Screenwriting : Far vs. Deep – November Write Club (Week 4) by Adam Spencer

From the beginning, I did not see the world quite like others.

Where most children carried daydreams that faded after recess, mine grew into sustained, breathing ecosystems that followed me like companions. I never built them for a single moment’s entertainment. They were continuous threads, pulled and rewoven over years, interlocking into something vast.

Part of this was circumstance. I was the youngest of five in a poor family from the blue-veined hills of rural Appalachia. There was one television, and the older siblings ruled it. My eyesight was weak, my speech hesitant, my anxiety constant. So I went outside, where the rules of access and hierarchy dissolved.

It was in nature that my first teachers appeared. Dogs that didn’t run from me; box turtles carrying private universes in their shells; mantids that twitched, waited, and mirrored back a strangeness that felt like kinship. They did not scatter when I leaned close. They let me study them in the only way I could—myopic eyes pressed inches away, turning limitation into intimacy. I discovered that if I could not see far, I could see deep.

These creatures became my collaborators. I didn’t just draw them; I imagined with them—civilizations, mythologies, cycles of mercy and hunger. Unlike childhood games, these worlds did not vanish when I grew older. They grew with me.

For a long time, the gap between the photorealistic imagination I carried and the imperfect tools I had to express it was my deepest ache. I could render fragments—sketches, half-languages of what I knew. But I could never fully place someone inside the fire.

Until now.

PRAYPREY is not simply a story I have written. It is the culmination of that lifelong fire. It is the bridge I have been building since childhood, stone by stone, between the unbearable solitude of vision and the shared experience of an audience.

The tsunami I witnessed in Thailand carved the final shape of this myth. In the wake of that wave, I saw nature’s horror and humanity’s mercy in terrifying contrast: destruction beyond words, and strangers risking everything to save one another. That paradox demanded a vessel strong enough to hold it. PRAYPREY became that vessel.

And here is why it matters:

It is medium-agnostic. Whether rendered in Avatar-level CGI or stylized animation, the systems we’ve built—the Ember Eye, the Mandible Protocol—are not just “looks.” They are languages. They work in any form because they are based in logic, biology, and expression.

It is mythic but grounded. The story fuses alien anatomy with spiritual law. Mercy is not a virtue here; it is a physics of coherence, the one force strong enough to stand against entropy.

It is born of lived truth. I did not stitch this world together from tropes. I carried it for decades, drawing from nature, loss, isolation, and revelation. Every mantid plate and ember flare is part of that biography.

People often warn, “Don’t overwhelm with too much.” I understand the note, but I see it differently. A story this big should overwhelm—not with noise, but with awe. The goal isn’t just to impress executives with polish; it’s to overwhelm audiences with that moment when the ineffable becomes real, when every hair stands on end, when mercy reveals itself as the hidden strength that keeps the world intact.

If I were in a room with a manager tomorrow, the honest question I’d ask is this:

Does the emotional truth of this script ever get buried under the scale of the world—if so, what must we cut or streamline to keep the heart beating in front?

Right now I’m doing exactly what this post asks: speaking the “why” out loud, and building clean materials that communicate the world without drowning people in it.

This story—Mantidoa’s story—has been waiting since childhood to be told. The vision would not leave me, so I chose to build it into something that will not leave the world.