I Didn't Choose My Main Character—He Chose Me
Hello, dear readers,
If you've ever spent time around writers, you've probably heard them say that, at some point, their characters start making their own decisions. It sounds strange. And honestly, if it hadn't happened to me, I probably wouldn't have believed it either.
But there are moments when it feels as though my hand isn't inventing the story, it's simply writing it down. As if someone is quietly whispering it to me.
When I started writing The Puppet King, I was in my early twenties. I was incredibly confused. I felt like a child pretending to be an adult, trying to figure out how the world worked. I still carried that teenage anger that so easily turns into rebellion. I constantly had the feeling that everyone around me understood something I had somehow missed.
That's when I started writing.
In fact, the book didn't begin as a book at all. It began as a letter. An angry letter to the world. An attempt to understand why people so often pretend that everything is fine. Why they say one thing but mean another. What truly motivates them.
And that's where Alistair was born. Cynical. Sarcastic. Completely convinced that almost any battle could be won with the right insult or a well-timed sarcastic remark. Sometimes I wished I could be that person. The one who says exactly what's on his mind without hesitation. The one who never lets anyone make him feel small.
Then I kept writing. The story began to grow. New characters appeared. A new world took shape. New themes emerged. And while I was exploring them, I slowly began exploring myself as well. In many ways, I grew alongside my characters.
The moment I realized I was no longer telling my own story, but Alistair's, came somewhere around the middle of the novel.
Suddenly, every line of dialogue that came out of his mouth sounded like something I would never say.
His decisions were no longer my decisions. The way he saw the world was completely different from the way I did. He was no longer a character I controlled. He was someone I understood. And I think that's when I finally understood what writers mean when they say their characters start making their own decisions. Not because they somehow magically take control of the story, but because, at some point, you know them so well that you stop thinking for them. You start thinking as them. And that's when they begin to surprise you.
Alistair was no longer just the protagonist of my novel. He had his own voice. His own fears. His own moral compass. His own choices. Maybe that's why I never truly felt like I had created him.
Sometimes I think I was simply lucky enough to be the person who got to tell his story.
If you’d like to follow the journey of the book I am writing and see how it’s coming together, you can find more here:
But if you want to, you can see more about my work as a ghostwriter here:
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