The character looked at me from across the coffee shop and I knew, with the cold certainty of recognition, that I had written him into existence years ago. Not the man himself—though the resemblance was unsettling—but the gesture he made while checking his phone, the particular way his shoulders curved inward as if protecting something fragile. I had described that exact posture in Jazz, had given it to Chris Sommers as he waited for Amber in that Parisian café, desperate and trying not to show it.

The line between fiction and prophecy is thinner than we pretend.

Writers don't create characters—we excavate them from some archaeological site in our subconscious, dust off their bones, and breathe life into their hollow chests. We tell ourselves we're making them up, but really we're remembering them. They exist before we write them, waiting in the shadows of our peripheral vision, patient as death.

When I wrote Jazz, I thought I was crafting Chris Sommers from imagination and ambition, building him from literary precedent and romantic delusion. But scene by scene, sentence by sentence, he began to feel less like fiction and more like confession. His hunger for meaning, his willingness to destroy himself for the possibility of transcendence—these weren't inventions. They were admissions.

The terrifying truth about writing fiction is that you don't know what you're revealing about yourself until it's too late to take it back. You think you're exploring a character's psychology, but you're actually performing surgery on your own. Every flaw you give them, every fear you make them confront, every way you break them—it's all autobiography disguised as imagination.

There's a moment in Jazz where Chris realizes he's been chasing an idealization rather than a person, that his obsession with Amber says more about his emptiness than her mystery. Writing that scene felt like looking into a mirror I hadn't known was there. The character's revelation became my own, the boundary between creator and creation dissolving like sugar in rain.

This is the writer's curse: we become haunted by the people we invent. They take up residence in our heads, commenting on our choices, judging our lives against the dramas we've given them. Chris Sommers whispers to me about authenticity when I'm being false, about courage when I'm being cowardly. He's more honest than I am because I made him that way—or because he made me see who I really was.

The coffee shop man looked up from his phone, and for a moment our eyes met. He had the same lost expression I'd given Chris, the same desperate hopefulness. I wondered if he was waiting for someone who might not come, if he was carrying the weight of his own impossible expectations. I wondered if I had written him, or if he had written me.

Fiction is supposed to be escape, but it's actually the opposite—it's the most direct route to the truth we spend our waking hours avoiding. We think we're playing god with imaginary people, but really we're confessing to crimes we didn't know we'd committed. Every character is a self-portrait painted in different light, every story a therapy session we're too proud to pay for.

The man left the coffee shop without his person arriving. I watched him walk away, shoulders curved protectively, and thought about the strange responsibility of having written someone into existence before meeting them. Had I somehow summoned him, or had he always been there, waiting for me to notice? Was he fiction becoming real, or reality revealing itself as fiction?

I went home and opened Jazz to the scene I'd been thinking about. Chris's desperate wait, his protective posture, his gradual understanding that some hungers can never be satisfied. The words looked different now, less like creation and more like prophecy. Less like imagination and more like memory of a future that hadn't happened yet.

Writers don't make up stories. We just learn to recognize the ones that are already there, waiting to be discovered in coffee shops and subway cars and the faces of strangers who carry our secrets without knowing it.

The real magic isn't creating characters—it's realizing they've been creating us all along.

Behind the Blood

Character development is archaeology, not architecture. We don't build people from blueprints; we unearth them from the sediment of our own experience. The craft lies not in invention but in recognition—learning to see the story that's already there.

With Jazz, I thought I was writing about a young man's romantic obsession, but the story kept pulling me toward deeper psychological territory. Chris's hunger for meaning, his willingness to lose himself in pursuit of an ideal—these emerged not from plotting but from some subterranean honesty I wasn't prepared for.

The technical challenge: how do you write characters who feel independent of your will while acknowledging they're extensions of your psyche? How do you give them agency while recognizing they're mirrors? The answer, I think, is surrender. Let them surprise you. Let them tell you things about yourself you didn't want to know.

The most effective characters aren't the ones we control, but the ones who control us—who demand their stories be told regardless of our comfort level.

The Week's Stats

Coffee shop revelations: 1 (devastating)
Characters spotted in real life: 1 (possibly)
Times I questioned the boundary between fiction and reality: 47
Pages reread from Jazz: 23
Moments of recognition that felt like prophecy: 6
New characters discovered: 2 (in peripheral vision)
Stories that wrote themselves: 0 (they never do)
Stories that demanded to be written: 3

Epiphany of the week: Characters don't live in books—they live in the spaces between what we intend and what we reveal.

One Line That Killed Me

"The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities." — Milan Kundera

The Uncomfortable Question

Which of your characters knows you better than you know yourself, and what are they trying to tell you?

Until next week, when I confess something else that probably should stay buried,
Cristian