There are characters you invent. And there are characters you find—somewhere between an observation, a question, and your own unease. Jonas Keller belongs to the second kind. He is the main character of a novel I’m currently writing—and this post is an attempt to explain how he came to be.
Jonas is a professional handball player, in his mid-twenties, good at what he does. He functions. That’s the right word for it, and it’s not a compliment. He gets up in the morning, eats breakfast, listens to his father, who is also his coach, nods at the right moments, says the right things. He isn’t unhappy. He doesn’t rebel. He just keeps going.
And that’s exactly what interested me. During the European Handball Championship, there were several reports about handball players and how strictly they’re bound by their routines. And then there was one who made an unusual career move.
We know the stories of characters who break free. Who slam the door, throw everything away, start over. That has narrative power, no question—hero stories always work. But what about the other kind of person—the one who doesn’t run away, but one morning makes a quiet decision that presents everyone else with a fait accompli? Without drama. Without explanation. Just: that’s how it is.
Jonas secretly applies to a foreign club. He gets accepted. He opens the letter alone in his room, sits on the edge of the bed, reads the eight-page contract—bilingual, in German and French—and doesn’t tell anyone. Not because he’s a coward. But because, in that moment, for the first time in his life, he’s making a decision that belongs only to him.
That is the starting point of Jonas’s search. Not the grand gesture, but the small moment when someone stops waiting for others’ permission.
What Jonas is looking for is hard to put into a single sentence—and that’s intentional. He doesn’t know exactly himself. He isn’t looking for freedom in an abstract sense. Nor is he searching for himself, at least not in the way it’s usually described in books. What he’s looking for is more of an answer to a question he’s never really asked himself, because he never had the space to ask it: Who am I when I’m not functioning?
At the new club, he meets people who—without knowing it—are asking him this very question. A rival who is just as ambitious as he is, but who has a life outside the field and enjoys it. A musician with whom Jonas spends time for the first time without that time serving any purpose. No training, no tactical discussion, no expectations. Simply: time together. That sounds like little. For Jonas, it’s enormous.
I realize while writing that I sometimes understand Jonas more than I’d like to. Not because I was a professional handball player myself or had a father who served me tactical instructions for breakfast, but because I know the feeling he embodies: functioning as a way of life. The art of becoming so good at what others expect of you that you forget to ask what you yourself want.
Writing helps me explore such questions—from a distance. Jonas is allowed to try things out, fail, and find the wrong answers where I lack the courage. He is not an autobiography. But he is also not a pure fabrication. Somewhere in between, a character emerges who—if all goes well—feels like a real person.
In the end, the novel poses a simple, difficult question: not whether Jonas is good enough as a player, but whether he is a good person, whether he is satisfied with his life. The answer he finds is probably not yes.
Next time, I’ll write about a scene that didn’t work—and what that taught me about Jonas. If you’d like to follow the writing process further, you can sign up for my newsletter.
That’s the moment I write for.