When Characters Refuse to Let Go

When I retired from corporate life at seventy, I needed to fill the space it left behind.

I had dabbled in photography for decades and built up thousands of images from all over the world. I even produced a few coffee-table books. But in recent years it no longer held the same appeal. I felt bored by it, short of inspiration, reluctant to go out and make the images at all.

Writing, on the other hand, had always been part of my life. Proposals, sales documents, messages — words had paid my way for more than forty years. So I began to wonder whether there might be a novel in me after all.

But what could I write about? What did I really know?

I’ve always been drawn to history, psychology, and philosophy — to trying to make sense of life. And I grew up in a mining village in South Wales. My father and grandfather were miners, and as a student I worked in the coal yards to pay my way through university.

I once read the familiar advice: write about what you know. That was the spark that led me to write my first novel, Unseen Souls.

I immersed myself in memory and research and began writing every day. It felt organic, almost inevitable. I wanted to know what happened next, and that curiosity pulled me forward.

Unseen Souls ended up at 530 pages. I loved writing it. I still dislike the business of promoting it.

What I didn’t expect was what came after.

I didn’t plan to start writing the sequel just yet.

There were other ideas waiting their turn. Other projects I could have picked up, more sensibly. But the truth is simpler than that: the characters wouldn’t leave me alone.

They stayed with me after I closed the document. They turned up while I was walking, reading, half-listening to the news. My wife would constantly ask me, ‘What has Eliza or Ned been up to today?’ We talked about them as if they were alive — and to us, they were. I found myself wondering not what should happen next, but what did happen, as though their lives were already unfolding somewhere beyond the page, and I was merely late in catching up.

That, I think, is one of the quiet miracles of writing fiction — particularly historical fiction rooted in real lives and real conditions. When it works, characters stop feeling like inventions and begin to feel like people you’ve met. People shaped by forces larger than themselves: poverty, class, labour, illness, belief. You don’t manipulate them so much as listen.

I write fact-based historical fiction. The scaffolding is real. The places existed. The industries existed. The suffering existed. But the inner lives — the thoughts, the private reckonings — have to be imagined with care and humility. Perhaps that’s why the bond can feel so strong. You’re not just telling a story; you’re carrying something forward.

When a character starts to feel alive, continuing the story doesn’t feel like a creative choice. It feels like an obligation. Not a burden — a responsibility. As though stopping would be a kind of abandonment.

I suspect many writers recognise this feeling, even if they don’t often talk about it. The moment when a book ends, but the people in it do not. When you realise you’re not finished because they aren’t finished.

So I’ve begun the sequel. Not because of a plan or a deadline, but because the characters were still there, waiting.

And that feels like reason enough.

Unseen Souls began as an attempt to make sense of the lives and histories I grew up alongside. If you’re interested in stories rooted in real places and real experience, that’s where this journey started.

I suspect this won’t be the last time I write about the strange afterlife of characters — or about the long conversation between memory, history, and imagination.