When I sit down to write, I don’t just tell a story, I step into another world. A world that didn’t exist before I imagined it. And like any new world, it needs people. Characters with hopes, flaws, secrets, and pasts. That’s how my novel began to breathe, with characters that came alive in my mind before they ever walked across a page.
It all started with Franco Falcone.
I first saw Franco not as a boy, but as a man. I imagined the kind of person he would become, his strength, his struggles, his quiet thoughts, and then I rewound the tape of his life and began building him from the beginning. I traced his footsteps back to childhood, to the dusty roads of Calabria, where boys run wild and grow into men with the weight of tradition on their shoulders. I built his world around him, brick by emotional brick: a mother with grief in her eyes, a father he would never truly know, a home filled with memory and silence.
But Franco couldn’t stand alone.
Characters began to form around him, like stars in his orbit. Family came first, each one shaped with care, some inspired by my own relatives, others by the kinds of people we all recognize but can’t quite place. Then came his friends. In Franco’s early friendships, I found echoes of my own. The laughter, the trouble, the loyalty, it was all there. Writing those scenes felt like revisiting my own childhood, filtered through a more poetic lens.
When it came to love, I gave Franco the kind of relationship I think many people dream of, something deep, transformative, imperfect but true. That character, the love of his life wasn’t created from a single person, but from a feeling. A memory, a longing, an ideal. I built her from admiration and mystery, a balance of strength and tenderness.
And of course, a world without conflict is not a story, it’s a daydream. So I gave Franco challenges. I gave him secrets, betrayal, loss, and moral dilemmas that I thankfully never had to face myself. That part was fiction, but inspired by years of stories I’ve consumed: films, novels, history, and of conversations that stay with you. Think of the tension in The Godfather, the spirit of Indiana Jones, the epic scale of Star Wars. That cinematic DNA runs through my writing.
Some characters I created, I fell in love with, others I love to hate. But all of them, in one way or another, reflect pieces of me or people I’ve known. That’s the beautiful trick of writing fiction. It’s personal and make-believe at once. It’s a mirror disguised as a mask.
As my story comes to life on the page, I can see now that what I built isn’t just a book, it’s a world that can grow. A world where the characters could easily walk into new stories, evolve, surprise me again. And I’m excited by that possibility.
Because once you’ve created a world… it’s hard to leave it behind.
The Mind's Escape 
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