Its taken a long time.
That old cliche about ‘little did I know’ seems applicable here. The Saga now is a fraction over 650 pages, and I’ve brought my characters out of the latest danger (or at least away from the things that threatened them underground) and they’re about to discover the coastal region.
A million years back, when I first got the story idea, and created a theatrical version, one of the initial titles was ‘From a Castle to a Coast.’
I had this simple idea of a Journey, where the travel itself became a character – as my heroes and heroines struggled to stay alive as they moved across a landscape and geology which hopefully had a range of meanings to the reader/viewer.
The last ‘formal’ monster in the plot, has fallen into a bottomless Pit.
And now my characters, unaware of a number of nasty approaching surprises, move towards their final destination.
Action scenes are exhausting to write, I’ve discovered. How does Koontz (or King) do it? Good grief.
Writing is very much about playing at being a creator of a universe, where you control the stage, the actors, the lighting cameraman…everything.
And precision is partly the key.
What is on the page, and how it is said, conveys the emotion of the moment to the reader.
So when the action erupts, the film being made, slows down radically. I’ve discovered this as one set piece after another occurs, and my characters have to fight or somehow escape.
And there’re no shortcuts to telling the story, unfortunately.
Its taken me 5 months of writing to reach the 650 page mark. Real slow. One of the initial reasons for the slowness, was that I had to learn how to correctly write prose. How to structure sentences. What to say, and what not to say.
(Much of storytelling is about letting the reader’s mind paint the pictures.)
I probably wasted at least two months worth of writing, in the painstakingly sharp learning curve. In addition, given that I still have no clue as to what a verb or an adverb is, I had to learn a whole bunch of basic grammar – not necessarily their names – just, what to use and how and when to use it.
Its all about making those movies in the minds of a reader. Prose writing truly is the ultimate power trip. After years of hoping that others ‘get’ what I’m saying in my theatre scripts, and having to watch as others create my work – its delicious to be able to precisely put down on paper, the world that I am making, and to know that a reader will feel the story exactly as I want them to.
The smear of orange across a purple sky at sunset. The acrid sting in the back of the throat at ancient dust in dank tunnels. The flicker of an eye at a crotch, followed by the wet pinkness of a tongue emerging to moisten a set of lips…
The poet in me comes out to play with prose, as I choose my lighting for each scene, and where I want the camera to zoom in on particular details that – for some reason – I feel should be used to show the reader a ‘moment’ in time.
I like to think that I have a slightly better handle on how to communicate in prose.
Play writing is not prose 
The next thing I write should emerge much much faster. I can feel the ideas yammering away inside me, but as a writer, I’ve learned to reign these things in, and to be patient. ‘Slowly slowly catchee monkey.’
The finish line is almost in sight. The important thing is to ‘do the work.’
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