By: Sylvia Lee 

There is a comforting lie we are taught early on: that school is a safe place, that everyone finds their people eventually, that discomfort is temporary and character-building. It is a story repeated so often that it hardens into something unquestioned. For many, that story holds just enough truth to pass as universal. For others, it becomes isolating, even damaging.

Runaway was born from the space between those two realities.

On the surface, Runaway reads like a science fiction horror novel. Samantha, a poor girl from a difficult background, enrolls in a strange high school only to discover that once inside, she cannot leave. The school becomes a closed system; oppressive, unyielding, and cruel in its own quiet ways. Samantha suffers, adapts, resists, and searches for escape. But beneath the genre trappings, the locked doors and eerie atmosphere, the story is rooted in something deeply familiar. It is a reflection of how institutions meant to nurture can instead consume, how enforced belonging can feel like exile, and how silence is often mistaken for acceptance.

I did not set out to write an allegory. I wrote from memory.

Throughout my own years in elementary, middle, and high school, I believed a version of reality that never quite fit me. I assumed that everyone else liked each other, that friendships were natural and effortless, that authority figures were benevolent caretakers. This perception didn’t just isolate me, it convinced me that my loneliness was a personal failure rather than a systemic problem. When you believe everyone else is thriving, you stop asking why you are not. You endure instead.

That endurance is what Runaway exaggerates on purpose. Science fiction and horror allow for distortion, and distortion can reveal truth more clearly than realism ever could. A school you cannot leave is not far removed from a school that punishes difference, rewards conformity, and ignores emotional damage because it does not show up on a report card. By turning those experiences into something surreal and frightening, I wanted to make the invisible visible.

Fiction has always carried this power. Every invented world borrows from the real one. The strongest stories do not invent pain for shock value; they reshape lived experience so it can finally be examined. There is truth in every piece of fiction, but the stories that last are the ones brave enough to look directly at that truth, even when it hurts.

For a long time, my relationship with writing was complicated. I started writing when I was twelve, but passion does not always come with confidence. There were periods when writing felt inaccessible, when my voice felt too small or too strange to matter. What pulled me back was honesty. Not polish. Not perfection. Honesty. Once I stopped trying to write what I thought was expected and instead wrote what I remembered, what lingered, what unsettled me, the work began to breathe.

That honesty is uncomfortable. It requires admitting that the systems we trust can fail us. It means acknowledging that not all suffering is accidental, and not all harm is visible. In Runaway, the school does not see itself as cruel. It believes it is functional. That distinction matters. Harm often hides behind good intentions, and fiction gives us a language to expose that without turning away.

This is something I believe emerging writers need to hear: you do not owe your reader comfort. You owe them truth.

Too often, writers are encouraged to soften their stories, to make them more palatable, more hopeful, more easily digestible. While hope is powerful, false hope is dishonest. Writing that avoids pain does not heal it; it buries it. When writers choose honesty, especially painful honesty, they create space for readers to feel seen rather than reassured.

My academic background in English and my continued pursuit of an advanced degree in English Education have deepened this belief. Literature is not just entertainment; it is conversation. It asks readers to sit with discomfort, to question norms, to recognize themselves in places they were told they did not belong. That is why my favorite genres, science fiction, fantasy, and horror, are often misunderstood. They are not escapist by nature. They are confrontational. They exaggerate reality so we can no longer ignore it.

Runaway is meant for adults because the wounds it explores do not disappear with age. Many of us carry school with us long after graduation: in our anxieties, our silence, our fear of exclusion. Writing this book was a way to name those feelings rather than dismiss them. It was a way of saying that alienation is not a personal flaw; it is often a response to environments that refuse to see us.

My earlier essay, “Do I Seem Asian Enough?” published in Asian American Voices, came from the same impulse. Identity, belonging, and perception are not abstract ideas. They shape how we move through the world. Whether I am writing nonfiction or speculative fiction, I am always returning to the same question: what happens when the story we are told does not match the life we are living?

For writers standing at the beginning of their journey, my advice is simple, though not easy. Write the thing you are tempted to avoid. Write the memory you keep revising in your head. Write the truth that makes you nervous. Readers can sense when a story is protecting itself. They can also sense when it is telling them something real.

The most meaningful fiction does not comfort us by pretending everything is fine. It comforts us by reminding us that we are not alone in noticing that it isn’t.

Runaway is not a solution. It does not offer easy answers or neat resolutions. What it offers is recognition. It is an acknowledgment that systems fail, that silence hurts, and that survival often looks nothing like success. If that truth unsettles, then the story has done its job.

In the end, fiction is not about escaping reality. It is about facing it, sometimes through locked doors, strange hallways, and imagined worlds that feel far too familiar.