Pourquoi j'écris

One never writes for a single reason. One writes because diverse forces, often subterranean, ultimately converge toward the same necessity.

I do not write to add another title to library shelves. Nor do I write merely to distract a few readers for a few hours.

I write because certain characters, certain wounds, certain hopes continue to live within me and demand a space where they can breathe.

Long before a novel finds its first word, it already exists in another way. Silhouettes appear, voices return, questioning glances linger, a scene refuses to fade. Nothing is yet structured, nothing is yet written. But something insists. As if these characters had stepped into my imagination and were waiting for me to finally open the door.

Writing means embracing this encounter.

I almost never start from a plot. I begin with a question, a fracture, a silence, sometimes a presence that asserts itself before I even know what story it will carry.

What sets me in motion are the beings themselves: their way of loving, faltering, resisting, letting go. Events only interest me through the upheavals they provoke within them.

The novel is, for me, the sanctuary where one can gaze upon the human being with a patience that life does not always grant us.

Memory recurs frequently in my books. It constructs us, shields us at times, and confines us as well. Between what we retain, what we forget, and what we reshape lies an essential part of our identity.

Filiation accompanies me just as deeply: what we receive, what we pass down, the silences carried from one generation to the next, and the gestures through which we attempt to mend what was broken.

And then there are choices: those that seem tiny when made, yet later reveal themselves as decisive crossroads. That is often where, for me, the novel begins.

I write to approach those thresholds where an existence tilts without always knowing, in that very instant, that it has just transformed.

I deeply believe that literature does not provide answers. It teaches us to look differently.

A novel is not meant to conclude a reflection, but to open it. It invites the reader to continue the journey with their own memories, wounds, and questions. Two people never read exactly the same book. Each recognizes something deeply their own. That is undoubtedly one of literature's most precious powers.

From that moment on, the book ceases to belong only to its author. It becomes the reader's.

The reader sometimes discovers what the writer had not consciously planted. They illuminate a sentence, grant unexpected depth to a character, and forge connections that nothing seemed to foretell. The work then continues to grow far beyond the one who wrote it.

If I continue to write, it is because no essential question can ever be definitively closed. Each novel shifts our perspective, breathes life into another character, another fracture, another way of probing what we are.

I do not know how many novels remain for me to write. I only know that as long as a story comes knocking at my door, I will keep opening it.

Because deep down, writing has never been a simple stylistic exercise for me.

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