Storytellersunplugged

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.