The Moment

[keiramarcos]

There's this moment when you're writing that what you're doing comes together in such an organic and easy way that you get used to it. I've been writing for over twenty years and I've had a lot of these moments. In 99% of my projects this moment can be narrowed down to a single sentence. I normally find it when I'm editing -- this defining sentence that tells me that the project is exactly what I wanted it to be from the very start. What's interesting is that it is rarely the first or the last line of a project for me.

I was reading The Air That Angels Breathe yesterday and I stumbled upon one those sentences. It was this: 

“No one deserves you as much as I do anyway.”

That is a wow sentence for me because it says so much about John's character in the story. Both as a writer and as a reader, it was during this final scene when John said that that the whole story came together for me. This is a John Sheppard who grew up loved and protected by the man who fathered him. He is strong both in mind and heart and he knows that he wants and most certainly deserves the love of the smartest man in the galaxy. I really like that about John in this story. In canon, he's so emotionally retarded that it becomes almost a parody.

Maybe that's why in my work I often spend more time pushing and pulling and eventually forcing John Sheppard to grow as a person because I never saw that growth in the series.