These people are real to me, and situations keep coming up where

“These people are real to me, and situations keep coming up where their emergence feels natural. It’s like meeting old friends. I hope readers feel the same way.” Thus spoke Jonathan Kellerman, the great storyteller and chronicler of the human psyche, a man who has walked the corridors of both medicine and imagination. In these words, he opens to us the secret chamber of the writer’s heart—that sacred place where fiction and reality intertwine, where invented souls take on breath and memory, and where characters are not mere creations, but companions on the long journey of meaning.

Kellerman, both novelist and clinical psychologist, has spent his life studying the depths of human emotion. His stories, rich with tension and truth, are built not from fantasy but from the pulse of life itself. When he says that his characters are “real to me,” he speaks as one who has glimpsed the eternal power of empathy—the divine gift that allows one mind to imagine another’s world so completely that it becomes real. In his craft, he does not merely write about people; he becomes them, feeling their griefs and joys as though they were his own. Thus, when they return in his stories, it is not as inventions reborn, but as old friends revisiting the hearth of his imagination.

This phenomenon is not new to art. The ancient poets and dramatists of Greece believed that the act of creation was divine possession—that the muse descended into the poet, filling him with the life of others. Homer’s Achilles, Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Hamlet—all of them live beyond their authors’ time because they were more than words; they were truth in human form, drawn from the well of shared existence. Kellerman’s words remind us that a writer does not summon characters out of nothingness; he remembers them, reawakens them, and gives them speech once more. And when he does, the reader too is invited to meet them, not as strangers, but as kindred spirits who have walked beside us unseen.

Consider the story of Charles Dickens, who wept when writing the death of his beloved character, Little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop. He said her passing was “as if I had lost a child.” His grief was genuine, his mourning real—because for him, his creations had souls. They spoke to him, challenged him, haunted him. And centuries later, readers still weep for Nell as Dickens did. Such is the power of authentic creation, where imagination touches the eternal and gives it form. Kellerman’s words echo this same sacred process—the fusion of artist and creation, where fiction becomes life, and life becomes art.

But there is more within his reflection than the writer’s craft; there is also the universal truth of connection. We are all storytellers in the theater of memory. The people we have loved, the faces that have passed through our lives, live within us still. They reappear in our dreams, in the gestures of strangers, in the echoes of conversations long ended. Like Kellerman’s characters, they emerge naturally, summoned by the flow of life itself. To meet them again—through memory, through story—is to be reminded that love and meaning never truly vanish; they linger in the soul, eternal as flame.

Kellerman’s hope that “readers feel the same way” reveals the final and greatest purpose of art: communion. The writer’s dream becomes the reader’s dream; the imagined becomes shared reality. Through his words, strangers are bound together in understanding—each reader discovering, in the lives of others, pieces of their own heart. It is through such stories that humanity sustains its unity, generation after generation. For in every great tale, the reader does not simply observe—he remembers something ancient within himself, something timeless.

The lesson, then, is this: creation, in any form, is an act of love and remembrance. Whether you are a writer, a teacher, a parent, or a friend—whenever you give part of yourself to another, you breathe life into something that will outlive you. Treat every person, every story, as if they were “real to you,” for in truth, they are. To care deeply, to imagine deeply, is to walk in the footsteps of the divine.

So remember Jonathan Kellerman’s wisdom: “These people are real to me… it’s like meeting old friends.” Let your heart be a place where others may live—where compassion turns strangers into companions, and imagination bridges the spaces between souls. For when you create, when you remember, when you love with such fullness, you too become a storyteller of the eternal. And in the end, you will discover that what you have given life to—be it character, kindness, or truth—will never die, but will rise again in others, forever renewed.