I write because there is no other way that I know how to make sense of things. Though there’s a fragility in my mind that allows for a constant hosh-posh of half-baked ideas to swirl and blend, becoming anew, dying again, shifting and moving through different phases, there’s something hyperreal about the featherweight of my thoughts, when everything in the material world is weighed down by gravity and expectations.

Through writing, I can be happy. Through writing, I can actually live my life.

I seem to have more friends wandering around my imagination than I do in this world. Or maybe I shouldn’t say friends—more like neighbors, people you may not like, people you may despise, yet with them you share inert and not so obvious commonalities through proximity, by occupying the same headspace. You are so close to them and for so long that they seem to take up permanent residence inside your soul, crashing on your couch, reading on the porch, or enacting strange dissecting rituals on a squirrel in your basement, only occasionally crossing your path to say a few out of context words.

These words shape them, just as they shape you. They live in a timeless void, transcending between the Earth’s crust and coming out the other side in New York, Paris, Amsterdam, lasting through centuries and centuries, while you try to pin them down in their right time. But they’re pinning you down, you see. Their ability to live in limbo comes from your inadequacy in your current place and your current time. A cause for you is an effect for them. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Let these people into your house and say hello to them once in a while—even the one in the basement.

Or maybe that’s just how I look at writing. Every character I’ve ever come up with is in some way myself, while also being something I fear, or hate, or something so great that I know I can never achieve it. And they really do seem to exist in a time warp, jumping from place to place, story to story, and I try to mix and match them to fit certain plots, hit certain beats in a scene and keep the overall rhythm of a story moving. I try to see what fits.

Sometimes I feel like these characters are closer to me than my best friends and my family, because they ARE me.

And these places in which they inhabit are my hometown, places I want to visit, alleyways and forests I’ve walked through in my dreams. Captured images or fragments of images taken out of storage and fleshed out into three-dimensional form. My mind is my home. My characters are my family.

And above all, my writing is a reflection of myself.

I’ve written a lot of characters over the years, in a lot of stories that never got published and will probably never become anything. All of these pieces, again, reflect me. Perhaps not “me” in the physical, day-to-day sense, but more so in the philosophies I subscribe to, anxieties I harbor and questionable nature of my surroundings. The reflection is that with all the light sucked out, all shadow, where the particles are too unstable to rise to the surface. The closest and most accurate of this kind of reflection of myself in anything I ever wrote can probably be seen in Ryan.

Ryan is a teenage kid that grows into his thirties and shoots himself while living in his dreary hometown of Point Elliot, Washington, somewhere along the southern shore of the Puget Sound. His father leaves his mother, who ages into an underpaid alcoholic who feels like time got away from her. Ryan is not well liked, nor is he discriminated against—he is completely ignored from all human interaction throughout his childhood. He grows up to play in a grunge band, and at some point along the way he marries his high school crush, who herself runs away from home and lives in her car for two years. She cries at his funeral, at the end of the third act.

And Ryan has no friends. He breaks down in his bedroom. He thinks up people named Michael and Gavin and Cameron, and he sometimes watches his own life unfold in the third person. Cameron teaches him how to play guitar and grow a pair. He has long blond hair and wears Converse shoes. These are Ryan’s real friends, until they mysteriously disappear and…something—something else. Reach inside the hat and draw one of a million possibilities. Cameron becomes Michael, and now there is no Ryan, then there is Ryan. Maybe he lives in Los Angeles or the Appalachian Mountains. Maybe he dies at 15, lives in the 20s, is Hispanic, grows up to write poetry or bomb a building. Maybe there is no Point Elliot, Washington.

Ryan was perpetually getting older and younger at the same time. I just couldn’t find a right place for him, or Cassandra, Michael, Cameron, everyone else he sees along his journey in this bildungsroman.

Both my parents are healthy and married. I’ve never been to Washington—it was just a mirror image of the cloudy valley I grew up in in upstate New York. I wasn’t alive when grunge was relevant—it was just the kind of music I liked at the time. The places he goes and the places he’s been—I’ve never stepped foot in them. Yet I perceive these places, times and situations in a certain context, as types of characters themselves, with definitions that are always shifting and rewording themselves as I live more life and realize how wrong my perception of things has always been.

Ryan and his made up companions have been my best friends for three years. Ever since eighth grade through around eleventh, they’ve followed me around everywhere (or it was me following them). They mirrored my anger, confusion and sadness with the world, in an environment that I found ostracizing. An environment that made me go crazy, vomit, made me want to destroy the things in my kitchen. Ryan wanted to do much of the same things. Hang himself from a bridge, hop a train headed north and see where it stops. Total gut reactions.

First thoughts that fled after split seconds, when rationality took hold. But I took these irrational thoughts and blew them up into stories and characters. Into Ryan.

He and his story were so truly me, that I thought it would all make a great novel.

I probably wrote over 800 pages regarding Ryan’s life. Just 800 pages of STUFF. I would sort through it, double back, rework and edit, jump back again, take two steps forward, three steps back, always going but never leaving. It was all so totally ME. I worked and worked. Three hours a night, after APs and studying, I would take a crack at dissecting myself, and in essence retelling Ryan’s life.

But as the years went by and I learned new things, left high school and realized that the world is a little better than I thought it was, Ryan began splitting into pieces. New stories arose, and I would take his left hand, his laugh, his hair color and his height, and relocate them onto other characters, in other places and other times. I kept breaking Ryan apart until there was no more left of him, until he was now 20 different people, living in four continents and across a span of something like 500 years. The world of Ryan and Point Elliot were no more. I had grown up, matured, saw that stories can go in new directions and have a certain kind of brevity that I didn’t they could have before. I took this new knowledge and, again, blew it up. Blew it sky high into the stratosphere where my head usually is.

Stories come and go, so do the characters that carry them on their broken backs. They’ll leave your couch, your porch and your basement, move to different cities altogether, and new neighbors will crash at your place. I welcomed these new folk, even though I wouldn’t exactly go out and have a beer with them. I knew it was necessary for them to be around, because without them I would be voiceless, completely incapable of existing in this corporeal dimension of ours.

I was sad to see Ryan go—I had invested so much time into getting to know him. But I also knew his leaving was necessary. We had outgrown each other, and it was time to go our separate ways.

This is what it’s like to be a guy who likes writing. More specifically, someone who invests a shit ton of time into one project, only to realize it will never really come to fruition, at least in its original form. But don’t fret. Everything is salvageable; especially in writing. That 300 page manuscript you got tucked away on your shelf, the one exploring the vastness of humanity within an epic adventure set in 1943 Italy, about the Rabbi that gets abducted by alien platypuses (platypi?) or the six year old who has the power to summon lightning from his eyeballs—that’s probably going to continue sitting on your shelf until the house it’s in burns down.

My stories might not make sense to you, and that story sure as hell doesn’t make sense to me, but your own stories should make sense to yourself, and nothing more. But I’m sure that as you’ve been growing older, your views and conceptions have changed. And so have your stories. That’s the way it should be. Your stories should evolve, just like yourself. Yet, you’re always going to retain little bits of your younger self, and so are your stories.

Go back, unearth that crypt on your shelf and see what treasures lie inside. Some of it will work, most of it won’t. But take what does and recycle it; melt it down and put it to its proper use. If your characters die and you miss them (not plot die, but walk-away die, their world evaporating not from a death ray, but from your own pressing maturity), don’t be sad. They’ll come back, just with different faces; you’ll see those places again, just with different names. Always keep writing, always keep dissecting, and always…always…

Just always keep living.