My Writing Narrative

Page 1 How Finding Keith Sparked

Page 1
Hello everyone,

I recently wrote a quick little micro-story called Finding Keith—you can find it in my portfolio. It started as a spark, but it ended up becoming the seed of something much bigger. That’s often how it begins for me: a scene, an image, or a character whispering at the edges of a story.

From there, I start shaping the main character—or sometimes a whole set of characters—who will carry the heart of the narrative. In that tiny story about Keith, a woman named Rania began to take shape. Now she’s fully alive in my mind, complete with a character sheet that spells out who she is and what she carries. She’s a woman poised between fear and understanding, holding a gift she never asked for and a purpose she never expected.

As I build a character, I ask myself why I would want to read or tell their story. That leads into the deeper work: backstory, physical details, career, home life, family, and all the subtle pieces that make a fictional person feel real. I try to do as much of this early as possible. It keeps me from having to stop mid-scene to make mundane decisions that break the creative flow. If I don’t plan ahead, I might end up typing something like “new actor 1” just to keep myself moving.

As Rania started forming, practical questions popped up—where does she live? What does her neighborhood look like? I pull out a map and commit to a location, because consistency matters. When I’m building bigger stories, I often draw maps myself to anchor the world and make the details believable.

Choosing her job led to even more questions: What’s her degree? Where does she work? How far does she commute? Does she drive, take a bus, ride a train, or have a driver? For Rania, I placed her in the State Department—and that choice came with a mountain of research. Worth it, but definitely not simple.

Now I have a character, a setting, a stack of research, and a blossoming idea. “In a nutshell,” it’s growing into an intriguing paranormal novel. My research ended up leading me back to a memory that fit perfectly with the kind of story I wanted to tell, and that became the foundation.

Let me explain. First, the Keith story was partly true—I can’t really share more than that. Second, I once had a friend who worked for the Postal Service in the late 1980s, before the U.S. had dedicated cybercrime divisions. He was involved in a raid where more than twenty computers were seized and over a hundred people were arrested for interstate child porn and human exploitation. It was so horrific that after reviewing some of the videos on those computers, he quit his job. His role at the time was to isolate faces in the footage so missing-persons investigators might match them.

It’s a roundabout explanation for how the idea came to me, but it will make more sense as we go. In my next post, I’ll share Rania’s character sheet.

This is so much fun!
Kind wishes,
Tee

Now that you know the path that brought me here, come meet the character at the center of it all.