What The Page Gives Back

I have not lived a quiet life.

I ran Pekka Rinne's official website for years - the Nashville Predators retired goalie, one of the best to ever play the position. I worked with Bret Michaels, lead singer of Poison, one of the most recognizable names in rock history. I have been inside the rooms. I have done the work. I have stood close enough to other people's extraordinary lives to understand exactly what it costs to build them. I would do all of it again - every single moment of it - for both of them. Without hesitation.

But that work, as real and as meaningful as it was, always belonged to someone else's story. Not mine.

That is the thing no one tells you about working inside someone else's world, no matter how remarkable that world is - the outcome never belongs to you. The game ends the way the game ends. The tour goes where the tour goes. You show up, you give everything, you do your job with everything you have, and then you watch the result from a particular distance that is hard to describe. Close enough to feel it. Far enough to know it was never yours to keep.

Writing is the only work I have ever done where that changes.

I came back to it after a long silence - years where the words weren't there or I wasn't ready for them or both. And when they came back they came back differently. Louder. More insistent. Less willing to wait.

What I found when I came back was something I hadn't expected to find anywhere.

Control.

Not the brittle kind - not control as defense or rigidity or fear. The real kind. The kind that lives in the architecture of a story, in the choices that shape a character's life, in the moments of grace and devastation that you place exactly where they need to go. On the page I am the architect of everything. Every consequence, every turn, every moment where something is lost or saved or transformed - mine. Nothing ends before I am ready. Nothing is taken without my permission.

For someone who has spent years being excellent inside other people's stories, that is not a small thing.

And then there is the other truth - the one that is harder to say out loud.

Sometimes I live vicariously through the characters.

Not because my life has been small. It hasn't. But because the characters can go where I cannot, feel what I have held back, say what I have kept private, choose differently than I have chosen. They carry things I have put down. They walk through doors I have stood outside of. They get to stay when staying wasn't possible. They get to leave when leaving was the only honest thing.

That is what the page gives back. Not escape - I have never needed to escape my life. Something more precise than that. A parallel track that runs alongside the real one and sometimes goes deeper. A place where the outcome is entirely my own, where the characters can live the parts of the story I am still figuring out how to tell.

I have never said that out loud before.

• SL