Freedom!!!!!

This week, I started something I haven’t in a very long time- I started to write a novel.

I had tried to write novels before in my youth, but it never seemed to come together and I couldn’t seem to finish them. Looking back now, I can see this was mostly my own inexperience with storytelling kicking in, and that I just wasn’t ready for such a project. Now, with 30 audio dramas under my belt, I have decided to take a run at it, and what an amazing experience it suddenly turned out to be.

The biggest shock has been going from writing audio drama, which is an extremely condensed and concise form of storytelling, to writing general prose and discovering the freedom that comes with it. Suddenly it doesn’t matter how long my scenes are, or how many characters I have. I don’t have to worry about background noises, music or sound effects. There’s a complete different set of limitations of form to consider, ones which are actually much broader than my audio work. My writing, which now feels like it’s been unknowingly cooped up in the house for the past two years, can suddenly fly free in the sky and go where it wants to go.

Of course, I’m not going to stop writing audio drama, I love it too much to stop. ^_^ So don’t worry about that. And in fact, I think I can credit much of what I see as an incredible leap in my writing ability to having been forced to write the very constrained form of audio drama for so long. By writing audio drama I had to master the art of storytelling through dialogue on a level most regular authors will never venture to. It really honed my writing skills, much as I’ve often heard journalists claim writing newspaper copy honed theirs, and I think I’m a much better writer for it.

You can judge yourself, of course, when Little Gou’s first prose adventure serial debuts sometime in the future!

Rob