Inlanders - 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