Words are his power . . .

World book day has come and gone, and the passion for reading goes on unabated.  I for one will always cherish the written word.  Because I do write.  It was the reading of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot' for the first time, many years ago, showed me just how cinematic reading a book could be.  That guy seriously has the raw power to take you right into a situation using only words, without taking you out of the story by intruding there himself.

Believe me, that's no easy task.

Mr King makes it look easy.  He has a skill many writers would give their right arm for (to coin a cliche).  And it seems Joe Hill, one of King's three children, has inherited his father's prowess for crafting prose.  Again, Joe writes much in the horror genre, and I am privileged to call personal friend the man who moved the wheels for Joe's first collection to be published.  However, I rather think this particular discovery was an inevitability rather than a happy accident.  Joe Hill would have been successful regardless, because he writes great stuff.  '20th Century Ghosts' is an absolute master class in the art of short story writing - and his follwing novels display similar glister.

Let's not get 'sniffy' about horror, please.  There is much to be gained by the would be author within the horror genre, and just as much skill involved in the construction of the horror tale as other genres.  If you are wont to put words on paper you're already in the battle, wrestling with the clunk and grind of sentence construction, syntax, and all the stuff that places one in the category marked 'writer'.  And it is a battle sometimes; one which can often feel like trawling through cloying mud.  A scene plays out in real time in the story or novel and we enjoy it as a cinematic experience.  Constructing that scene can be like building the Eiffel Tower out of matches . . . a slow process in which the author carefully plays out the situation over and again, ensuring the prose he/she uses conveys exactly what was intended, without stalling.

The interpretation of the scene after is now down to the reader.  This is no single point of view laid onto film or digital video.  The written word requires the participation of the reader to give it life.  Here is another creative force in play, allowing the story to run out in vivid experience.  It's only a shame we live in an existence that seemingly moves at an ever increasing speed.  The day holds twenty four hours, the same as it always did, as far as I can tell (give or take a few milliseconds).  Time is not the issue; it's the amount of 'stuff' we fill those hours with keeps some of us from habitual reading.  For me as a writer the study of the written word is an essential, and yet I struggle with this same problem.  But is it really that much of a problem?  Reading is supposed to be a pleasure.  Far too often the 'pull' of the TV easily drags me away to watch something that is ultimately less rewarding and demands no participation from me whatsoever.

There's the rub.  Reading demands, whereas most other armchair pastimes ask little more than parking your rump in a comfy chair and watching the pixels shimmer.  Those pixels form all kinds of dazzling images, cool, titillating and often horrific, but somehow never match the written experience, once you get past the initial 'effort' it might take to open the darn book (or e-reader).

So my call here folks is, keep on reading.  Those of us staring at our laptops for hour upon hour need your support - and there are millions of books out there just waiting for you to dive in and be amazed, delighted and dare I say, horrified . . .