LITERARY TITAN

The Moments Between Choices centers around a man who is allowed to see both the consequences of his life choices and glimpse of the man who could have been. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The story began with a dream I had a few years ago. It wasn’t one of those scattered, surreal dreams — it felt frighteningly clear, like being allowed to watch pieces of my life from the outside. Not the big, obvious turning points, but the tiny moments I’d brushed off. The ones you only recognize as important when you see what they added up to.

That experience sat with me for a long time. At first, I wrote the story with myself as the center because that’s where the emotional spark came from. But as the manuscript grew, I realized I needed to protect the privacy of the people who shaped my life — family, friends, even casual figures from childhood. So I created Omar. He became a way to keep the emotional truth while allowing the details to shift into fiction.

The structure came from trying to recreate the feeling of that dream. We don’t remember our lives chronologically; we remember them through sensation — what we touched, ignored, hurt, loved, or failed to see. I wanted each stage of Omar’s journey to feel like a sense dimming out as he comes closer to understanding himself.

More than anything, the novella came from a quiet, universal fear:

If we were suddenly forced to face our choices all at once…would we be proud of what we see?

That was the seed. Omar grew out of that question.

Where did you get the inspiration for Omar’s traits and dialogue? 

Omar didn’t come from one person. He grew out of the parts of ourselves we usually ignore — the moments we move too fast, the people we take for granted, the habits we justify because we think there’s always more time. When I first started writing, I pulled from my own blind spots. But as the story grew, Omar stopped being “me.” He became a reflection instead of a replica.

His traits aren’t meant to point to a specific individual. They’re meant to feel uncomfortably familiar. Anybody who reads this novella is, in some way, Omar. Not because they’ve lived his exact life, but because everyone has those small, forgettable choices that slowly shape who they become.

His dialogue came from trying to capture that everyday tone — the half-distracted conversations, the rushed apologies, the small dismissals we don’t even notice. I didn’t want him to sound poetic or polished. I wanted him to sound real…sometimes painfully real. Because in those ordinary moments, you see the entire arc of his life.

Omar is fictional, but the habits that made him are human. That’s why readers recognize him — not as someone they know, but as someone they might be without realizing it.

What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?

I’ve always been fascinated by the small, almost invisible moments that end up shaping a person’s entire life. Not the dramatic events we expect to remember, but the tiny decisions we barely register — the things we say out of habit, the people we overlook, the apologies we delay because we assume there’s endless time. Those small choices become the architecture of who we are, and most of us don’t realize it until much later.

Another thing that interests me is how people carry two versions of themselves at the same time: who they are, and who they believe they could be “if things were different.” That gap is where a lot of pain — and a lot of hope — lives. It’s also where great fiction usually hides.

And then there’s memory. We don’t remember our lives in clean timelines — we remember through sensation. A smell, a sound, a sudden feeling in your chest. Emotions come back to us through the senses, not the calendar. That idea shaped the way I wrote this story.

One of the things I love about fiction is the freedom it gives you. You can reach heights you didn’t even know you were capable of. You can follow imagination to places that feel unbelievable — and still land on something emotionally true. Who would’ve thought I’d end up writing a novella based on a dream I had? That’s the power of fiction. It lets you take something fragile, something fleeting, and turn it into a story that might touch someone else.

What makes great fiction, to me, is honesty. Not in a factual sense, but in the way it forces us to sit with something we’ve been avoiding. When a story captures those small, uncomfortable truths about how we love, how we fail, how we change, or how we refuse to — that’s when the human condition feels most alive on the page.

Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?

Yes, there will definitely be more. Writing this novella opened up a creative side of me I honestly didn’t expect, and I’m already shaping the next project. But right now, I want to give this book the space it deserves. It’s my debut, and I’d like to see how it finds its readers, how people react to it, and hopefully enjoy whatever success it earns.

I’m taking this moment to connect with readers, learn from their responses, and appreciate the journey of having my first story out in the world. After that, I’ll be ready to step fully into the next one — and I’m excited for where that will lead.