A, B, C

1

Like thousands on thousands of young writers before and since, I figured the easy way to write a novel was to write a series of interconnected short stories. I’d even thought of it as an experiment — and I still think it could have been an interesting one. But it was an experimental idea that I’d used in place of doing the necessary imaginative work, rather than a formal idea I had brought to life through the work and the thinking that would have opened up and multiplied its resonances and meanings. It was an idea I had thrown away rather than utilized, because I’d hoped it would be interesting in itself, whatever its content. Forty years later I tried it again, with more success — I hope — in a novel called Dark Reflections. (It won the Stonewall Book Award in 2008.) But this reflects on something I find myself writing about even today: though the genre can suggest what you might need, it can never do the work for you — whether you are thinking of the text as science fiction, as literary, or as experimental; though, from time to time, all of us (writers and critics both) hope that it will.