I always got stuck on characters. I would build them up to a certain point, give them a shape, a voice, maybe even a verbal tic, and try to craft a past for them. But then, when the moment came to breathe life into them, to let them exist through their own thoughts, I would stop. I felt like I didn’t know them well enough, that they were missing that «something» that makes a person real, authentic, and unrepeatable.

Every time, without realizing it, I ended up finding myself in them. I shared my fears with them, gave them my thoughts, placed them in front of the same dilemmas that troubled me. I created them so close to my soul that, at some point, I could no longer tell them apart from myself. In a strange way, my characters became mirrors—but never truly people.

I wondered many times where I was going wrong. Maybe characters aren’t born just from careful descriptions or meticulously crafted stories. Maybe they come to life in the moments when we allow them to exist outside of us, to breathe without constantly controlling them. Maybe we need to listen to them instead of dictating them.

That’s what I tried to do—to look beyond myself, beyond what I already knew. To listen to other people’s stories, to see the world through different eyes. To stop imposing an identity on them and instead let them discover it on their own. Maybe characters are born, in fact, the moment we, their authors, stop forcing them to resemble us.

I decided to step out into the world and search for inspiration where life pulsed the strongest. I walked into a crowded café, where voices blended like a chaotic choir of unwritten stories. I sat at a table by the window and observed the faces around me. A young woman laughed loudly, throwing her head back. An old man read a newspaper, resting his glasses on the tip of his nose. A man with a wrinkled coat scribbled frantically in a notebook, never looking up.

That’s when I understood. My characters didn’t need to be invented from nothing—they needed to be discovered. They already existed, hidden in the small gestures of those around me, in the way someone ran a hand through their hair when nervous, or in the brief pause between two sentences. I took out my notebook and started writing. This time, not about me, but about them.