Sarah Monette

Last week, I finished the first draft of The Goblin Emperor (::wild cheers::), and in the last five to ten thousand words or so, I gained a new appreciation for why mystery writers so frequently resort to the last chapter In Which The Great Detective Explains It All. And so today I’m going to talk about ending a novel.

Ending a novel is harder than it looks.

For one thing, how do you figure out where the story ends? How do you choose where to stop? For another, unless your novel is exceptionally spare and stripped down, you’re not finding an ending point for one monolithic story, you’re finding a point where you can bring together the ends of several different story-strands, spatially, temporally, and as Captain Jack Sparrow says, ecumenically. And still make it look quote-unquote “natural.” This is where “Rocks fall, everyone dies” becomes a major temptation.

And there’s also the problem–again, unless your narrative is so minimalist Raymond Carver would be proud of you–that you probably have more than three characters with names. You don’t have to explain what happened to all of them, but you also don’t want your readers’ first response to the brilliant, touching, masterful end of your magnum opus to be, “Hey, what happened to whatsherface?” Hence the Great Detective gets all the characters together to explain whodunnit to them. Or, in Victorian novels (which often evade the problem of having to collect all the characters in one room by being in omniscient) there will be a sudden rash of marriages in the last chapter, to get everybody tided out of the way. Both The Great Detective Explains It All ending and the Mawwiage Is What Bwings Us Togethah Today ending are artificial in the extreme, and frequently–as Elizabeth Bear pointed out when I mentioned it to her–awkward, obtrusive, and unsatisfying, but the thing is, I understand why people do them. Because it gets everybody to hold still for FIVE FUCKING SECONDS so you can END THE GODDAMN BOOK ALREADY. And I don’t care if your eyes WERE closed, Aunt Mabel, this is the picture that’s going to the newspaper.

But understanding the temptation is not the same as thinking it’s a good strategy. It isn’t. The more artificial and obvious the narrative structure is, the more likely your readers are to be distracted from the brilliant, touching, masterful end of your magnum opus by the creaks and groans of the machinery. All the more so as the Great Detective Ending and the Mawwiage Ending are cliches, and the majority of your readers will recognize them the instant they hear the oom-pah-pah of the calliope, and you will have to work twice as hard to get their attention back.

So, okay, Mole, you say. Cliches are bad. Clunky artifice is bad. What do we do instead?

Well, you try to make your artifice look natural. You can’t, by the way, avoid artifice: that’s all writing a novel is: artifice and sleight of hand. If you aren’t writing a novel predicated on artifice–like John Myers Myers’ Silverlock or Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next books or Tristram Shandy–you want to camouflage it as much as you can, so that the reader will forget to look for the zipper down the monster’s back, or for the wires enabling Peter Pan to fly. Even if you’re writing category romance, in which part of the attraction of the genre is its patent artifice, you still want it to look like your characters reach their Happily Ever After because they love other, not because the plot made them do it.

To be perfectly clear: I don’t think artifice is bad. I don’t think patent artifice is bad, either–otherwise I wouldn’t love revenge tragedies, or the work of Georgette Heyer, as much as I do. But part of the artifice of writing a novel is that you’re trying to make it look not-artificial. Renaissance rhetoricians had a word for this: sprezzatura, the art of making the difficult look effortless. And that’s really what I’m talking about. Not how to be natural in your writing, but how to appear natural. Sprezzatura.

You can try for sprezzatura with regard to your ending in several ways:

1. Limit the number of artificial interventions in your story. To tell a story at all, you have to choose an artificial starting point, and a trigger: a murder or a visitor or an earthquake. The more you can set up your starting point and your trigger so that the rest of the story follows naturally from them (remembering, of course, that like I said a couple paragrahs up, “natural” is also artificial in the world of a novel), the less the mechanics of your narrative have to be visible, and the less likely the artificiality of the ending is to call attention to itself.

2. Misdirection and distraction. Brilliant prose style! Wacky characters! Dialogue that your readers will be unable to prevent themselves from quoting to hapless friends! The brighter and more wildly the surface of the novel shines, the less attention readers have to spare for noticing things like plot. Concomitantly, the more likely they are to forgive the artificiality they do notice. I don’t mind when Lord Peter Wimsey Explains It All, because listening to Lord Peter talk is somewhere between half and three-quarters of the reason I showed up for this book in the first place.

3. Try to find an ending point that doesn’t look like you’re going for a merit badge in knot tying. I know many readers are frustrated by the endings of my books because the arc of the characters’ lives can’t be predicted (“What’s going to happen to X?” they ask plaintively–but please notice that that’s a different question than “Hey, what happened to whatsherface?”), but for me, that’s a feature, not a bug. I think you should feel at the end of a book that the characters’ lives are going to continue and, like real people’s lives, be unpredictable. Even if you like more closure than I do, getting it too pat will make the game look rigged.

Of course, the game is rigged. But your job is to make people feel like they won it on their own.

It’s the day after the Feast of the Epiphany and it’s snowing like a mad bastard. I have 85,000 words of The Goblin Emperor, which is due on February 1st. My word limit is 110,000 words, which means I need to write the equivalent of a novella this month.

Good times.

And, of course, what I’ve mostly been doing in this, the coldest and darkest part of the year, is playing a game called Torchlight. It’s a sort of Diablo meets Angband dungeon crawler with a horror marinade and a generous garnish of steampunk. I love being able to wander around !Moria killing undead dwarves with a pistol. Seriously. Never gets old. And it sends me on quests. I am stupidly, stupidly easy for a game that will send me on quests.

I’ve been thinking about that and story-telling, and the way that my relationship with a story is different from my relationship with a game. Because a novelization of Torchlight is not something I would read. The characters are two-dimensional, the storyline is utterly predictable (“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”), and the narrative structure is nothing but quests. None of which is a complaint, mind you, because Torchlight is not a novel, and I don’t mind that the characters and the plot don’t get in the way of the game’s real business, which is monster-slaying.

The game’s real business, in other words, is not the story. Because it’s, you know, a game.

But how about the real business of a story? Where I’m going with this is an attack on my least favorite piece of writing advice, the one that says “Readers want to identify with the protagonist. Therefore, your protagonist must be an Everyperson, so that everyone who reads your novel can identify with him/her.” There are a lot of things I disagree with here:

1. If the reader wants it, the writer has to give it to them.

I don’t think that a writer should go out of his or her way to deny readers what they want. But I think it’s a mistake to write with one eye on the gallery all the time. Especially as what actual readers actually want is next door to impossible to predict.

And sometimes, what readers think they want, and say they want, will not be as satisfying to them as something they haven’t thought of. That, after all, is why we want new stories. But you can’t get there if you’re afraid to go beyond the boundaries of “what readers want.”

2. Readers want to identify with the protagonist.

I know that some readers do get great pleasure out of reading in this way, reading as a method of self-insertion into fantasy, but not all readers do. I personally prefer to read about people I don’t identify with–because, honestly, if my own life was that fascinating to me, why would I be reading fiction? I think it’s more accurate and useful to say that readers want to empathize with protagonists. We want to feel for and with the people we read about. But that’s not the same as identifying with them.

Some of the greatest reading pleasure I had as a teenager was in reading about characters who were NOT LIKE me. And not just the characters who were elves or aliens or vampires, either, but the characters who were Australian, or who were living in the Depression, or who were members of large families–or who weren’t well-behaved over-achievers. I loved that they were different. I loved that they gave my imagination more stuff to work with. I most disliked the books with protagonists most like me.

And that’s only me, of course, but I don’t think I’m the only one.

3. Readers only identify–or empathize–with protagonists who are NOT UNLIKE them.

Notice, please, the difference between LIKE and NOT UNLIKE. Because it is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE, and it’s the difference that results in protagonists who have no identifying characteristics, or who only have “quirks.” Readers can and do empathize with a vast panorama of characters–frequently to the bewilderment of writers who thought that X was a walk-on, or a villain. Frequently, that empathy comes not from any way in which the reader is NOT UNLIKE the character, but in a likeness that runs well beneath the surface, in the way the character isn’t afraid to make jokes about serious things, or the way he or she endures adversity. These are the things you cannot predict as a writer, and they’re the things that you can’t get to with a formula. We are most likely (I think) to empathize with characters who feel real to us–it only makes sense, doesn’t it? And Everyperson will never feel real, because s/he isn’t. S/he is an attempt to be all things to all people, and if we don’t like that in our politicians, why should we want it in our protagonists?

4. [and this is implied, rather than directly stated] The real business of your story is not your protagonist.

Because if it’s the real business of your story, you’re not creating it based on what your hypothetical readers are hypothetically going to want. The protagonist, in this model, is merely a vehicle for getting readers to read whatever it is your story is really about, whether that’s the mystery your protagonist is going to solve, or the werewolf your protagonist is going to fall in love with, or the fabulous underground kingdom your protagonist is going to explore.

Now, I don’t for a moment deny that the real business of a story can be a mystery or a werewolf or a fabulous underground kingdom. But I think, and am going to go on thinking, that this is a BOTH/AND situation, not an EITHER/OR. Sacrificing the protagonist will never make the story better. I’m greedy; I want everything–the mystery and the werewolf and the fabulous underground kingdom and a protagonist who’s a real person, who I can empathize with and thus come to love.

Because, for me, all those things are the real business of a story.

Welcome to Storytellers Unplugged. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

II’m absolutely 100% out of ideas for Storytellers Unplugged columns. Seriously. Zip, zilch, zero, and nada. Suggestions made in the comments to this post will be (a.) most gratefully received and (b.) utilized to get blood out of the turnip next month. Thank you, as the Bartles & Jaymes guys used to say, for your support.

Apparently, this month I have nothing to say.

Except for a follow-up to last month’s post, in two parts:

1. I have no idea what I mean by “art.”

2. Despite all my bitching about open series (series in which every book is an entry point and every book can be read separately from the others), closed series (a la The Lord of the Rings) have no inherent virtue or “artistic” value, just as standalone novels don’t. I still think that the form of open series makes it difficult, if not impossible, to do certain things (which, last month, I described as “art”), but those things are not the only way to define art. The perfect counter-example is P. G. Wodehouse, whom I do not have the brass-faced effrontery to deny is an artist.

I hope that next month I will have real content to give you.

The thing about writing a post every month (or every couple months–mea culpa) is that you-the-reader tend to get hit with whatever I’ve been thinking about more or less in the background of my day to day life. This time, it’s series novels.

There are two different kinds of series in genre fiction. One, on the Tolkien model, is a single story split up over multiple volumes.* George R. R. Martin is doing fabulously well with that kind of series right now. (Please note: Martin’s success is the exception, not the rule.) The other, which I think of as the mystery model, is a set of stories, all with the same protagonist(s), but with little or no continuity from novel to novel. Ngaio Marsh wrote that kind of series. So did Emma Lathen and Ellery Queen and Edmund Crispin and a whole host of other Golden Age detective story writers. At the far end of that spectrum is someone like John Dickson Carr, whose continuing character, Gideon Fell, is actually almost always a secondary character. Carr wrote standalone mysteries which happened to feature the same detective.

The advantage to the mystery model, from the publishing point of view, is that it caters to the vast yearning for same-but-different that drives a lot of people’s reading habits. You can pick up any book in the series–first, fourth, fourteenth, thirty-seventh–and have roughly the same reading experience. It doesn’t matter if two, five, and nineteen are out of print, because only the completists will care–or even be able to tell. Each book benefits from the sales record and reputation of the other books, but no book is dependent on the other books. This is very much not the case with the Tolkien model, where if you can’t find volume three, reading volume four is an exercise in frustration. And if you’ve read volume four, your incentive to find volume three is sharply diminished, because you already know what’s going to happen. In the mystery model, what happens in volume three has little or no bearing on volume four, and vice versa, so reading one has no impact on your desire for the other–except for feeding the same-but-different demon.

I completely understand why people like the mystery model. I like it myself when I find an author who’s good enough at it. And I equally completely understand why publishing likes the mystery model. It’s as close as you’re going to get to a sure thing in an industry ruled by caprice and intangibles.

My problem is, a mystery model series is the last thing on earth I want to write. They’re popcorn reading, and their indeterminate nature–you have to have enough closure that the story stands on its own but either (a.) leave enough minor threads loose that the next book can tie on or (b.) have frictionless characters who don’t change from book to book–means that even very excellent mystery model series aren’t much more than popcorn reading. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy Emma Lathen and John Dickson Carr and Ngaio Marsh and their ilk, and I respect their craft. But they’re not what I want to write. You have to live with a book you’re writing for a lot longer than a book you’re reading, even if you write fast (which I don’t), and, while I enjoy visiting, I couldn’t live in such a self-limiting form.

I’m ambitious. I aspire to art. I want to write great novels, not just excellently crafted entertainment. This may be a case of “aim for the stars, get to the roof” but it’s still better than aiming for the roof and only getting halfway up the stairs. The four books of the Doctrine of Labyrinths are all deeply dependent on each other, and I have always thought of that as a feature, rather than a bug. (It was in fact my puzzlement over reviews describing it as a bug that led me to understand, finally, that my definition of a series was only one of two possible definitions, and not the preferred definition at that.)

I’m going to be writing standalone novels for a while, I think. Aside from the publishing drawbacks, writing a Tolkien model series is exhausting. But when and if I do write another series, at least I’ll know what I’m getting into.

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*This is very literally the Tolkien model, since–As You Know Bob–Tolkien conceived of The Lord of the Rings as a single novel. Most post-Tolkien series have at least some closure at the end of each individual volume: each installment is more or less a novel on its own.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about romance¹, and from two different directions.

In exhibit A, you have an author who had to rip conventional romance plots out of her two most recent books, The Mirador and Corambis, like yanking Virginia creeper off a tree trunk. In exhibit B, you have a reader who is currently reading a fantasy series by [name of well-known sff author redacted] and is finding the predictability of the romance sub-plots, in all their conventional heteronormative glory … well, predictable. And therefore not very interesting. And at the same time, in both exhibits A and B, you have an author/reader who likes love stories and even likes category romance–at least in the form of Georgette Heyer. And so I’m trying to figure out where the line is between compelling–or at least entertaining–and that not-quite-eyeroll I give the book when the characters yoke up in exactly the pair I expected.

The first thing to do is to separate category romance (including paranormal romance and “urban fantasy”²) out from novels-with-love-stories-in-them, because the point of category romance is, to a certain extent, its predictability. You don’t read a romance because you really want to wonder whether the heroine will find her True Love or not. You read a romance in the comforting certainty that she will, and thus you can watch the twists and turns of the plot, the misunderstandings and separations and rival suitors and all, with a scaled down version of the vicarious thrill of a roller coaster. It’s exciting, but it’s also ultimately safe. And I’m not knocking this–I’ve reread my Heyers so many times I’ve just about worn the print off the page. If you’re reading or writing category romance, that’s what you’re there for and there’s no sense criticizing a duck for not being a ferret. If that’s where you are, then the question is whether it’s a good duck or not, not whether it’s got fur and viviparous offspring.

But the thing about conventional, category romance is that, when it’s imported out of its genre–where it’s part of the form, like it’s part of the form of a sonnet that it has 14 lines–is that it shuts down character development. That’s what happened to me in The Mirador and Corambis. I put my characters in a conventional romance, and they began to behave according to the conventions of the category romance rather than according to their personalities and situations. Now, I fully admit that I did this to myself: I decided arbitrarily that character X and Y should be In Love, so it’s no surprise that X and Y began to behave arbitrarily. But it was astonishingly hard and painful for me to see what I’d done and to see that it was wrong. My writing partner, Elizabeth Bear, just about had to commit long-distance GBH to get me to let go. I’m deeply grateful now, but it’s a little like . . . okay, you’ve gone to a party and gotten completely hammered and you really really really want to take off all your clothes and dance on the table in nothing but a lampshade-hat and maybe shout rude things about the important people at the party (professors or editors or managers–take your pick depending on your profession). You have a friend who won’t let you, and you curse at them and maybe try to hit them and maybe try to stomp off in a huff, only they’ve got your car keys, and then you get distracted by having another drink and end up passed out cold on the stairs. And when you wake up the next morning, you remember wanting to dance on the table and you remember how your friend wouldn’t let you, and you realize you owe them your first-born child and probably a kidney . . . that’s what it’s like.

And I’ve come, in consequence to a realization: love is hard. It’s hard to do in real life, but it’s also hard to write about. And it’s even harder to write about if you don’t fall back on romance conventions. Because we all know how to write romance conventions and we all know how to read them. It’s safe, whereas writing about what love really is–that’s hard and scary, like asking an armadillo to expose its underbelly to a coyote. But here’s the thing. We do all know romance conventions, which means readers are able to predict them. And if we aren’t reading a book where the predictability is part of the win conditions, that predictability is going to undercut the rest of the story. Because real people aren’t predictable–or, rather, they’re predictable according to their own characters, not according to an arbitrary set of externally imposed rules–and if characters who are three-dimensional in every other respect become flat and conventional when faced with love, it points out how flimsy and artificial the conventions of romance are, and it makes a thin place in the structure of the novel, a place where you feel like you can put your hand through and grab the strings. And that thin place, of course, is exactly the thing a novelist doesn’t want.

So I’ve answered my own question: it depends on whether the predictability of the romance is constructed (or construed) as a bug or a feature of a given novel. Because it can be either. It depends on what the novel is trying to do, and on whether that predictable romance is commensurate with the other parts of the narrative.

If you’re writing a romance, yes, Cinderella kisses the prince. If you’re writing a novel about a girl who’s been abused and degraded and exploited by her stepmother and stepsisters for years while her father does nothing to help her, and whose fairy godmother seems to feel that the only thing worth intervening for is a ball . . . well, maybe she should and maybe she shouldn’t. It kind of depends on the prince.

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¹In the modern sense of limerence and erotic interest, rather than the early modern sense of a prose narrative that is similar to a novel but really something quite different.

²I’m plagiarizing a footnote from myself:

I put “urban fantasy” in quotes because–as we discovered on a panel about it at Odyssey Con–whatever that genre is, “urban fantasy” is a misnomer. Urban fantasy is fantasy about cities–which the panel also discovered is a flourishing sub-genre including authors like China Miéville, Ellen Kushner, Fritz Leiber, and Terry Pratchett–but “urban fantasy,” while very distinctly a genre, really needs a different name. (Oddly enough, both genres are clearly influenced–if not outright founded–by Charles de Lint and Emma Bull). I write urban fantasy; I do not write “urban fantasy” and couldn’t if I tried.³

³This is not a slam against “urban fantasy.” It is very much Not My Thing, but dude. Neither is hard SF. The fact that, obviously, I want to reappropriate the term “urban fantasy” for something else isn’t because I think the books being called “urban fantasy” somehow don’t “deserve” the label, but because, as a genre theory geek, I am frustrated by the fact that the term is being used to label a genre it doesn’t describe, while a genre that it does describe, and which I think is really cool, doesn’t have a label at all–or much recognition as a genre. From the genre-theory-geek perspective “urban fantasy” is actually really interesting, because what makes it a genre is the mélange of genres it offers–fantasy, romance, mystery, action-adventure, maybe a little horror–but while the urban environment, or at least the postmodern cosmopolitan sensibility, is necessary to the genre, it’s not really what books in this genre are about.

Today is the official launch date of my fourth novel, Corambis, about which you, O Gentle Reader, have probably heard more than you would necessarily wish. In celebration, over on my blog, I’m doing a Q&A, and the first question up is such a good one that I’m stealing it for SU for April.

Q: You’ve mentioned what you think a secondary world story should and shouldn’t do a few times, but I don’t think you’ve ever specifically elaborated on the subject, so, to be blunt: What do you think a secondary world story should do for the reader? What shouldn’t it do? Do you think you’ve accomplished this in your writing so far? etc.

A: So, yeah. What is a secondary world for?

This is an enormous and complicated question, and I’m going to break it down into (hopefully manageable) chunks.

1. What A Secondary World Does For An Author

This part is actually fairly obvious: if you invent your own world, you don’t have to play by real-world rules. To use the generic fantasy example, you can have a monarchy without having to research Tudor England or Bourbon France. You don’t have to know about the Habsburgs or the Julio-Claudians. (And these are all examples from Europe–never mind Russia, China, Japan, Thailand, etc. etc. etc.) And you can mix and match bits of cultures to get what you want. You aren’t tied down to historical reality. It’s enormously freeing.

(And, yes, many authors use it as an excuse to be lazy.)

But there’s more to it than that. Because what a secondary world really does, what you have this freedom for, is it lets you use your imagination. It lets you make things up. And really, you shouldn’t be a writer of any kind if you don’t like using your imagination. You especially shouldn’t be a fantasy writer. When I was a teenager and writing was something I did for my own private enjoyment, what I did most was draw maps and make up genealogies, the more elaborate the better. It was the invention that I enjoyed most. (You can also exercise your invention in this way in stories set in the real world, and I don’t mean to imply you can’t, but there’s nothing quite like the rush of a completely blank slate.)

So, for the author, a secondary world lets you maximize the fun stuff: making your own rules, writing your own history. Playing god.

2. What A Secondary World Does For A Reader

Well, first off, obviously a large number of people simply enjoy stories that aren’t set in the real world. Not all people, and I don’t know whether it’s a majority or a minority. But it is a lot. And even though I’m one of those people myself, I don’t know exactly where the attraction is. But since the point of writing stories is for other people to enjoy them, this is an important part of the purpose of secondary worlds. It also follows from the enjoyment the author takes in invention. If the author is enjoying what he/she does, that enjoyment is likely to communicate itself to the reader. Win-win.

Ideally, also, a secondary world should allow and encourage a reader to think outside the box, to see that, because we can imagine a society different from our own, our society itself is not immutable–not reified, to use the fancy theoretical term. Reification–thing-ification–is the process whereby a human construct becomes perceived as a thing, as something impervious to human endeavor, as something that can be neither changed nor destroyed. So–to give two examples off the top of my head–Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness deconstructs the reification of gender roles. Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint deconstructs the reification of heteronormativity (the norm in the world of Swordspoint is bisexuality).

(The social thought experiment has long been considered the territory of science fiction, as with most “serious” endeavors in the amalgamated genre of fantasy/science fiction/horror, but I don’t think the necessary given for it is “science/technology.” I think the necessary given is “a world different from our own”–and fantasy can provide that just as readily as sf. The social commentary may be buried a little deeper because–not being a “serious” genre–secondary world fantasy doesn’t have the leeway to leave out the stuff for the groundlings. Or it may not be there at all–just as it may not be there in science fiction, either. *ahem* I am digressing like a digressive thing.)

3. How A Secondary World Does What It Does
This is where we get into the do’s and don’ts which I may from time to time have promulgated.

The dream, says John Gardner, should be vivid and continuous. He was talking about fiction writing in general, but it applies in spades to secondary worlds. Take your secondary world seriously. Treat it with respect. Remember that for oyou rcharacters, it is the real world. (I.e., if you aren’t Terry Pratchett and haven’t deliberately set up your secondary world so that it spawns warped reflections of the real world, resist the impulse to be cute. Also, n.b., when Pratchett does it, he isn’t being cute. He’s being consistent to his secondary world as he has established it.)

Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, think things through. Every decision you make about your world has consequences. Some of them will be obvious; some will not. And it’s the pursuit of the unobvious consequences that will make your world feel rich and deep. Also, consequences that make things more difficult for your characters. Scott Lynch has a brilliant example of this in Red Sails Under Red Skies; it would be a spoiler to discuss it, so I won’t, but it made me believe in the world because, like our world, it doesn’t always work in the viewpoint character’s favor.

And while there should always be a reason that the story is set in a secondary world–something that you can’t get by setting it in the real world–the secondary world should also be a reason in and of itself. It should provide richness to the story, beyond simply being a pretty backdrop. It should be an integral part of the reader’s enjoyment.

I feel like I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this topic, but I also feel like that’s enough pontificating from me for one post. So on the understanding that I don’t think what I’ve said here is either conclusive or definitive, here endeth the lesson.

We just got back from seeing Watchmen. I can tell you neither the first time I read the graphic novel, nor how many times I’ve read the graphic novel, so you may understand that it is something of a coup for the movie that I was by and large pleased and impressed. There are one or two matters where I was disappointed, but this is largely an inevitable effect of the translation from one medium to another. And there’s one matter where I think the movie improves on the graphic novel–which, as the title of this post suggests, is its narrative efficiency.

The graphic novel Watchmen is narratively a sprawling object; there are several different foci of attention (I hesitate to call them plot threads, because they aren’t plots), and one of the beauties of the graphic novel is the way these different foci are played off each other, the way Moore and Gibbons use each to comment on the others. It is not, to use a thematic image that both graphic novel and movie utilize, a watch. All of its intricacy and delicacy come on the thematic level. The movie, on the other hand, is a watch; the pared-down plot is actually far better constructed than Moore and Gibbons, and it achieves something which the graphic novel does not, in that the playing out of the external plot is also a playing out of the story’s central themes.

(As you can tell, I’m trying very hard not to spoil anything, since although the graphic novel is twenty-three years old, the movie is new, and I can imagine that many people may go see the movie who have never read the graphic novel. If you’re one of them, I do sincerely recommend the novel. For all the movie’s loving recreation of the graphic novel’s visuals, the book is not the same as the movie and it is a tour de force of its form.)

This is a very neat trick. It makes the movie feel cohesive; it makes the movie feel organic, as if this is the way the story always has been, the way the story has to be. Because it all fits together. Theme and imagery are reflected in the plot; the plot tells you something important about the theme. It’s coherent. It’s efficient.

Now, it may fairly be said that my novels are not efficient. They are large and sprawling (not unlike my assessment of the graphic novel of Watchmen). I don’t know if I have it in me to write a narratively efficient novel, one that works like a beautiful watch. But I can certainly admire it when I see it done, and I think that the fundamental thing that makes narrative efficiency possible is this idea that the plot itself is an expression of the theme, and that the theme, conversely, has something to say about the plot.

I’ve never felt very comfortable with plot–certainly never felt that it is one of my strengths. External action is rarely where my interest lies. Recently, in fact, I’ve been having difficulty writing short stories because the ideas come to me as themes and don’t bring any plot along with them, and because I’m not much good at plot, I’ve been unable to do anything with them. So this new way of looking at the relationship between theme and plot is exciting for me. In the dead end I feel like I’m stuck in, it gives me hope of a door.

I’m in kind of a lull right now. The page-proofs of Corambis* have gone back to New York, so I’m officially done, not only with that book, but with the four-volume series (Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and now Corambis) that I’ve been working on, in one way or another, since approximately 1993. That’s a big project and a big chunk of my life (even if I didn’t know when I started that it was going to be four books and fifteen years long), and so I suppose it’s really not surprising that I find myself metaphorically standing here, squinting at the signposts, frowning at the map, wondering where I go next.

I don’t know that I’m done forever with Felix and Mildmay and the world of Meduse, but I know that I’m definitely done for now. I need a new direction. I need new worlds to conquer. And at the same time, my mule team say they needs a goddamn break. They need a vacation, for crying out loud.

The mule team, of course, is the subconscious and the right brain and the place where the creativity wells up, the thing we don’t have any good words for. That part of my brain is tired. It’s not drained–I’m still getting new ideas–but, honestly, the idea isn’t the hard part. Turning the idea into a story, and making that story complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That‘s the hard part. And the mule team don’t want to do it. They want to lie around in the shade and drink iced tea.

And for now, I’m willing to let them. We could all use a breather.

And maybe by the time they’re ready to pull again, I’ll have figured out which way is up on the map.

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*If you’re interested, right-click here to download an .mp3 of me reading the first chapter (1 hr: 14 min).