I look in the mirror and ask myself—what am I more: a writer or a war-traumatized veteran?
Which came first?
Who is the person typing this essay?
And why does it matter?
Because a writer can invent a world—any world he wants.
But the traumatized man?
He only wants to write one world—his.
I don’t write about the trauma.
The trauma writes me.
Every time I sit at the computer, it shows up.
Not always right away.
Sometimes it lets me type a few quiet lines—then it pulls up a chair.
Not shouting. Whispering.
Uninvited.
It tries to take over.
Not me—the character.
I try to build someone else: a protagonist who is calm, intact, untouched by war.
Someone who knows love, boredom, ordinary fear.
But the trauma rewrites him.
It revises his backstory.
It plants in him the wounds of a soldier.
It floods him with anxiety.
It forces him to face what I tried to escape—my own fear.
And suddenly, the character—no longer entirely mine—carries my scars.
It’s not a war between memory and fiction.
It’s a war between two voices.
The writer’s voice: it shapes, composes, imagines.
And the trauma’s voice: raw, insistent, unfiltered, breaking in.
One seeks structure.
The other wants to blow it apart.
The writer writes.
The trauma erupts.
In my first novel, Holiday Apocalypse, the protagonist—a writer—meets a wicked dwarf who offers him a deal that’s hard to refuse.
He wants what many writers want: success, fame, admiration.
But then, without warning, the instincts I learned in the army begin to surface.
The training.
The reflexes.
The way war etches itself into your nervous system.
It bleeds into the narrative.
I tried to write about ambition.
The wounded man in me hijacked the plot.
Suddenly the character drinks.
He uses drugs.
He fights enemies that aren’t there.
And the novel shifts.
It’s no longer about ego—it’s about fracture.
A man who can’t tell the difference between memory and madness.
Because something inside him is still at war.
In my second novel, Dog, I didn’t resist.
I surrendered in advance.
Let him speak.
The shell-shocked veteran got the mic.
The writer stepped aside.
No metaphors.
No protection.
Only trauma—raw, howling, unfiltered.
There was no “me” in Dog.
No voice left to shape.
Only a wound, begging to be read.
Even in the novels that followed, the swordfight never stopped.
Book after book—character against creator.
Didn’t matter if the protagonist was a Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis or a chimpanzee fluent in sign language.
The same battle played out.
The trauma pulled toward itself.
The writer pulled toward story.
And in between—a character torn in two.
When does it end?
When does the writer hold the pen steady, and the trauma sit quietly in the shadows?
When I write for children.
Something changes then.
The child walks onto the stage—the child from before.
Before the war. Before the injury. Before the silence.
He tells a story.
Simple. Pure. Full of wonder.
And the trauma has nothing to say.
Because it hasn’t been born yet.
That’s the only voice unafraid.
Maybe this is the core of my writing:
Not choosing one over the other,
but learning to live in the tension.
To be both.
The man who remembers.
And the man who imagines.
To let them share the page.
Sometimes, even the same sentence.
Because sometimes, from that fracture, a deeper truth appears—
One that can’t be faked.
Not perfect.
Not heroic.
But honest.
And in the end, that’s all I have to give.
