Inlanders - Stephen Reese

So, says Mr Self-Critical, why bother writing a site about writing? Who’s gonna read the thing anyway?

Me, for one, I spit back at him.

I see, says the bastard. It’s a vanity press.

No, me, I repeat. As in me, a writer. A writer would read it.

Writers will read it!

He’s not convinced, but I am.

You know why?

Because when I’m writing (read: grinding the grind, seeing to that searing, solitary business of sliding ass into seat and squeezing sentences from cerebellum as easily as blood from stone, sir), nothing is more heartening and motivating and…well, soothing…than reading the words of someone else who’s grinding too.

Due to this scientific truth:

Only a writer can feel sorry for a writer.

Don’t believe me? Ask anyone who isn’t a writer.

They don’t get it.

Oh, poor thing, say They, what a terrible go of it you have, plinking around on your ‘pooter, making up funny names for places that don’t exist. How hard it must be for you, blessed with the time to jot down all your cute ideas. I’d do just the same, if I didn’t need a real job and a real life and real people to spend my time with instead of imaginary ones.

Yes. The only Greek chorus who’ll stand behind me and chant “hear, hear” when I trumpet the difficulty of this particular calling is one made up of fellow butt-in-chair, fingers-on-keys freaks who know damn well what I’m talking about when I say writing fiction is only ever pleasurable when you’re finished doing it, and only then if you can ignore all your own Mr Self-Criticals long enough to believe what you’ve just spent the last three years of your life jotting down isn’t complete and utter horseshit.

Writing is not a lark. It’s not even a larf.

It’s more punishment than reward.

It ain’t for the weak of heart, nor for dilettantes and hobbyists.

And it has nothing to do with vanity, Mr Self-Critical.

That’s why this site, the Inlanders site, is not my “consolation prize” in case I never publish the book. It’s not a formalized proof to show for myself, should the words I agonize over in the manuscript not reach an audience themselves.

This site is for people like me, people who look for sites just like this while they’re still hip-deep in the shit, down in that trench of misplaced and misused words all heaped atop each other like the severed limbs of felled soldiers, a gangly and ungainly labyrinth of jutting arm-stumps and bleeding torsos and dangling legs you gotta shove your way through, head down and teeth gritted, if you wanna make it out.

It SUCKS in the trench.

So if that’s you right now, or whenever you find this, if you find this - know I’m there with you, sister. I got your back, brother. Keep on chopping your way through. Together we’ll make it.

Ahem.

All this bluster serves as hopefully worthy introduction to the author bearing an inaugural link in the Writers section of my blogroll at right, one Elizabeth Bear.

Lady’s written a helluva lot more fiction than I have, in nearly the same amount of lifetime. And she’s published a scary-large chunk of it. Yesterday I read her short story Tideline, a 2008 Hugo Award nominee, found it boffo, and immediately scoured the web for any traces of non-fictional musings from the gal.

What I found was a blog started in 2003, when Elizabeth was just on the cusp of becoming a published novelist. A blog that perfectly (and honestly) captures what it feels like to be down in the trench, to claw your way out of it, and bravely jump back in for more of the same. Reading Elizabeth, I felt like we shared the same brain, so identical to my own thoughts and feelings were hers. She even uses some of the same jargon I throw around when referring to what it is I do with my disheveled lump of words that might one day be a novel: I poke it, I prod it, I kick its sorry ass until it stands on two feet and uses one of them to kick my ass.

This blog is for Elizabeth, the same way her blog is for me.

It’s for all us fools.

Fools stupid, crazy or masochistic enough to make a go at this plodding, elaborate drudgery of building fictions for public consumption. That’s who I’m writing this site for.

Thank God others have done the same for me.

A few of them are already in the blogroll: Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio of Wordplayer, whose essays nursed me through my years of trying to become a professional screenwriter (and remain potent for me today); Dan Simmons with his Writing Well columns and accompanying forum for aspiring scribes; Rick Kleffel, perhaps the only existing writer-fanboy for fictive practitioners of all persuasions, including us spec-eff weirdos.

And now Elizabeth, whose blog I wish I’d found back when I was in the first-draft trench with Inlanders.

For what it’s worth, I’m reading her tale - of becoming a published novelist - in its entirety now.

Hear, hear.

- 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