Inlanders - 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

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