and then figuring out which order they belonged in and why. Accretion is much more typical for me, and I’m always, honestly, a little surprised when what emerges from it is recognizably a story.

The other way I write stories is pastiche. The Kyle Murchison Booth stories are all M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft pastiche, with a side of Arthur Conan Doyle and some Edward Gorey as a palate cleanser. In essence, they’re mysteries, which is a little like the prose equivalent of a sonnet, and there it’s just a matter of fitting what I want to say into that mold. (This is not always as easy as I’m making it sound.) The ideas behind those stories tend to be simpler, and thus they’re also simpler in form. No weird chopped up narratives (like “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day“) or stories like “Draco campestris” where there’s barely any narrative at all. I can also get ideas for Booth stories from dreams; “The Yellow Dressing Gown” was nearly as simple to write as “Straw,” although the two stories could not otherwise be more different.

And sometimes I can’t manage the trick at all. I have half a dozen short stories languishing on my hard drive because I cannot figure out how to turn the idea into a story.

So maybe my most honest answer would be “I don’t have a clue.”

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There’s one more question for this month, but as the question itself is a spoiler for Corambis, it and my answer are on my blog, so that everyone can choose whether they want to read it or not.