Inlanders - Stephen Reese

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