Sometimes when you start on a new project, the ideas come faster than the writing. At least when you have a day job and a family as busy as mine. But I’ve always found the joy to be in building and growing the story. That’s where I find myself with “The Mankind War.” I created this story at the age of 17, now beginning it at age 47. I’ve always known it would be bigger than I expected. I just never expected it to be as big as it’s becoming in my mind.
The other difficult component is coming up with a short, memorable pitch. As the ideas grow, and your enthusiasm to share those ideas with it, it becomes increasingly difficult to boil it down to a sentence or two. That’s certainly a hard thing for most writers, but it becomes essential to share the essence of your story in as succinct a way as possible. My “elevator pitch” is slowly forming.
The themes are less hard for me in this. I find the themes of this book guiding every scene I’m writing - themes of family, loss, grief, how we know what happened in our past, from recent to distant. Every time I start the mental path of charting out a scene, it’s bounced against these and a few other themes. If it doesn’t fit, it’s cut. When it does, I find the scene growing and moving in directions I didn’t expect prior to sitting down and writing that scene.
I look forward to sharing this story as it develops. I hope it comes across in execution as well as it is my mind.