Seen / Unseen Greenville: How Fiction Influenced My Reality

I’ve talked a lot recently about Greenville, development, local history, gentrification, empty spaces, civic vision, and the strange contradictions that seem to sit underneath this city I love. Some people have probably wondered where all this came from. A year ago, I wasn’t writing essays about urban planning, Cherokee history, or why certain projects get built while others quietly die in committee rooms.

The truth is, a lot of this started with fiction.

For years, I worked on a novel project called Ain’t No Bootlicker. One of the central characters was a journalist named Maya. She wasn’t meant to be a superhero or some flawless crusader. She was observant. Curious. Skeptical of easy narratives. The kind of person who walked into a room and immediately started noticing who had power, who didn’t, who felt comfortable, who felt invisible, and what everyone was pretending not to see.

At the time, I thought I was simply building a fictional character.

What I didn’t realize was that spending years imagining how Maya saw the world was quietly changing how I saw it too.

Writers spend so much time living inside the minds of their characters that eventually some of their perspectives bleed back into reality. Somewhere along the line, I stopped just inventing fictional systems and started noticing the real ones around me. Not in some conspiracy-theory way. Just in the everyday structure of life: who gets heard, who gets delayed, who gets protected, who gets pushed aside, and how cities slowly shape themselves around certain priorities.

And Greenville is fascinating in that regard.

This is a city that is genuinely beautiful in many ways. I love Greenville. I love Falls Park. I love the Swamp Rabbit Trail. I love Fluor Field, the music scene, the bookstores, the coffee shops, the way downtown feels alive compared to many Southern cities. I understand why people move here.

But if you stay long enough and move through enough layers of the city, you start noticing tensions underneath the surface.

Part of the reason I notice them is because I’ve drifted through a strange variety of spaces in my life. I’ve been inside rooms at the Poinsett Club and I’ve also spent time talking to people barely holding things together. I’ve sat with investors. I’ve sat in psychiatric wards. I’ve worked retail jobs. I’ve tried to start businesses. I’ve spent years around artists, addicts, professionals, recovery groups, suburban families, and people who feel completely disconnected from Greenville’s polished image.

I don’t fully belong to any of those worlds.

And oddly enough, that may be the thing that allows me to write about them.

A lot of the current Seen / Unseen Greenville project comes directly from that feeling of being both inside and outside the city at the same time. Fiction trained me to look closer. Maya trained me to ask questions. She trained me to notice systems instead of just isolated events.

Why do certain buildings sit empty for years?

Why do some developments move quickly while others stall forever?

Why do cities often prioritize looking nice over being equitable?

Why are some forms of growth welcomed while others are treated as threats?

Who benefits from the current vision of Greenville, and who quietly disappears underneath it?

Those aren’t questions I learned from politics. They came from storytelling.

Ironically, I think the fiction project itself may have stalled because I needed to live more before I could write it honestly. The Greenville essays, the local conversations, the experiences with Pleasant Roast, the research into Cherokee history and redevelopment and mill villages and local power structures — all of that feels less like a detour now and more like gathering material.

Not just material for a novel, but material for understanding the place I actually live.

The funny thing is that Maya never really disappeared. She just stopped being confined to the page. In some strange way, these essays may be the book she would have written if she had lived here herself.

And maybe that’s one of the oddest things about fiction: sometimes we think we’re creating characters, when really those characters are quietly teaching us how to see.