I had a grand vision: King Odo was supposed to be my hero. I slaved over his character arc, sweating through rewrite after rewrite for a full year, trying to make him compelling. I built him up, refined his motives, and polished his narrative line until I was sure he would carry the story.
Then the verdict from my beta readers came in:
Nobody liked King Odo.
You know who they did like? Zeb.
Zeb wasn’t even supposed to be a main character. He was a sarcastic street urchin added as background detail, but he stole every single scene he touched. Out of sheer frustration with Odo, I had deliberately made Zeb abrasive and given him a razor-sharp tongue; confident readers would boo him off the page so I could get back to my “real” protagonist.
Why did the hero I tried so hard to make lovable fail completely, while the character I tried to make objectionable succeeded beyond measure?
To understand why King Odo failed and Zeb succeeded, you have to go back to how this journey began. In 2014, I sat down to write this epic fantasy novel. I was absolutely certain I’d finish it in a year.
Twelve years later, two earlier stories had evolved into something I never could have imagined: The Outlaw King.
Twelve years later, here we are.
When I started, the feedback from writing groups and traditional circles was immediate and cold. My manuscript was too long, my characters were too old, and my approach broke every convention in the book. It was suggested that older characters simply wouldn’t work, and I was routinely criticized for refusing to write according to cookie-cutter formulas.
Truthfully, it was a lonely path. But I was trying to satisfy standard expectations while fighting a deep-seated impulse: I had something in my past that saw the world a different color than most.
I grew up poor. I mean hungry, lost, alone, and even homeless. I had lived nine lives by the time I was twenty-five, crawling out of hell and fighting for my own independence.
Yet for years, I had spent my life carefully hiding the fact that I had once been on the street hungry, that no one had cared, and that I had known profound isolation. I hid all my pain from the world. Without realizing it, I brought that same defensive mechanism to the page. I thought writing was supposed to work the same way—that you put on a mask and present something flawless.
My characters were Stepford Wives living in some artificially constructed euphoria that wasn’t real. I was keeping human truths off the page because I had spent a lifetime keeping them out of sight.
Except when it came to Zeb.
When I brought Zeb onto the page out of frustration, my defense mechanisms were down. I wasn’t trying to make him noble, impressive, or palatable. He was real.
And Zeb knew things. He had the sharp tongue, instincts, and hard-won wisdom of someone who had been kicked around by life. He knew what a real hungry boy would do. He knew what a real man would say to another when there was no room left for pretense. He spoke with the raw, visceral reality of the streets I had known.
I wasn’t following a formula; I was tapping directly into what I knew about survival and human nature.
Zeb knew everything. I forgot to hide it.
In one confrontation, Zeb finds himself surrounded by armed enemies, with another person’s life at stake.
“Touch her, and I will kill you. Has it eluded you that I care nothing about the law?” said Zeb.
“Ah, but you care for those I will kill.”
Zeb’s eyes hardened with the ghost of a grin. “Are you sure? You need those Chambers. Kill one of us, and she might never open them. But me? She might care about each of us, but me?” He snapped his arm and hit Fims in the nose, and a Defender ripped Zeb backward, forcing him to the ground. Simultaneously, Gelendara were each held by sword point again.
Fims held his nose. “You broke it! Rabid peon. You are next in the Cell of Maz. Let us see how long you last!” He jabbed his bloody finger like an arrow. “Who will you betray to remain alive? Oh, you will care!”
Zeb laughed. “I will outlast you.”
It is easy to look at a moment like that and assume that hardship alone creates art. But pain by itself doesn’t write a novel.
One of the greatest discoveries of my writing life was realizing it wasn’t trauma that allowed me to bring Zeb to life; it was mastery. It was those ten thousand hours of deliberate practice—the relentless sacrifice, the blood, sweat, rewriting, experimenting, and sheer refusal to walk away from the desk.
It came down to habitual consistency, although it didn’t begin that way. I started writing food articles back in 2006, grabbing whatever time I could. What began as sporadic work and stolen fragments of time—an hour squeezed into the margins of the day when my son was seven—gradually became a serious devotion to the craft. Over the past decade, writing became the center of my working life.
For five years now, my days have been measured in words: eight hours writing content for a paycheck, followed immediately by another five to seven hours pouring myself into my manuscript. I read, dissected, rewrote, and continued learning, building my craft through years of deliberate practice.
Hardship gave me a raw perspective and a total intolerance for hollow templates, but that intense discipline gave me the tools to express it. I was educated and didn’t know it. My years of practice had quietly given me the craft I needed—I just hadn’t realized what I was capable of until I stopped filtering myself.
That preparation was put to the ultimate test when another cataclysm struck my life. In a moment of utter despair, I threw the entire manuscript away. It was the deepest heartbreak I have ever endured—the kind of grief that reduces the heart to a silent, motionless state. Staying alive required literally crawling forward inch by inch.
When you dive into water that deep, you need something solid to hold onto. Truth forbade me from curling up like a wounded animal. I didn’t have room for superficial stories anymore, but I had something real waiting for me: I had a discipline I had cultivated over years of practice. I had an unyielding investment in myself and a craft I genuinely loved.
I refused to surrender to circumstance or allow past cruelty to dictate my future. Reclaiming my pen, I began carving cold, unvarnished truths directly onto the page. The discipline I had quietly cultivated over all those years gave me the power to rebuild my life and my story.
When I returned to The Outlaw King, Zeb became my standard. He hijacked the narrative because he was the one character I’d written without worrying about industry guidelines or what readers were supposed to like.
I began systematically revising the rest of the cast through his unfiltered lens. I stopped writing characters according to assigned roles or plot demands and started looking at them as real human beings. What would a real person do when hungry, afraid, furious, or cornered? How did their past actually shape their speech and choices?
Each character after that was visualized rather than standardized.
The moment I stopped hiding behind templates and started applying that level of authenticity across the board, the entire architecture of the book transformed. The story ceased to be mediocre and became real.
Looking back, Zeb didn’t ruin my book—he saved it.
I had intended him to be an insignificant background character. Instead, he exposed the hollow places in my original draft, proved the strength of the craft I had worked so hard to build, and showed me how to bring the rest of my story to life.
Pain and hardship gave me my raw perspective, but it was the years of deliberate work, constant practice, and unwavering love for the craft that turned that perspective into a novel. Suffering didn’t make me an author. Devotion did.
Zeb was just the one who forced me to recognize it.
Thanks for reading,
Effie
Zeb is only one voice in the world of The Outlaw King. Discover the characters, their histories, and the stories that shaped them before the novel begins.
You can also explore (The Weight of Steel), another story from the world of The Outlaw King.
