Inlanders - 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

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, 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