The Best of Connie Willis

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Writing an author’s introduction to a “Best of” collection is kind of problematic. If you talk too much about the stories, you give away the plot, and if you focus on the “best of” part, it looks uncomfortably like bragging—and usually is.

Telling where you got the idea for each story is usually a terrible letdown and doesn’t really explain anything. I mean, I got the idea for “The Last of the Winnebagos” from being stuck behind an RV going fifteen miles an hour up the pass to Woodland Park, and the idea for “All Seated on the Ground” from sitting in the church choir singing some Christmas carol with truly awful lyrics, but that doesn’t explain how I got from there to the story, and if I explain all the steps in between (giving away half the surprises in the story in the process), you’ll feel as duped and annoyed as you do after a magician explains how he sawed the woman in half.

Besides, I don’t know all the steps. Writers don’t really understand where their ideas come from, or how they morph into the story on the page. And often what I thought I was doing turned out not to be what was really going on at all. While you’re writing one story, your subconscious is busily writing another. Which means that to really explain the stories, I’d have to go all autobiographical and get into my childhood and the traumas thereof, which I have no intention of doing here.

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