I know exactly who I wrote Black Water for.

It is the person who is talented in ways that nobody around them has noticed. Who has gifts that are sitting unused because the noise of everything that went wrong is louder than the signal of everything they were built to do. Who has been told — directly or indirectly — that they are ordinary. That their dreams are too big. That what they feel in their chest when they imagine a different life is just wishful thinking and not a genuine signal from God about what they were made for.

Alan Charms is built for that person. His unrealized potential is symbolic of theirs. His journey toward accepting what God put in him is the journey I want that reader to recognize as their own. Not as a fantasy they can escape into. As a mirror that shows them something true about themselves.

The marginalized person. The overlooked person. The person who has more trauma than confidence and more gifting than clarity. The person who has spent years letting outside voices determine the size of their life.

That person exists everywhere. In every neighborhood. In every church. In every family. And most of the stories being told right now are not for them. Most of the heroes in fiction look nothing like them and carry nothing like what they carry and move through the world in ways that feel foreign and inaccessible.

I am writing for the person who needs to see someone like them do something extraordinary. Who needs to watch someone navigate the gap between what happened to them and what God put in them and come out on the other side with something intact.

That person is my reader. That story is what I am building.

I have not stopped building since I sat down on that couch in my father’s living room and refused to go outside.

Stephon Rudd