There are certain things in my life for which I am incredibly grateful, and what I’m most grateful for are the people I’ve come across in the formative years of my life. For starters, I come from an incredible family, full of lively and diverse personalities. As I grew up, I had a core group of close friends to help me navigate my late teens and early 20’s, and I made friends at a great job in my mid-20’s. All of these people influenced my thoughts, my ideals, and my writing most of all.

I’m unabashedly proud of my upbringing, even though some would consider it to be not ideal. I’m from a working-class Jamaican family, one of seven children in a two-bedroom apartment in a not-so-great neighborhood. From the time I could talk, I have been exposed to brilliant minds with varying degrees of charm and humor. That apartment was a safe space, where ideas were nurtured and characters were formed, just by looking around me. Seven different strong personalities under one roof, with my overworked mother and grandmother as the guiding force. It sounds like great television. When I started taking writing fiction seriously around high school, I can freely admit that I based many of my characters on my family.

I grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and once my older siblings grew up and moved out, I got closer to friends in my building and in my neighborhood. We had our adventures, our fights, our struggles, but we were pretty tight-knit. We were very much ride-or-die homies, only no one drove and no one died. And where my home life did a good job of sheltering me from the realities of where I grew up, my friends helped me navigate that safely, and I realized there was strength in numbers. Despite the pressures of the neighborhood, we all either got out, or lasted long enough for the neighborhood to change. There’s a degree of toughness in there that can’t be explained.

I was 23 when I moved out and to a new neighborhood, and a new job. This job was the first time I had co-workers in the same age range, and did we ever click. It was only after I left that I realized that the personality tests we were all given at hiring wasn’t designed to necessarily test aptitude, but to test how well you would get along with people in a small room. (Spoiler alert: it worked.) While I was still a bit of a kid when I met these people, the years we spent working together made us close and we all figured out adulthood—relationships, families, and bill payment—together. We’re all pretty solid grown-ups now, and I can’t help but think it had something to do with our time together.

The experiences I had as a kid from Flatbush—the family, the ‘round-the-way friends, the friends I made at work—drive the majority of my writing, and very many of my characters to this day have deep roots in the family I was born to or the people I’ve grown close to along the way, especially in the core groups of people back home. Some of the stuff I went through with these people have found its way into my first two novels. As an idea, I had my work friends beta read my first novel, which was mainly about the people I knew growing up, and my family all received autographed copies. When it comes to mining my life for a story, I’ve been rather fortunate.

It’s more interesting—and satisfying—to interact with these people as a fully-formed adult as we all enter middle age, some of us (me) kicking and screaming. Some are married with families of their own, some have enjoyed accomplishment at work or pursued business their own ventures, but we are all happy, for the most part, and enjoying varying degrees of success.

Anyway, I wanted to take a moment to thank my family and friends. They pushed me to be a better writer and supported every effort I ever put forth.

Cheers!

#2017 #character #fiction #videogames #inspiration #friends #family