Inlanders - Stephen Reese

Okay, I’m ready.

Or nearly so.

I look back at this month’s measly two posts and realize I’m not interested in killing time anymore.

March saw a surge of creative energy directed at this blog to get the thing rolling and somewhat relevant. But my enthusiasm for ice-breaking small talk has subsided.

I’ve been poking at two new, unpublished posts: one about the hypnagogic state and its role in my creative process; another about how attempting to finish a first novel mirrored the adoption of serious long-distance running into my lifestyle.

Both are worthy topics, and there’s decent sentences in ‘em.

But I’ve no drive to keep nattering about writing.

I want to get on with the real thing.

Also.

To counteract the necessary labor of completing my tax return, I sought to MAKE something this weekend, to work on a creative project whose completion would fulfill me where finances couldn’t. So I dug out some sound files from the Upcoming Mixes folder on my hard drive (I do that, too, for fun - make music and mix other people’s), and some DJ-centric ideas popped out of nowhere for me to explore yesterday evening.

Alas.

They. Did. Not. Hit. The. Spot.

No, there’s a bigger unfinished project yodeling its presence from on high, goading me from behind, its incipient forms now three months distant, its Platonic ideal teasing ahead, and friends, readers, it’s now time to distance-run toward that destination clearly visible from my comfy spot here atop Procrastination Peak.

I’ve been scared. I’ve been excited. Now I’m just impatient.

I thought maybe there’d be a quiet moment, a whimper not a bang, that presaged my return to the naive, sputtering first draft, there to whip it into an honest, upstanding novel.

Turns out it was neither.

It’s a burn. An itch. A barely-articulate buzz at the back of my subconscious that keeps intoning, as best it can:

Yes, fool, yes - the need is ripe.

Behold that dubious fruit you’ve harvested, then make of it a satisfying meal.

I’m hungry.

And so.

I’ll not wait another month. I’ll get back into a tussle with Inlanders some 30 days earlier than planned. I’ll finish the damn taxes, rip through what’s left of the fiction I wanted to consume while on vacation from my own make-believe, then blunder headlong into draft two at the top of May.

If nothing else, it’ll give me something to yap about here.

You’ve been warned.

- Stephen Reese

It was a beautiful spring day. I went for my first bike ride of the year. Skidded through some leftover slush. Mudded up my legs. And when I came home, I found myself poking at the query letter.

Thing’s a little closer to where it needs to be now. Maybe halfway.

And so am I, incidentally.

Halfway through my vacation from the novel.

Halfway near the edit.

I’ve carefully monitored my feelings toward that task as my distance from the novel increases across these months away. There are days I’m chomping at the bit to get started cutting and rewriting. There are days I’m scared shitless of seeing just how bad the first draft turned out (I didn’t look back, you see, as I wrote it - my first time trying this technique, which I’ll discuss in a future post). Ups and downs. As roller-coastery as the writing was.

But as time goes on, my emotions are tipping toward a more balanced, neutral perspective on the whole business. And that’s probably the best place to be in. We’ll see.

In the meantime, the meanwhiles continue, with a few additions:

• Uploading music (and obsessing over playlists) on http://anywhere.fm/Podge
• Reading The Ruins, The Kite Runner, Tuesdays With Morrie and Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
• Getting the aforementioned bike back on the road

Vacation remains fun!

Two months to go…

- 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

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

So I finished the first draft of Inlanders on 4 February 2008, in the midst of starting a new job, securing a renter for my condo across the country, and suffering the sickening sneezing and snotting stage of my first head cold in over a year. That means I wrote the finale feeling like a crushed pop can being kicked around a particularly dirty part of town…perfect for typing THE END!

Now the manuscript sits untouched by me for at least four months while I cool down, regain some perspective and prepare for the merciless editing phase. To be honest, I can’t wait to hack that bloated, pockmarked, larval sack of a story to grisly pieces, but I must win some distance from it first.

In the meantime, I started work on a new query letter. What a difference from the early attempts at same, way back when Chap 1 was all I had committed to word processor! Even one month outta the jungle, I could see more than just the trees, and was better able to summarize what my mess of sentences might be about.

I’ll keep picking away at said query during this four-month vacation from the novel. Also on the itinerary: a synopsis. But NOT an outline, not until I wade back into the underbrush and start plotting a clear path through the forest. When I’m out the other side, I’ll be ready.

For now, I won’t even open the Word file. There are plenty of meanwhiles to keep me busy in my off-time:

• Uploading music to http://anywhere.fm/Podge
• Reading, for the first time, Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories
• Perusing Monster Hunters and Unexpected back issues
• Enjoying the heck outta Lost season four

My conclusion? Vacation is FUN!

- Stephen Reese