What writing means to me

Human connection as the territory I'm exploring

The question I keep returning to, in this phase of my writing, is what people will do for each other — and what it costs them. Not love in its easy form, but love that requires something: sacrifice, transformation, the willingness to stay when leaving would be simpler. Brie in The Grandmaster gives away thirty-five years of her remaining life to a man who wasn't even there when she needed him. That is the kind of human moment I find myself drawn to right now.

Ideas that begin as beautiful and become monstrous

The Grandmaster's Lifespan Law was, in his own mind, a perfect chess move: elegant, logical, humanitarian. The horror is that he wasn't entirely wrong — and that he spent years unable to see the cost. I am curious about the kind of evil that starts with a genuine idea, an honest belief that you are solving something. That is where the real moral weight lives.

The spiritual as structural, not decorative

My guardian angel in The Grandmaster is not a metaphor — he is a structural force, grounded in defeat, watching from a rooftop and unable to intervene. He asks God how He can still love them. This is not window dressing. The tension between divine order and human chaos is load-bearing in everything I write; it shapes what characters can and cannot do.

Language as landscape

I am Armenian by birth and have spent a career writing in English as a second language — which means I have always felt the weight of words, their strangeness, the gap between what you mean and what you can say. That friction became an asset. I write characters who are always, partly, in translation.