Books and Writing

Why My Stories Keep Coming Back to People Who Are Searching for Home

Posted on 30 September 2026by Sarah King

I did not plan this.

I want to be really clear about that upfront, because when writers talk about recurring themes it can sound very deliberate and literary and sophisticated, like they sat down with a pipe and a leather chair and said, yes, I shall now explore the motif of belonging across multiple narrative arcs. That is not what happened. What happened is that I kept writing stories and kept finishing them and kept stepping back to look at what I had made, and kept finding the same person standing in the middle of every single one of them.

Someone looking for home.

Every time. Without fail. In different bodies, different worlds, different centuries, different circumstances. But always the same ache underneath. Always the same fundamental question driving everything forward: where do I belong, and does anyone there know my name?

It took me a while to admit that this is not a coincidence. It took me even longer to admit why.

The thing about writing is that you cannot really lie in it.

You can lie in a journal. You can lie to your therapist, to your family, to yourself at two in the morning when you are staring at the ceiling running a mental highlight reel of every mistake you ever made. People are remarkably creative at self-deception. But fiction? Fiction is a snitch. You sit down trying to write a cool adventure story about a warrior in a fantasy kingdom and somehow, without making a single conscious decision about it, you have written a character who is desperately, heartbreakingly trying to prove they deserve to take up space in the world.

And you look at that character and you think, hm.

And then you look at the next character and the next story and the pattern just starts grinning at you from the page like it has been waiting patiently for you to catch up.

So. Here I am. Caught up.

What Does Home Even Mean

This is the question I keep asking through fiction because I genuinely do not think there is one clean answer and I find the messiness of it fascinating and also personally necessary to process. Home gets treated in culture like it is this obvious, settled thing. You have one. You grew up there. It smells like a specific thing and there is probably a parent in it who made food and you carry it with you as a baseline of safety forever.

That is the template. And it is a beautiful template. I do not begrudge anyone who has it.

But a lot of people do not have it. A lot of people had the address but not the feeling. A lot of people had the feeling for a while and then it got taken away. A lot of people built something they called home and then watched it burn or collapse or quietly dissolve over years until one day they looked around and the people who made it home were gone and the walls were just walls again.

A lot of people never had the template at all and spent their whole lives pressing their face against the glass trying to figure out how everyone else seemed to understand something they could never quite decode.

Those are my people. That is who I keep writing about. Not because loss is the only interesting story but because the searching is where everything real happens. The searching is where character is forged. The searching is where people make the choices that define them, for better or worse, and where they find out what they are actually made of when the comfortable lies get stripped away.

And here is the thing I keep coming back to, the thing my stories keep trying to say in a hundred different ways: home is not always a place.

Sometimes home is a person. That one person who sees the exact strange shape of you and does not flinch, does not try to sand the edges down, just goes, oh, there you are, I wondered when you’d show up. That is home. That feeling of landing. That full exhale.

Sometimes home is a community. A group of people who have no logical reason to belong together except that they found each other and decided to stay. Found family is real. I believe in it the way I believe in Scripture, with my whole chest, because I have lived it. Those bonds are not lesser because they are chosen. They are not a consolation prize. Sometimes they are the truest thing a person will ever have.

Sometimes home is a feeling that only visits. It shows up in a specific light on a specific afternoon in a city you have never been to before, and for twenty minutes you feel it, and then it leaves, and you spend years chasing it and not quite catching it but knowing it is real because you felt it that one time. That counts too. That absolutely counts.

And sometimes home is something you have to build from nothing with whatever material is available, which is exhausting and imperfect and takes longer than anyone warns you and the finished product has visible seams and that is fine. That is okay. Seams mean it was made by hand.

Found Family Is Not a Trope to Me

I know found family has become a big deal in fiction. I know it is everywhere now and people sometimes roll their eyes at it the way people roll their eyes at anything that becomes beloved and widespread. That is fine. Roll your eyes.

But I want to say something plainly: found family is not a narrative device I reach for because it is popular. It is not a box I tick. It is the structure that makes emotional sense to me because it reflects something I know to be true about how love and belonging actually work in the lives of people who do not get the easy version.

When I write a group of misfit characters who have no reason to trust each other slowly building something that functions like a family, I am writing about a very real human phenomenon. The way people in crisis reach toward each other. The way strangers become chosen. The way the people you did not expect become the people you cannot imagine living without.

That is not sentimental. That is survival strategy dressed up in feelings. And I find it endlessly, endlessly interesting to write because the complications are real. Found families fracture. Chosen bonds get tested in ways biological family bonds sometimes do not because there is no shared history to fall back on, no built-in obligation, no default. You have to keep choosing. Every time. And the stakes of that choosing are enormous.

My characters get that wrong a lot before they get it right. Some of them do not fully get it right within the pages I give them. Because that is honest. That is what it actually looks like.

Memory and the Homes We Carry

One of the weirder things about belonging is how much of it lives in memory rather than in present reality. You can be standing in a place that was once home and feel nothing because the thing that made it home is gone. You can be thousands of kilometres away from somewhere and feel it pull on you like gravity because the memory of being known there is still alive in your body.

Memory is such a strange and unreliable and precious thing. It reconstructs. It shifts. It protects you from some things and ambushes you with others at spectacularly inconvenient moments, like in the grocery store when a smell hits you and suddenly you are nine years old and somewhere completely different and you have to stand there in the cereal aisle breathing through it while someone tries to get past you with their cart.

I think about memory a lot when I write, specifically about how much of a person’s sense of home is built on memories that may not be entirely accurate, that may be curated by the brain for emotional survival, that may be carrying more weight than the original experience could possibly have held. Characters who are searching for home are often, underneath it all, searching for a feeling they remember. Or a feeling they imagined. Or a feeling they were promised and never received.

And sometimes the quest is not to find that original feeling but to grieve that you never had it and build something new in the space the grief leaves behind.

That is a different kind of story. Slower. Quieter. But it matters just as much.

Identity and the Question of Belonging to Yourself

Here is something that took me a long time to understand and that I keep working out through the characters I write: you cannot fully be at home anywhere until you are at least somewhat at home in yourself.

That sounds like a poster you would see in a waiting room. Bear with me.

When you do not know who you are, when you are still assembling the pieces of identity or when pieces have been taken from you or when you have been told for so long that the real you is unacceptable that you have buried it under layers of performance, the search for home gets tangled up with the search for self in ways that make both searches harder. You do not know what you are looking for because you do not know who is doing the looking.

Characters who are searching for home are almost always simultaneously searching for themselves. The external quest and the internal quest are the same quest wearing different clothes. And what I love, what I find genuinely hopeful about this pattern in storytelling, is that the answer to both questions often comes from the same place. From being seen. From being known. From someone or some community saying you are allowed to be exactly this and meaning it.

Identity does not solidify in isolation. It solidifies in relationship. In the friction and warmth of being known by other people and finding out you are still acceptable on the other side of being known. That is why belonging is not just a nice feeling. It is functionally necessary for becoming a whole person. The research backs this up, but honestly, you do not need research. You can feel the truth of it in your gut.

My characters learn this the hard way, usually. Because that is the only interesting way to learn anything in fiction.

Adoption, Loss, and the Stories We Carry About Where We Come From

I am going to be careful here because I want to draw a clear line between my fictional characters and my own life. The people in my stories are not me. Their histories are not my history. The specific events and circumstances I write into their backgrounds are invented, not autobiographical, and I think it is important to say that clearly.

But I also think it is dishonest to pretend that themes like adoption, loss of origin, questions of identity and lineage and belonging, questions of who are my people and where do I come from and what do I do with the parts of myself that have no clear explanation, are just random intellectual interests I stumbled across.

Questions of home and origin and identity are not abstract to me. They are personal in ways that I navigate privately and that inform the emotional texture of what I write without dictating the plot of it. The feeling underneath the story is real even when the story itself is invented. That is, I think, how it is supposed to work. The facts are fiction. The feeling is true.

What I can say, generally and honestly, is that I have spent a significant portion of my life thinking about what it means to belong to people, to places, to a history, to yourself, when the answers are not simple or clean. That thinking does not stay in my head. It goes straight into the work. It drives the questions I ask through my characters and the journeys I put them on and the things I let them find, or not find, at the end of the road.

Loss is woven into a lot of this because you cannot honestly write about home without writing about loss. They are the same conversation. You know what home is because you have lost it, or because you wanted it and did not have it, or because you are terrified of losing what you have built. Loss is not the enemy of home. It is the thing that teaches you what home was worth.

Safety Is the Real Thing

When I dig down underneath all the beautiful language about belonging and identity and found family and memory, when I get to the actual engine of what drives these stories, what I find is something really simple.

Safety.

Not comfort. Not happiness. Not even love, exactly, though love is part of it. Safety. The specific feeling of being in a place or with a person or inside a community where you can stop bracing for impact. Where you do not have to manage yourself carefully or perform a version of yourself that is more palatable. Where you can be tired and uncertain and scared and not perfectly assembled and the people around you will not use that against you.

That is what my characters are looking for underneath all the plot. A place where they can stop holding their breath.

Because here is the thing about people who have not had that, and I write a lot of them, they do not know they are holding their breath until they stop. They have been braced for so long it feels like just the way a body works. And then something happens, some person or place or moment of grace comes along, and they feel the breath go out of them and they realize with absolute shock that they have been tense for years. Possibly their whole life.

That moment of release is the emotional climax of basically every story I have ever written, dressed up in different clothes. A battle won. A truth spoken. An arrival. A recognition. Whatever form it takes in the particular story, underneath it is always the same thing.

Someone getting to exhale.

I do not think I will ever get tired of writing that moment. I do not think I will ever stop needing to.

Why This Matters Outside the Story

I write fiction. I know that. I am not curing anything or solving anything or building shelters. I am making up people and putting them through difficulty and hopefully giving whoever reads it something that resonates.

But I do believe, genuinely and without embarrassment, that stories about searching for home matter in a way that goes beyond entertainment. Because there are a lot of people in the world who are doing exactly that search in real time. People who do not have the easy version of home. People who are rebuilding after loss. People who are discovering that what they thought was home was never safe. People who are autism spectrum or chronically ill or disabled and have spent years being told, subtly or directly, that the ordinary assumption of belonging does not quite extend to them.

People who are grieving. People who are starting over at ages when starting over is not supposed to happen. People who are piecing together chosen family out of whoever showed up and stayed. People who are trying to figure out if they are allowed to need what they need.

Those people deserve stories in which the search is treated seriously. Stories where it is not solved cheaply. Stories where the messy, nonlinear, occasionally infuriating process of finding where you belong is given its full weight.

I want to write those stories. I appear to be constitutionally incapable of writing anything else, which I have made my peace with and which I think is probably exactly right. God built something specific into the way I see the world and the things I care about and the questions I cannot leave alone, and it would be a waste to fight it.

So I keep writing the person standing in the middle of the story, looking around them at an unfamiliar world, asking the question they have always been asking.

Is this where I belong?

And I keep writing them toward an answer. Sometimes it is the answer they expected. Sometimes it is something entirely different and better and stranger than they imagined. Sometimes it is partial, unfinished, still being worked out at the last page.

But I always write them moving toward it. Because I believe they get to find it. I believe we all get to find it.

Jeremiah 29:11 says God has plans for a future and a hope. I take that personally and I think my characters get to take it personally too, even the fictional ones who do not know the verse. The movement toward home is not futile. The search is not pointless. You are not broken for needing to find where you belong.

You are, in fact, doing exactly what humans are made to do.

The searching matters. The finding matters. The building matters. The exhale, when it finally comes, matters.

And I will probably keep writing about it until I run out of words, which based on current evidence is not going to happen any time soon.

Good.

Books and Writing Creativity

I Made Them Up. They Taught Me Everything.

Posted on 26 August 2026by Sarah King

I want to tell you something weird about writing fiction.

The people I invent — the ones who live entirely inside my head and on the pages I am perpetually rewriting at two in the morning — have taught me more about actual living humans than most of my real-world interactions have. Which says something either about the quality of my fictional characters or the mystifying complexity of actual people, and honestly I am not sure which one it is.

Probably both.

I have been chewing on this for a while now because someone asked me recently why I write. And the obvious answers are there — I love story, I love language, I have things I need to say and this is how I say them without screaming into a parking lot. All true. But the answer that surprised me when it came out of my mouth was this: I write because it is the only way I actually understand people.

That landed weird for both of us.

But I meant it. And the more I sat with it afterward, the more I kept finding evidence everywhere in how I think, how I observe, how I handle the baffling tornado of human behaviour I encounter on a daily basis. Writing fictional characters has been, without exaggeration, the most significant empathy training I have ever undergone. More than any book on psychology. More than any well-meaning workshop on perspective-taking. More than most conversations.

And I want to try to explain why.

First: The Problem with Real People

Real people are chaotic. They contradict themselves constantly. They say one thing and do another. They hold values they violate without noticing, and then they hold guilt about the violation that they also refuse to examine. They love people they treat badly. They treat people well out of motives that are not entirely clean. They are generous in one area of their life and absolutely withholding in another, and they do not experience these as contradictions because they are too busy just living.

When you are on the receiving end of a person — when you are their friend, their kid, their coworker, their person — the contradiction lands as confusion or hurt or frustration. You cannot see the full architecture. You only see the wall that just hit you in the face.

I have spent a significant portion of my life being confused and hurt by people I loved, in ways I could not articulate or understand. Some of that is my autism doing its thing — the part of my brain that processes social cues and unspoken emotional subtext does not exactly run on the latest operating system, and I have had to learn a lot of things manually that other people absorb by ambient exposure. But some of it is just… people are hard. People are hard for everyone.

Fiction is where I figured out how to look at the architecture instead of just the wall.

You Have to Know Why They Do It

When you write a character — a real character, not a cardboard cutout villain or a flawless protagonist — you cannot just make them do things. You have to know why. You have to build the whole basement of motivation before a single word of behaviour shows up on the page, or the behaviour reads flat and unbelievable and your readers will clock it immediately and put the book down.

So you ask the questions. Why does this person lie? Not what do they lie about — why is lying the tool they reach for? What did they learn, early, about what happens when the truth comes out? What did the truth cost someone they loved? Why does this character give and give and give and then suddenly, in one specific context, become immovable and closed? What is that context protecting? What happened the last time they were open there?

You have to build the wound before you can write the scar.

And here is the thing — once you have trained yourself to ask those questions about fictional people, you start asking them about real ones. Reflexively. Almost without meaning to. Someone does something that hurts or baffles me, and instead of stopping at what they did, my brain has started reaching for why would someone do that. Not to excuse it. Not to make it okay. Just to understand the architecture.

That shift has been quietly enormous for me.

Contradiction Is the Point, Not the Problem

One of the biggest lessons writing has smacked me with repeatedly: contradiction is not a flaw in a character. It is the proof of life.

A character who is brave in battle and terrified of one specific conversation. A character who is ferociously loyal to a group and completely dishonest within it. A character who loves deeply and still makes choices that damage the people they love, not out of malice but out of fear or need or a wound that never got properly looked at. These contradictions do not make the character unreliable or poorly written. They make the character true.

Real people contain multitudes and the multitudes do not have to harmonize. I know people who are spectacularly kind to strangers and genuinely difficult to their families. I know people who will fight fearlessly for justice in public and quietly rationalize cruelty in private. I know people who preach one thing with full sincerity and live another thing with full sincerity, and both are real. Both are happening in the same person at the same time.

Before I wrote fiction seriously, that used to break my brain. It felt like evidence that someone was fake, or a hypocrite, or not who I thought they were.

Now I understand it as: they are who they are, and who they are is complicated, the same as every character I have ever tried to write. The contradiction is not the lie. The contradiction is the person.

Secrets and What They Cost

Every good character has a secret. Not necessarily a dramatic one — not always a murder or a hidden identity or a double life, though those are fun. Sometimes the secret is a shame they have never said out loud. Sometimes it is a belief they hold that contradicts how they present themselves to the world. Sometimes it is a grief they never processed, or a decision they made that they have built their entire self-image on top of, load-bearing and invisible.

Writing secrets into characters taught me to see the weight of them in real people.

There is a particular quality to the way someone moves through their life when they are carrying something they have never said. A stiffness in certain directions. A subject they veer away from with a specific kind of casualness that is not actually casual. A defensiveness that appears out of nowhere when nothing obvious provoked it. I was not always good at seeing this. I am better at it now, because I have spent a lot of hours building fictional people and learning which architectural choices produce which visible behaviours.

This is not me claiming I can read minds. I absolutely cannot. I get it wrong constantly. But I am at least looking now, instead of just reacting to the surface.

And more than that — writing characters with secrets has made me more compassionate about the secrets real people keep. Because in fiction you know the full story. You know what the secret is and why they cannot say it and what it cost them to keep it and what it will cost them if it comes out. You feel the weight of it. You root for them even while you watch the secret do damage. And you carry that feeling into real life, where you do not know the full story, and it becomes easier to extend grace.

Loyalty as a Moral Complication

Oh, loyalty. The thing I find most morally complex in fiction and in life.

Loyalty is beautiful. It is one of the qualities I respect most deeply in people and that I try hardest to embody myself. But loyalty is also the thing characters — and people — use to justify staying silent when they should speak, protecting someone who is causing harm, choosing their in-group over the truth. Loyalty is the reason good people participate in bad things. It is the reason whistleblowers are so rare and so isolated when they do blow the whistle. It is the reason families cover for members who do not deserve covering for.

Writing characters in loyalty conflicts — where every option is a betrayal of something real and the question is only which thing you are willing to betray — has given me a framework for understanding some of the most painful patterns I have witnessed in real life. Why someone stays in a situation that is clearly damaging them. Why a person defends someone the evidence is stacked against. Why someone who knows a truth never speaks it.

It is not always weakness. Sometimes it is loyalty to a version of someone or something that they cannot let die. Sometimes it is loyalty to the people around that person who would be collateral damage if the truth landed. Sometimes it is loyalty to an identity that the truth would demolish.

When a character makes that choice in my fiction, I write it with full understanding of what it costs them. That understanding has made me slower to judge when I see it in reality.

Slower. Not completely non-judgmental. I am still a person, not a saint. But slower.

Mistakes and the Question of Goodness

The characters I find most interesting — the ones I return to, that I root for hardest, that haunt me when I am done writing them — are the ones who make genuine mistakes. Not comic mistakes. Not misunderstandings that get resolved in act three. Real mistakes: choices made from fear or selfishness or a moral blind spot that does actual damage to people they love and cannot fully be undone.

Writing those mistakes is uncomfortable. Because you have to be honest about them. You cannot let the character off the hook too easily or the story goes dishonest, and readers feel dishonesty in fiction the same way you feel it in a conversation — something is off, they cannot say what, but the trust is gone. So you have to write the full weight of the mistake. The damage. The consequences. The inadequacy of the apology. The thing that does not get fixed.

And doing that over and over has changed the way I hold the mistakes of real people.

Including my own.

A character who does a genuinely harmful thing is not automatically a villain. A character who does something I respect is not automatically a hero. Goodness in fiction is not a category — it is a direction. It is the question of whether someone is moving toward accountability or away from it. Whether they are willing to look at the damage they caused or whether they have decided it was necessary or someone else’s fault or not that bad really.

The same is true in real life. And having that framework — goodness as direction, not category — has been one of the most practically useful things fiction has handed me. Because it means I do not have to throw whole people away when they do something that hurts. And it means I do not have to accept ongoing harm from someone just because they also have good qualities. Both of those used to be harder for me than they should have been.

They Are Not Real People. That Is Exactly the Point.

I want to be clear about something: my characters are not based on specific real people. They are not romans à clef in disguise. The people in my life are not showing up fictionalized under different names — that is a thing I find both ethically murky and creatively limiting, because real people are too fixed, too themselves, and you cannot push them the way a story requires.

What I mine from real life is not people. It is patterns. The way a particular kind of fear produces a particular kind of behaviour. The way love and control can get so tangled that the person doing the tangling genuinely cannot tell them apart. The way grief that never gets named finds other exits. These are not specific people. These are things I have observed and felt and been on the receiving end of, distilled and rebuilt into someone new who serves the story.

The distance is important. Because in the distance, I can be honest in ways that would be impossible if I were writing a real person I actually know. I can follow the logic wherever it leads. I can let the character be wrong in ways I understand and right in ways that cost them. I can write the full complexity without protecting anyone’s feelings or my own relationship with them.

And paradoxically, the honesty I can access through fictional distance often illuminates real situations more clearly than staring directly at them does. It is the same reason you can sometimes only cry at a movie about something that has happened to you, not at the thing itself. The angle matters.

What God Has To Do With It

I think about the verse in 1 Samuel where it says that people look at outward appearances but the Lord looks at the heart. I have always found that both comforting and kind of terrifying, depending on the day. But I also find it instructive about what it means to really know a person.

Most of the time we only get the outward appearance. The behaviour. The words. The choices that are visible. The version someone has decided to present, edited for the audience. We do not get the heart — the full interior, the fear underneath the confidence, the love underneath the anger, the hope underneath the cynicism.

Writing fiction is the closest I can come, in my human limited way, to practicing looking at the heart instead of just the surface. It is not the same as actually knowing. It is not spiritual insight. It is craft and imagination and the discipline of asking why until I get somewhere that feels true.

But it has made me a more patient person. A more curious person. Less quick to conclude and more willing to stay in the question of what is actually going on underneath what I am seeing.

That is not nothing. In fact, for me, it has been quite a lot.

The Practical Upshot

If you are a writer, you already know most of this. You have felt it — the way your characters start talking back, the way a scene goes somewhere you did not plan because the character would never do the thing you had planned, the weird grief of finishing something and losing access to people who were never real but felt completely real to you anyway. You know the thing I am describing.

If you are not a writer but you are someone who struggles to understand people — and honestly, who among us is not, at least some of the time — I would gently, non-prescriptively suggest: try writing someone. Not a real person. A made-up person with a problem. Give them a contradiction. Give them a secret they cannot say. Give them something they want and something they are afraid of and watch what happens when those two things collide.

You might be surprised what you find out. About them. About the people in your life. About yourself.

Because here is the thing I keep coming back to: we are all the unreliable narrators of our own stories. We all have the parts we present and the parts we protect and the parts we have never looked at directly because we are not ready. We all contain contradictions we have not resolved and loyalties that cost us and mistakes we are still in the middle of deciding how to carry.

Fiction does not fix any of that. But it does give me language for it. It gives me a way to hold the complexity without demanding it resolve into something simpler than it is.

And in a world that is constantly telling us to sort people into clean categories — good or bad, safe or dangerous, worth keeping or worth discarding — the ability to sit with complexity feels like something worth protecting.

Story matters. Character matters. The question of why matters.

The people I invented told me so.