Finn Thale

I lost my mother when I was seven years old.

At that age, seven years feels like an entire lifetime. Looking back as an adult, it feels startlingly short.

I have memories of those years, of course. Some are unexpectedly vivid: a voice, a room, a particular moment that has somehow survived intact. Others have faded so much that I am no longer entirely sure where my own recollections end and the stories I was later told begin.

And yet those years are part of me.

I think that is true of far more than the things we can consciously remember. We are shaped by places, people, losses, discoveries, fears and small moments we may never think about again. They influence what catches our attention, what moves us, what we are afraid of, and the questions we keep returning to.

For a long time, I thought stories began with ideas.

Now I am not so sure.

An idea may be the visible beginning: a character, a place, a strange rule of magic, a single scene that appears in your head and refuses to leave. But underneath it there is often something older. A question you have been carrying for years. A feeling you recognise without knowing why. Something that matters to you before you have even found the words for it.

That does not mean fiction has to be autobiographical. Mine certainly is not.

But I do think we carry pieces of ourselves into the worlds we create.

Perhaps that is one of the things I love most about writing fantasy. The world can be completely invented, and yet the questions inside it can be deeply familiar. You can place characters in circumstances that could never exist in our own world and still ask them to make choices, lose things, protect things, misunderstand one another, take risks and live with what follows.

Somewhere in that process, things from our own lives find their way onto the page.

Not necessarily as events.

Sometimes simply as questions.

And perhaps those are the stories worth paying attention to: the ones that keep asking us something long before we understand why.