Why I Wrote Fiction Instead of Memoir—Even Though Much of It Is True

When I started writing Captains Wanted, I wasn’t thinking about genre. I wasn’t thinking about platform, or personal brand, or what shelf the book might end up on. I was trying to make sense of something I couldn’t quite name.

(Why I Decided to Write a Memoir—and How I Did It.)

I had been through a slow-burning transformation—one that didn’t have a single, cinematic turning point, but rather, a series of subtle ruptures. Some joyful. Some painful. Most hard to explain in plain language.

I didn’t feel called to tell my story. I felt called to understand it. I felt called to transmit it. And for that, fiction felt like the only form honest enough to hold what I was trying to say.

It’s not that Captains Wanted is entirely made up. Much of it draws from the emotional terrain of my own life—conversations I’ve had, places I’ve been, choices I’ve wrestled with. But it’s not a memoir. It’s not a blow-by-blow of my biography. It’s not even a thinly-veiled self-help book wrapped in anecdotes. It’s fiction. And that distinction matters.

Because fiction gave me room. Room to explore questions without needing to answer them. Room to shape scenes for resonance instead of accuracy. Room to be honest without being literal.

Memoir often says, Here’s what happened to me.

Fiction, when it’s working, says, Here’s something I’ve felt. Have you felt it too?

That felt like the deeper offering.

I wasn’t interested in writing a story that led readers from Point A to Point B in 10 tidy steps. I wanted to make something that left space—for curiosity, for discomfort, for mystery. Captains Wanted isn’t a roadmap. It’s an opening.

One of the things that kept tugging at me during the writing process was how strange it all is—being alive, being in a body, trying to follow rules that no one really remembers agreeing to. We move through the world as if it’s governed only by logic, but that’s a trick the mind plays. The deeper truths—the ones that change us—often don’t make logical sense. They emerge from dreams, from gut instincts, from the in-between spaces we’re taught to ignore.

Magical realism became a way to reflect that back to the reader. Not because I wanted to dazzle anyone with cleverness, but because it felt honest. Life already is surreal. We just forget. Or we’re trained not to notice. The cracks in the matrix are everywhere—those moments when time bends, when coincidence feels like choreography, when grief and beauty exist in the same breath.

I wanted the book to hold that sense of the unexplainable. To invite readers into a space they already know but maybe don’t allow themselves to visit. A place where logic loosens its grip, and something more intuitive—more ancient—can emerge.

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From the start, I wrote the book in second person. Not to be experimental or edgy, but because it felt necessary. I wanted the reader to be inside the experience—not observing it, not judging it, but living it. Second person can be disorienting at first, but then something happens: You stop resisting it. You start to see yourself in it.

I also chose not to assign a gender to the narrator. Not as a statement, but as a widening. I wanted the story to feel personal to anyone who read it. Not because they shared my identity, but because they shared the ache, the longing, the confusion. The deeply human stuff. When we strip away labels, we sometimes get closer to the core.

The craft decisions—the form, the perspective, the structure—weren’t academic for me. They were spiritual. Every choice I made was in service of one hope: that this book could help someone reclaim their agency. Not by telling them how. But by reminding them it’s possible.

The title says it plainly: Captains Wanted. Not found. Not perfected. Just willing. I wrote this book for anyone who suspects there’s more to life than what we’ve been sold—and who’s brave enough to take the wheel, even without a map.

One of the things I kept bumping into while writing was how little progress actually feels like progress when you're in it. We expect growth to be vertical, to feel like momentum. But more often, it feels like circling the same wound from a new angle. Like forgetting and remembering over and over again.

If I had written a memoir, I might’ve been tempted to tie it up with a bow—to frame the chaos as clarity. But fiction allowed me to leave the edges raw. To honor the fact that change rarely announces itself. That we often grow in the dark, in the silence, in the stretch of time when nothing appears to be happening.

This mattered to me. Because I’ve given up before. I’ve told myself the lack of visible movement meant I was stuck or broken or failing. But sometimes, the soil needs to go still before the seed breaks open. I wanted readers to feel that. To know that the story continues—even when it doesn’t look like it.

Writing this book taught me how to hold contradiction. How to trust feeling over form. How to let a story lead, even when I didn’t know where it was going. It showed me that vulnerability doesn’t require confession—it requires presence. That truth can wear many costumes. That sometimes, the most generous thing you can offer a reader isn’t an answer, but an honest question.

And maybe most importantly, it reminded me that we don’t have to be finished in order to be free.

We just have to be willing to begin, again and again and again.

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