Inlanders - Stephen Reese

So, says Mr Self-Critical, why bother writing a site about writing? Who’s gonna read the thing anyway?

Me, for one, I spit back at him.

I see, says the bastard. It’s a vanity press.

No, me, I repeat. As in me, a writer. A writer would read it.

Writers will read it!

He’s not convinced, but I am.

You know why?

Because when I’m writing (read: grinding the grind, seeing to that searing, solitary business of sliding ass into seat and squeezing sentences from cerebellum as easily as blood from stone, sir), nothing is more heartening and motivating and…well, soothing…than reading the words of someone else who’s grinding too.

Due to this scientific truth:

Only a writer can feel sorry for a writer.

Don’t believe me? Ask anyone who isn’t a writer.

They don’t get it.

Oh, poor thing, say They, what a terrible go of it you have, plinking around on your ‘pooter, making up funny names for places that don’t exist. How hard it must be for you, blessed with the time to jot down all your cute ideas. I’d do just the same, if I didn’t need a real job and a real life and real people to spend my time with instead of imaginary ones.

Yes. The only Greek chorus who’ll stand behind me and chant “hear, hear” when I trumpet the difficulty of this particular calling is one made up of fellow butt-in-chair, fingers-on-keys freaks who know damn well what I’m talking about when I say writing fiction is only ever pleasurable when you’re finished doing it, and only then if you can ignore all your own Mr Self-Criticals long enough to believe what you’ve just spent the last three years of your life jotting down isn’t complete and utter horseshit.

Writing is not a lark. It’s not even a larf.

It’s more punishment than reward.

It ain’t for the weak of heart, nor for dilettantes and hobbyists.

And it has nothing to do with vanity, Mr Self-Critical.

That’s why this site, the Inlanders site, is not my “consolation prize” in case I never publish the book. It’s not a formalized proof to show for myself, should the words I agonize over in the manuscript not reach an audience themselves.

This site is for people like me, people who look for sites just like this while they’re still hip-deep in the shit, down in that trench of misplaced and misused words all heaped atop each other like the severed limbs of felled soldiers, a gangly and ungainly labyrinth of jutting arm-stumps and bleeding torsos and dangling legs you gotta shove your way through, head down and teeth gritted, if you wanna make it out.

It SUCKS in the trench.

So if that’s you right now, or whenever you find this, if you find this - know I’m there with you, sister. I got your back, brother. Keep on chopping your way through. Together we’ll make it.

Ahem.

All this bluster serves as hopefully worthy introduction to the author bearing an inaugural link in the Writers section of my blogroll at right, one Elizabeth Bear.

Lady’s written a helluva lot more fiction than I have, in nearly the same amount of lifetime. And she’s published a scary-large chunk of it. Yesterday I read her short story Tideline, a 2008 Hugo Award nominee, found it boffo, and immediately scoured the web for any traces of non-fictional musings from the gal.

What I found was a blog started in 2003, when Elizabeth was just on the cusp of becoming a published novelist. A blog that perfectly (and honestly) captures what it feels like to be down in the trench, to claw your way out of it, and bravely jump back in for more of the same. Reading Elizabeth, I felt like we shared the same brain, so identical to my own thoughts and feelings were hers. She even uses some of the same jargon I throw around when referring to what it is I do with my disheveled lump of words that might one day be a novel: I poke it, I prod it, I kick its sorry ass until it stands on two feet and uses one of them to kick my ass.

This blog is for Elizabeth, the same way her blog is for me.

It’s for all us fools.

Fools stupid, crazy or masochistic enough to make a go at this plodding, elaborate drudgery of building fictions for public consumption. That’s who I’m writing this site for.

Thank God others have done the same for me.

A few of them are already in the blogroll: Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio of Wordplayer, whose essays nursed me through my years of trying to become a professional screenwriter (and remain potent for me today); Dan Simmons with his Writing Well columns and accompanying forum for aspiring scribes; Rick Kleffel, perhaps the only existing writer-fanboy for fictive practitioners of all persuasions, including us spec-eff weirdos.

And now Elizabeth, whose blog I wish I’d found back when I was in the first-draft trench with Inlanders.

For what it’s worth, I’m reading her tale - of becoming a published novelist - in its entirety now.

Hear, hear.

- Stephen Reese

I spent Easter Sunday hanging out with a fellow writer. Such is a prescription for day-end whiplash, since together we comprise an eight-limbed, four-eyed, double-mouthed ADD machine pointing at and yapping about anything and everything we mutually or separately notice. It’s an exhausting enterprise.

But a comforting one, too.

It’s nice to remember there are other freaks like you.

Us freaks talked about something else we believe is germane to the writing life, over dinner. It involves an ongoing effort to unbalance what seeks balance, discomfit what’s become comfortable, upend things when they feel ended.

Making good stories, we agreed, requires intimacy with chaos.

I’ll try to explain this by starting in “reality”.

If you believe there’s a tendency toward order in the universe, after observation you must also admit chaos is a necessary part of the equation. Order is built from chaos, and chaos strips order down again, that order may rebuild in better form.

It’s the very opposition of these two that defines them. There would be no conception of order without a chaos to measure it against; no impression of chaos without an order to counter it. They need one another as yin needs yang.

In fiction, things also work this way.

A story starts from a place of order, an equilibrium. Unexpected events tip the balance toward a position of chaotic disharmony. Characters once comfortable in their established realities face contingencies and challenges that squeeze them into new shapes and possibilities. Eventually, at length and through struggle, equilibrium returns, but it’s hard won. And the rise and fall of the scales, that lack of balance between balanced states - it hurts.

As writers, we need to do that on the page, through fiction. But more importantly, we need to do it in reality - in our own lives - to get the ball rolling.

I’ll use myself as an example.

In the preparation year leading up to the writing of Inlanders, I fell in love, moved, was dumped, fired and sued.

Don’t get me wrong - it was not a fun twelve months.

Did I willingly bring it on myself?

Not exactly.

Did I enter into certain situations knowing they’d play out chaotically?

Without question. I knew it would lead to good material.

Yes, it was a humdinger of a year, not pleasurable in most senses of the word, and living through it, I wasn’t a particularly happy camper. But boy, did I write afterward. And here’s the thing: I didn’t write at all about what happened to me.

Inlanders is not a novel about Stephen Reese falling in love, moving, getting fired, dumped and sued.

Nonetheless, having lived through those events prepared me for what followed, this task of writing the Inlanders manuscript.

It was a quieter process. A lonelier one. Just me on my own, thinking and typing and making sense of what came before, building not from it but because of it an attempt at order following chaos - a novel.

And I wasn’t a particularly happy camper then either.

But I did write.

I brewed some fictional chaos.

Drama didn’t surround me anymore. Instead it went into my story. I made drama up. If in the previous year I transited chaos, in my writing year I forced fictional people to do it. And now, in my editing year, I’ve found myself a stable place from which to muster perspective over the mess I’ve surely put onscreen.

This last part of the process: the perspective, the edit, the order from chaos from order, will also come to an end. When the story is as good as I can make it, and I’ve achieved my new equilibrium, the cycle comes round to start over. 

And make no mistake, I do want to tell another story.

So right back into chaos I’ll go.

- Stephen Reese

So this week I found an article deriding the concept of the prequel, a concept we’ve seen popularized in at least one major science-fiction franchise with the word star in its title. And I don’t disagree with the author that everyone’s favorite long-awaited origin story ended up dramatically inert. It wasn’t all that exciting to watch Darth Vader become Darth Vader.

I theorize that’s because Anakin Skywalker isn’t really a force to be reckoned with until the mask is on and he opposes his own son, a kid who must first leave his backwater podunk homeworld and be recruited into a galactic war of good vs evil.

Which of these origin stories is more dramatic? I say Luke’s.

Hence the boring prequel - the good stuff starts when Luke’s coming of age, not his daddy.

The author of the article I mention has a different theory.

He suggests the beginnings of epic tales - these sprawling sagas that spring from tiny, interpersonal buds and flower into entire cosmoses of conflict - are inherently less interesting because fewer people are involved in (or affected by) the drama when it seeds.

That’s an interesting idea.

Let me don my contentious hat and explore it.

My author admits being swept up by expansive…let’s call them “space operas”, with wide-ranging scope and repercussions for entire cultures (nay, civilizations; no, species!) where the primary players are perhaps representatives elect for their respective tribes and stand for everything their kind embody: ideals, goals and distinctive facial ridgings included.

He’s maybe partial to heady clashes of mores set against dense intergalactic skirmishes over precious resources, say, or holy land, or some long-forgotten, misperceived slight that somehow turned into a decade-spanning retributive slaughter.

And you know what? I dig that shit too.

As long as there are identifiable people (alien or not) at the center of the grand battle royale. No matter how loud the ion cannons or how dazzling the plasma gunfire, I’ll be looking for those tiny yet distinctive biological silhouettes cast against the vast backdrop of multi-generational strife and struggle. The “big picture” may be damn pretty, and high stakes certainly speed the pulse, and tragic, far-reaching consequences do indeed turn my crank.

But it has to start with people.

And people are inherently…small. It doesn’t take a million of them to foment drama. All you need is two of the little buggers, actually.

Like Anakin and his son.

And here I come back to the beginning.

If something happens somewhere that somehow explodes (fractally, exponentially) into a million somethings happening everywhere else that somehow affect the entire history of the universe, I have to say I’m more interested - intensely, passionately more interested - in the inciting event than in the resulting diaspora. Specifically because it stands a chance of being smaller, more personal, more…human.

Give me the bud, the seed, the soil; not the fully-grown plant.

That silent, frozen moment before Big Bang went boom.

The first dribbles of paint on empty canvas that hint at form in the void, figure against ground, order from chaos.

Not the fully-spattered, deeply layered canvas halfway toward the artist deciding it’s well and done.

The small stuff in the beginning is important.

It can repercuss forever.

And it gives good drama.

You just gotta pick the right beginning, the true beginning, the best beginning - and the right, true, best people responsible for setting the whole thing off.

I hope to heck I’ve done that in my novel.

- Stephen Reese

I posted earlier that I’m enjoying the fourth season of Lost. I admire the show as an example of “pure storytelling”: this happens, then this happens…but then! And then! And guess what? Then this! And who’s that? And what’s that mean?

When you keep posing new questions and withholding the answers, you get a fine steam of forward momentum going. Alas, Lost has been accused of withholding too much and revealing too little. Worse, it can resort to gimmickry. As in last week’s episode.

In it, the writers intercut a “flash-forward” showing the hospital birth of one character’s baby, with a flashback tracking her husband’s frantic efforts to secure a panda doll for emergency room gifting. In the show’s final moments, the dupe is revealed, confirming that husband is nowhere near his wife in the future. He’s securing the panda for an employer in the past.

Let me start this rant by saying I’m not fond of twists.

For me, the nobler goal of storytelling is to engage an audience’s emotions. To aim first for their heart, and their head second, if at all. An immediate emotional response, in my opinion, is more instinctive and true than a considered, reasoned reaction. It’s a more powerful means to bind the reader (or viewer) to the fiction, and a finer achievement for the writer. 

Consider: a story that’s found its way into someone’s heart has greater lasting impact and meaning than one that simply teases their brain. If a viewer’s head gains critical and objective distance from the material, that magic of immersion, the suspension of disbelief, empathy for the characters living the story…they’re lost.

Sometimes a head “gaining distance” happens so abruptly and inelegantly, the heart never comes back for more. 

I argue a twist does this. It jolts the audience right out of the fiction. Our heads are so busy trying to make sense of the cognitive disconnect - as the rug is pulled out from under us - we forget we were feeling anything in the first place.

That’s what happened for me when Lost showed its hand last week. Suddenly discovering the two threads were not connected, except to deceive, violated my intimacy with the story. It was a snide nudge and wink without emotional weight, a purely intellectual device. Hey look, viewer, we got you to believe the husband was on his way to meet his wife, but nope, his scene’s actually from an earlier, unrelated time.

That’s not storytelling. It’s a cheap parlor trick.

If the little game you’ve played with your audience adds nothing to our understanding of the characters and doesn’t carry the story forward in a meaningful way, the only one who’ll be satisfied is you, Mr Clever. You don’t win any points for not playing fair with the people you’ve worked so hard to seduce into your fiction. Betrayal is betrayal, regardless the arena.

I’m not saying a twist can’t work. I imagine it’s well and regularly employed in mystery yarns, which I have no affinity for and won’t presume to pontificate about here.

In a standard, straight-ahead drama, though - which I’ll claim to understand - you want readers (or viewers) to invest in characters for real emotional reasons and follow their plight with true, building concern. A conclusion, when it comes, should feel inevitable, built on and arising naturally from all events preceding it. This way, the audience is not caught off-guard. Those events we’ve witnessed along the way combine their narrative and emotional weight, and the critical mass they gather can ONLY tip the scales this one particular way we may not have foreseen, but will readily admit was coming - once we glimpse it actualized.

That’s not a cheap trick at all.

It’s damn hard to pull off.

And to be fair, Lost did pull it off, only a few weeks earlier this fourth season. The episode in question saw a hero traveling back in time to give his beloved a message that if acted upon, would reunite them in the future after years of estrangement.

If the beloved can look past the absurd means her lover uses to deliver the message (time travel), and honor the request, no matter how insane, they win. The outcome hinges on her finding faith that this man she once loved and trusted - but over the years has come to doubt - is telling the truth now.

So we’ve got a cool time travel setup to get our head working.

And the payoff of true faith to hook our heart.

Now that’s storytelling.

- Stephen Reese

So, my self-critical self asks, why bother writing about writing?

Well, I answer defensively, in lieu of actually writing, there’s nothing I’d rather write about. And since I’m officially taking a break from the novel, I add, I’m allowed.

It occurs to me, insists Mr Self-Critical, that you’re not really taking a break from the novel if you’re writing this blog about it.

Hmm. He may have a point.

Alas, I’m not poring over any details of the manuscript. The discussion is of process. And what I’ll highlight today is the very process I’ve demonstrated above, that of giving voice to your every hesitation and self-doubt, among other “negative” instincts. Whether or not you shape these pesky critters into identifiable villains with names such as Pyrodraxx Thugginaard, you’d do well to heed their nagging snipes and gripes.

Without them, you ain’t got a story, chum.

In the novel perhaps more than any other fictional form, drama - that stuff you need to get a story goin’ - arises from the human heart in conflict with itself. I theorize the need is more pronounced in the novel because words, hopefully sounding in someone’s head, are all we have to generate the illusion of adversity.

No stampede of dinosaurs bearing down on us from a giant movie screen. No dazzling interplay of verbal agility between two talented thespians onstage.

Nope, all we got is words on paper, and whatever they can do when sucked up into someone else’s consciousness. With luck, they turn into thoughts. In other words (thoughts), what we’re left with is what goes on inside any given human head: some thoughts think some things, and some thoughts think others. They differ. They disagree. They are rarely “of one mind”.

And yet they are. 

So what we must do, as writers, is make of that one mind many. We must detect within a single consciousness multiple personalities coexisting: occasionally in harmony, usually not. Then we splinter the collective into a myriad selves at direct opposition to each other.

These become the characters.

And if we’ve succeeded, they’re gonna be at each other’s throats.

In this way, multiple personality disorder becomes a conscious life choice. The novel’s form of drama requires a writer play all the parts; we must inhabit the body of every dinosaur in the stampede AND the panicked mind of the poor sap fleeing the horde. A malleable sense of self is a prerequisite. No matter what our therapists say, we should listen to the voices in our head.

More: we need to be them.

Find our inner Jekyll. Embrace our inner Hyde. Recognize we’re both, and many more besides. Holding two contradicting thoughts in your melon simultaneously is not just a measure of intelligence, it’s the skillset you need if you wanna whisper sweet somethings inside a reader’s ear for 300 pages. If you’ve made that special love connection, you’re not in conflict with the reader - they’re just along for the ride.

So you better be in conflict with yourself.

- Stephen Reese

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself…alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. - William Faulkner

At this point, I’ve invested two years in the Inlanders novel. About 12 years of “seed-time” preceded that, wherein ideas, concepts and earlier permutations of this fiction came together, fell apart, and reformed.

In January 2006, I made some early notes toward the novel, and wrote a first chapter I soon realized was completely wrong.

So I set things aside and spent the remainder of that first year taking notes (mostly on my cell phone) and thinking about the world, characters and story structure. Come autumn, I started poking at the first chapter again, and this time, things rolled on.

The writing stage continued to January of 2008 and wrapped up, as I mentioned yesterday, on 4 February - roughly one month past the deadline I’d set myself, of 31 December 2007.

Though the writing phase, like the “thinking” phase, took a year, only 45 days of that year were spent actually typing sentences. Most of the time I spent “living” with the story, “carrying” it with me, thinking about it regularly, taking notes.

This ratio of “writing” to “living” may seem strange, even pretentious. The fact of the matter is, when I’m working on a story, I’m always working on it, even while going through the usual rhythms of everyday life. My head is attuned to a frequency that converts absorbed stimuli into narrative, mostly narrative that fits the story.

I don’t mean real-life events are directly translated to book events (mine is a fantasy novel, after all, and none of the external things characters experience therein have ever happened to me). But living, while I’m writing = writing. They’re one and the same.

Until I finish the story, I’m in it.

Now I’m out of it. I’ve shifted from a subjective, involved headspace to an objective, critical one. From that place I’m able to edit what I’ve already “lived” with these characters. And to be honest, it’s a place I’m more comfortable inhabiting. My natural tendency is to criticize, to refine, to rearrange and streamline. I edit way faster than I write.

But that’s a topic for a different post.

- Stephen Reese

So I finished the first draft of Inlanders on 4 February 2008, in the midst of starting a new job, securing a renter for my condo across the country, and suffering the sickening sneezing and snotting stage of my first head cold in over a year. That means I wrote the finale feeling like a crushed pop can being kicked around a particularly dirty part of town…perfect for typing THE END!

Now the manuscript sits untouched by me for at least four months while I cool down, regain some perspective and prepare for the merciless editing phase. To be honest, I can’t wait to hack that bloated, pockmarked, larval sack of a story to grisly pieces, but I must win some distance from it first.

In the meantime, I started work on a new query letter. What a difference from the early attempts at same, way back when Chap 1 was all I had committed to word processor! Even one month outta the jungle, I could see more than just the trees, and was better able to summarize what my mess of sentences might be about.

I’ll keep picking away at said query during this four-month vacation from the novel. Also on the itinerary: a synopsis. But NOT an outline, not until I wade back into the underbrush and start plotting a clear path through the forest. When I’m out the other side, I’ll be ready.

For now, I won’t even open the Word file. There are plenty of meanwhiles to keep me busy in my off-time:

• Uploading music to http://anywhere.fm/Podge
• Reading, for the first time, Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories
• Perusing Monster Hunters and Unexpected back issues
• Enjoying the heck outta Lost season four

My conclusion? Vacation is FUN!

- Stephen Reese