Maybe you are in love with a girl. Maybe she is too young for you, or you are the wrong religion, or you have a terminal illness, and so you will grieve her more than would otherwise be the case, which in itself is no small thing.

Maybe each time you tell someone about her, his first instinct is to speak back at you the things you already know (because a sensible fissure runs through even your wasted bones). What you really need is someone to tell you something your fast-wasting bones don’t know, like it will be okay, or God’s mysterious ways aren’t always toward suffering, or insensible love is the kind that sticks in the long run.

So maybe you decide your friends are a bunch of bastards, which puts you in mind of a quote you heard once about why this eventuality makes loving your enemies such a wise policy after all.

You share a wry smile with yourself as you walk down a sidewalk in some city whose name you’ve forgotten a half dozen times already, not because you are old, mind you, but because you don’t live here, not any more than you live any other place, and if you don’t live somewhere there’s no real point in knowing its name anyway, especially since nobody in it knows yours.

You pass a bar and it strikes you that this is a shame, to pass a perfectly good bar on an afternoon like this, and so you duck in, because this is how a man enters a bar. You’re in an Irish town, and you hope for a wise old bartender to pour your favorite whisky drink. He will be gnarled with age and wear, and he will fill the space behind that scarred and polished bar, and he will greet you like he has been hoping for you, too.

You have already decided that you will tell him about this girl of yours. You know he has no choice but to understand, because he has seen enough ruin and desolation and godforsaken loneliness to know that when you love someone who loves you back you’d best hold on for dear life and tell all the sensible people of the world to go pound sand.

You duck into your soured-beer confessional, only there’s no worldly-wise Irishman tending bar, just a girl with red hair dyed blonde. She is spilling Katy Perry from the bar’s speakers, because her name is Katy too. She’s sweet but not all that bright, and probably no wiser than you, and so there’s no way you’re going to spill your guts while Katy Perry sings about how she kissed a girl.

So you wince your way through your favorite whisky drink that is really quite simple, but which dyed-haired Katy has ruined anyway, and you imagine the character of the bartender you wanted—his knotted hands, his smoker’s voice. Maybe, you think, this is why writers write characters, to fill the spaces where real people won’t do.

The problem is that real writing is like living, which means you have to let all the characters on your hand-scribbled pages become who they are supposed to become, just as you must raise your child in the way he should go, and let someone free if you really love them, so they can come back to you like a pigeon or a boomerang or a virus (this is advice you got from a Sting song, and frankly you think it’s a load of horse manure because by the time she needs to be set free, the last thing she wants is to come running back to the likes of you).

The point is that if you craft your bartender, you have to give him some rights, and wants, and anger, which sets you to wondering how many times he’s heard your pathetic little story about how nobody understands you, your very same story from the lips of a thousand other people who imagine their pain is exquisite.

He’s probably tired of your story before you tell it. Even as you wet your lips to confess it, he’s daydreaming a character who orders a whisky and asks about his story, because nobody ever does that. In fact, maybe your bartender is just as disappointed to see you as you are to see Katy the bleach-blonde faux-Irish bargirl with the tat that isn’t even Celtic.

The more you think about it, the less you like this bartender.

But the thing is, he’s your bartender, the one you set loose among your synapses with his damp cloth and bitter Irish heart, and now you’re stuck with him. Even though neither he nor your readers nor your mother wants to hear about the girl who’s got you drinking and writing, at least you’ve got a character with some heft, which is a darn sight better than most of what passes for storytelling these days.

You don’t like your bartender any more, but maybe you accept him because you understand his story. You smile at this while you sip your awful whisky drink, and then it hits you in the gut—if it’s this easy to embrace the flaws of a make-believe man, why are they so hard to forgive in flesh and blood?