Sarah Monette

(Thanks to Leah Bobet for suggesting this topic.)

Corambis (which, yes, I have turned in and even been paid for–loud cheers) is the fourth and final book of a series I’ve been working on, one way or another, since 1993. Now that it’s done, and my brain has grown back a little, I am faced with the quandary of: What do I do next?

The problem–I should make clear–is not that I don’t have ideas. I have at least thirteen ideas for novels floating around in my head, ranging from a modern reworking of Webster’s White Devil to a novel about the first integrated human-elvish baseball team. But, unlike Isaac Asimov, I can’t write more than one novel at a time. So I have to choose.

The first stage of the winnowing process is easy. Several of these ideas are things that aren’t ready to be written yet. They need more time to ferment in the compost heap. I have one novel that would take place in the same world as the series I just finished, and I’m not writing that right now because I need a vacation.

So then it’s down to the things that are ready to write–or, even better, already partially written. Ideally at this point, that would be one thing and there, voila, the decision is made. I have three, and how to choose between them is in fact a dilemma. First strategy: is there one that I know everything I need to know, it’s just a matter of doing the work? Sadly, no. Of the three, one is stalled out three-quarters of the way through because I’d been cataclysmically wrong about where the plot was going; a second has a complete draft (as in, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end), but it needs a ground up rewrite–and that’s stalled out at the beginning of Chapter Two because my protagonists need to discover a Thing, and I don’t know what the Thing is. And the third, for which I have a complete outline of the plot, is and has been refusing to give me either which decade of the twentieth century it should be set in or which voice it should be told in. These are not insurmountable problems, any of them, but certainly no one of them is any easier to solve than the other two.

Now I tried to fob the decision off on my agent–since that could be a factor in the decision; I am a professional novelist, and if one of these ideas seems more marketable than the others, that’s at least something to consider–but he replied with the, “I love them all equally in different ways” defense, and I was right back to square one. So I consulted the oracles put up a poll on my LiveJournal.

Now, the interesting thing about this as a decision making tool is the fact when I get an answer, there is a very distinct reaction in my head: either, “Yes, that’s right,” or “No, that’s wrong.” So it doesn’t matter what the poll says; what matters is that it says something. In this instance, the poll says The Emperor of the Elflands and the inscrutable workings of my brain say, “Yeah, that’s the one.”

This is an arbitrary decision, and that’s okay. If it turns out to be wrong, I can change my mind. But in the meantime, the important thing is that it is a decision, and I don’t have to stand here, miserably stalled out between my three bales of hay, until I starve to death.

Now I just have to figure out the plot.

Last month, alert readers will have noticed that my post was conspicuous by its absence. My excuse is a good one: an utterly ghastly bout of stomach flu. Trust me, you don’t want to know what I was thinking about on May 29.

This month, I find that I’m envying my fish.

I have an albino bristlenose plecostomus–which isn’t nearly as alarming as you think, since the maximum size these critters reach is four inches and they are vegetarian, subsisting mainly on algae. I don’t know whether mine is male or female, as it is still juvenile; we’re still waiting to see if its going to sprout that Lovecraftian crop of tentacles. Its name, insofar as it has one, is Childe Cthulhu, which in the twenty-first century I think qualifies as unisex. But in any event, I have a (currently) two-inch fish. It lives in a five-gallon tank on my desk and spends its life assiduously cleaning its environment–which in fact it is doing even as I type this. As multicelluluar organisms go, it’s a pretty simple one, and I feel certain that unlike the centipede of the notorious dilemma–and unlike me–it never overthinks.

I intellectualize everything. And while mostly this works in my favor, there are some critical issues on which it constitutes FAIL. One of them, with which I have been wrestling for most of a year, is the process of writing short stories.

I only figured out how to write short stories in 2000, and I had a good run (thirty-two short stories sold, my bibliography tells me) with, you know, no more traumas than any other part of my writing career. And then I started working on a short story called “The Hostage Crisis on the Derelict Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool,” and the whole thing collapsed, as Eddie Izzard says, like a flan in a cupboard.

It took me three tries to finish it, and when I did, it was lifeless. I whinedtalked about it with my husband and with my writing partner, and finally figured out what was wrong, but when I went to try to rewrite it, like the centipede, I discovered that I had forgotten how to walk.

Theories of expertise talk about moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. But my problem is that I seem to have gotten two of the steps reversed. I’ve moved from unconscious competence to conscious incompetence. Because the stories that I wrote prior to this crash and burn were not incompetent stories: the slew of reprints in various Best Of anthologies reassures me of that. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t consciously working on my craft when I wrote them; “Draco campestris,” to name just one, is all about the conscious craft. But there was something I was doing that I wasn’t thinking about that was simply, painlessly working, and when it stopped working, I couldn’t find a way consciously to fix it.

Which means, of course, that I can’t stop thinking about it. Obsessing, even. And I know intellectually what’s wrong. Something has shifted so that my brain is presenting me with story ideas theme-first. And what I fail at, again and again, is translating that thematic idea into a viable story. If I get the story first, the theme takes care of itself, but this is breach-presentation, and thus far I have not found a mental equivalent of a Caesarean section.

(Interestingly, I have managed to write a few short stories since the crash, and what they have in common is that their structure came predetermined. Ghost stories have a pattern.)

This is frustrating. I like short stories. I like writing them. I like the sharpness and crispness of them; I like the way I can hold them in the cup of my palm. I like the fact that I can finish a short story in less than a week . . . when I can finish one at all. And it’s frustrating because my brain, lacking traction, continues to spin its wheels, thinking about something that I’ve already thought into a limp and wrung-out rag. And yes, I’ve tried writing without thinking about it, which (a.) I can’t do and (b.) you don’t want to see the results.

I can’t solve it by thinking, and I can’t solve it by not-thinking, and while I wait for some third solution to present itself, I sit and envy the small, simple life of my fish.