How My Stories Begin

Stories, when they come to me, begin with a person.

Not a plot, and rarely a world. A character simply appears, sometimes only a vague figure at first, sometimes already vivid enough that I know how they move through a room or the tone of their voice when they speak. They usually arrive without explanation, and I rarely go looking for them.

Once they appear, they begin to gather details. A name comes first. Then a temperament, small habits, the kinds of things they notice and the kinds of things they avoid. Gradually they become more defined.

After that, I begin to wonder where they belong.

What kind of place would contain a person like this? What time would they live in? What sort of world would shape them, or resist them? I begin to imagine scenes: moments where they might stand in a particular room, or walk through a certain landscape, or encounter another person who alters the direction of their life.

From there, a story begins to unfold.

One example of this process is a novel I am currently writing called If Not Heaven.

It began with a single figure: a priest in rural Germany in 1908. I did not yet know the story. I only knew the character at first, then eventually his name became Markus Engel, and once the name existed, other details followed. His posture, his quiet manner of speaking, the sense that he lived carefully inside a life shaped more by discipline than certainty. Then came where he was from, a small town called Bacharach, along with fragments of his childhood.

At first he was only an idea. A man who had entered the seminary young, who had spent years performing rituals and speaking prayers that no longer felt entirely true. The kind of person who had built his life out of structure and restraint because it was safer than facing what might exist without them.

Once Markus existed, the world began to grow around him.

The village came next. Then the rhythms of parish life: the small duties, the expectations of the people around him, the way a priest occupies a strange position of authority and isolation at the same time. Other figures began to appear naturally within that space.

Philomena von Richthofen arrived not long after, and once she did, the story began to move.

She is curious in ways Markus finds unsettling. He is careful in ways she finds revealing. When the two of them meet, sheltering together in a small roadside shrine during a storm, the quiet order Markus has maintained for years begins to fracture.

What began as a single character has slowly become something much larger. The village, the people around them, the tensions between faith and doubt, duty and desire, all of it emerged piece by piece from that first figure.

Sometimes the character remains close to the original idea. Other times they become something entirely different as the story grows around them, and that small thought can expand into something far larger than I expected.

Occasionally a character appears only as an experiment, a passing curiosity. But sometimes those small beginnings lead to whole narratives, especially when other characters begin to gather around them.

I am nearly sixty thousand words into the manuscript now, and all of it, in some sense, began with just Markus.

some fanart of Markus by kafkaaaaa23