When Writing Takes You Back

Reflections while shaping Dreams of the Future

There are weeks when writing feels like walking forward; this past one felt like being gently pulled backward. Back into origins, back into losses, back into the quiet rooms where a story first learns to breathe. As Dreams of the Future moves into its third act, I can feel the ground gathering under it. The characters who’ve survived to stand here now carry what this novel demanded they learn: that scars are not only physical or mental; they are spiritual. And the dream each person holds, fulfilled or painfully unfulfilled, begins to decide what kind of life they are willing to live.

One character, in particular, has occupied my attention like whiskey poured into a heavy glass; strong, dark, and difficult to swallow. Their course was set early. Threads I laid in the opening chapters tugged steadily toward an ending I hoped might change as I wrote. However, unfortunately it didn’t. In the third act, this character dies. Not extravagantly. Not theatrically. But in the precise way that life, when it chooses, can be unanswerable. The door is knocked, and whether we’re ready or not, we open it. The reaper finishes his work.

Skye endures the brunt of that moment. She doesn’t face it alone. Those around her, already marked by loss, meet it with her. But grief is strangely solitary even when shared. The room can be crowded; the silence is still yours. Writing that silence required me to slow down and listen, to let the scene tell me what it needed instead of insisting it say what I wanted. The result is less about a death than the pressure-wave it leaves behind: the tremor running through Skye’s memory, the way a room changes shape when someone will never enter it again.

I won’t pretend this is easy to write. Authors are not immune to their own pages; often, we are the first haunted by them. The question that kept returning, one that belongs to both writer and character, was simple and relentless: what does a dream become when the future that held it collapses? The answer is not neat. Sometimes a dream becomes a wound. Sometimes it becomes a vow. Sometimes it becomes a smaller, humbler version of itself that still insists on meaning.

If Echoes of the Past was born out of darkness, Dreams of the Future asks what we do afterward; how we carry on, how we adapt, how we keep faith with what we’ve lost without worshiping the loss itself. This third act is, in many ways, an argument with time. Time refuses to stop for our grief; it keeps moving, and asks us whether we will move with it. Not forward as in “away from,” but forward as in “with.” With the memory. With the lesson. With the love that grief tries to hide.

That is the work this story is trying to do. Not to defeat death, that is beyond us, but to look honestly at the dream it interrupts and ask how much of that dream can still be salvaged, replanted, or reimagined. Maybe not today. Maybe not soon. But perhaps someday, in a different season, the echo of what was broken becomes a new shape of good, a quieter peace. I do not claim certainty. I do claim hope.

I want Dreams of the Future to be remembered not because it avoids the hard places, but because it enters them and still finds a way to leave the light on. Even when fate lays a heavy hand on a shoulder and the room tilts, time does not end. It passes. And in passing, it sometimes reveals that the dream was larger than the single life we imagined it inside of.

So we keep writing. We keep living. We keep carrying what we can, scars and all, toward a future that will not always answer us, but may yet receive us. If the dream you are holding right now feels shattered, hold the pieces gently. Some dreams return in a different form. Some are meant to be set down so that others can be lifted. And some, against every reasonable expectation, come true.

That is where I am writing from today; backward and forward at once, grateful for the cost, aware of the weight, and still, stubbornly, dreaming.