Inlanders - Stephen Reese

Well, that’s that. I made it to the end.

The book is sad, strange, and, I suspect, impossible to sell.

But it’s worth a try.

Now, to cheer myself up, I’ll watch Wristcutters: A Love Story.

- Stephen Reese

It’s possible I overreacted.

Guess what I found out when I crossed the halfway point reading the manuscript last night?

The thing starts coming together!

Once you’re over the hump, almost exactly dead center in the story, it rather suddenly and surprisingly clicks.

That’s curious.

It’s also a huge relief.

Post-middle, the voice is there, the tone is correct, the sentences flow far better than they do (if they do at all) in the first half.

What happened?

Well, I guess I found Inlanders at that point in the writing process.

Or Inlanders found me.

Whatever the process, I’m super grateful for the results, because now I’m not so bummed about what’s left to read. And not so embarrassed about what I’ve already read.

But I did start rewriting yesterday anyway, right from the beginning, soon as I decided the whole draft had to be chucked overboard and left to drown. Peering hopefully at the back half of the book, though, I suspect I won’t need to cut as deeply into the living tissue there to perform any necessary surgery.

Might not even need anaesthetic.

W00t!!!

- Stephen Reese

I knew it would be bad.

But I didn’t know it would be this bad.

That light-hearted, ‘even fun’ tone I mentioned yesterday? It’s only one of oh, maybe twenty different approaches I’ve already found in just the first half of the book alone.

And none of them work!

How did this happen? I’ve never read an early draft of mine this craptastic before. Is it because I wrote ahead blindly, without going back and editing as I advanced? The latter is my usual method. I iron all the wrinkles I can see in the shirt before even trying to smooth out an adjacent section. It worked for those ten screenplays I wrote in my 20s just fine. When I came back for draft two, the necessary changes seemed less…overwhelming.

Is it because I’m more critical now? More able to see my errors, my missteps, my complete…idiocy? On this first pass, I haven’t come close to hitting the target on anything…except those first few pages I wrote and rewrote multiple times before proceeding with the rest of the circus.

How did something this flawed take so damn long to get outta me in the first place? Surely that year could have been better spent choosing a tone, a voice, a style that clicked, and pursuing these to their logical conclusions. Why instead do I have this botched afterbirth of mad science in a broken-down laboratory whose dented, scuffed counters are spattered with the debris of a hundred failed experiments?

Reese, Reese. Always the why with you.

Why doesn’t matter.

All that matters is how.

How you fix it.

If you want to, that is.

Good point, Mr Self-Supportive.

(And where the hell have you been, anyway?)

Is this manuscript even worth salvaging? Can it be salvaged? Or is it just 102,400 of those million words of shit Stephen King says we gotta get outta us before we can produce anything effective?

Sigh.

Who did I think I was kidding, anyway, coming off ten years of writing screenplays and hoping to pull off a decent first novel.

You’re such a whiner, Reese. Shut it. Think clearly.

This is the FIRST. DRAFT.

Does it work on any level?

Well, the structure is there. The emotional arc too. The dynamic between the lead characters seems right.

The themes feel…present.

But everything else?

Everything else has to go.

On an executional level, maybe 5% of what I’ve read so far works. The rest is faeces thrown against the wall by a monkey hoping something sticks and makes a pattern that entertains somebody.

I meant well. I wrote a story I wanted to read. I put something down that meant something to me.

But at this point, it’s a blueprint at best. A sloppily drawn blueprint covered in coffee spills and food stains.

My work’s cut out for me.

I have to rewrite every sentence in this manuscript.

Better: I need to chuck every sentence in the trash where it belongs and write new ones.

Good ones this time.

- 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