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
