Short stories, coming together

[desperance]

It's late, I'm tired, I should be in bed; if this comes out incoherent, let me know.

When I was a young writer, when I used to read how-to books about the craft, the digest of advice about short stories would have said that the perfect short story encapsulates a single idea, thoroughly examined.

Thankfully, I never believed this. Thirty years of practice insist that - for me, at least - the best short stories arise from the collision of two ideas - Hardy's "consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres." Exactly that: it's got to shake both sides of the equation. Fiction is friction - oh lordy, all my tags are coming out - and story happens at the margins, on the edges, where the tectonic plates rub together. And other mixed metaphors. You take my point.

So: I have almost thirty years'-worth of unfinished stories, single ideas waiting for the other shoe to drop.

One of my long-term projects is a sequence of short pieces about a singular cathedral. The first story, "Going the Jerusalem Mile", was published in The Third Alternative last year; the rest exist as a scribbled list of titles on the back of an envelope, pinned to a corkboard in my office. Except that one or two of them exist as considered first-ideas in my head; and my favourite, "The Battle Flag of the Republic", has an opening and an ending and it almost has a theme. I am, inter alia (for extensive values of alia, including but by no means limited to crime and horror), a fantasy writer; and I do not now nor have I ever written about elves. Not any sort of elf, trad or Tolkienesque; I never have, I never will. Except that this is absolutely and always has been a story about elves: elves and the cathedral, elves in their absence, a presumptive war between elves and humans. With an interesting side-issue about the republic of Elfdom and what would they do with their monarchy. But it's only half a story; it's been waiting.

The other thing I do not ever do, not ever, is dream about elves. Except that I was following an LJ thread late last night and it ended up with elves, and I woke up at half past five this morning, startled from a dream of the Sidhe, with the phrase "Prince Bishop" literally on my lips. I said it, I did.

Now it so happens that I live just a spit north of County Durham, and every time I've passed through it in a car this last quarter-century I've seen the sign, 'Land of the Prince Bishops'. The phrase is absolutely in my common vocabulary, and it never occurred to me that it was exactly what I needed, the other shoe, until (I presume) my wretched subconscious hammered me over the head with the heel.

I don't believe in dreams, but it does seem that sometimes they believe in me.

So have I spent all day hammer, hammer, hammer on this new story? Well, no, I have not. I do after all have a dread deadline to meet, a novel to finish, not enough time. So have I spent all day hammer, hammer, hammer on the book? Well, no, not that either. Thing is, I've had a really good week on the book, and finished part three last night; and in three weeks' time I have an engagement, Summer Phantoms at the Phil, new ghost stories which Sean O'Brien and Gail-Nina Anderson and I will read at the Lit & Phil on Midsummer's Eve; and I happen to know that Sean and Gail have both written their stories, so I'd damn well better come up with something myself.

And for a while I have had, as it were, half a story: just a single page, not even a title yet but a happy conceit and a feeling, a sense of where the narrative wanted to go. It's my Brideshead story, a young man among the glitterati; and it's a vector story, how they brought the infection from Aix to Ghent; and what it lacked was the theme, the purpose that I picked up sideways from a post in fjm's journal. So that's what I've been doing today, and I'm three thousand words to the good. Next time anyone asks me where I get my ideas from, I will spare their life; I will smile, indeed, and say "I find them on LiveJournal."

Comments

[devonellington.livejournal.com]

Stories do ripen, don't they? And they choose you, not always the other way around (though sometimes they let you think you chose them).

I'm delighted you're having such a wonderful waking writing craft dream adventure!

And I can't wait to read the story!