Last summer, I traveled to the Philippines. On the flight home from Manila, I started writing about the experience. My trip had been years in the making. I’d even booked a ticket previously and then ended up not going. As my trip approached this time, it seemed at points that it, too, might stall out and fall apart. All these thoughts and more were swirling in my mind as I set pen to paper and began writing.

I started with the rain—how the clouds draped the sky like a velvet blanket that refused to let go of the gray. The city’s tears. Somewhere over the Pacific, I felt eyes on my notebook.

The Filipina woman in the seat beside me kept glancing over—quietly, politely, curious. She checked her phone. Looked back. Said nothing. But the more I noticed her attention, the more inspired I felt to keep going—and the more I wrote. The ideas flowed. The sentences landed. I hit that rare, clean stretch of flow where you stop “trying” and just… move.

I didn’t know it yet, but that flight would push me into new genres, a new point of view, and a kind of story I never expected to write.

Eventually, I leaned back in my seat and stopped. By then, the silence had built its own pressure. When she finally smiled and spoke, it felt like water bursting from a dam. She asked if it was my first time in the Philippines. That sparked a conversation. We talked until our layover in Taipei split us toward different gates—hers back to Northern California, mine onward to the airport lounge where I would wait for the next segment of my trip. She told me about her family in the Philippines, about the rhythm of traveling home and away, and about the small tethering details of a life divided across two continents.

By the time we parted, something in me had shifted.

Not because of a single conversation, exactly—but because the trip, and the writing, and that quiet moment of being witnessed had watered a seed that had been in the ground for years.

Taipei’s airport is clean, modern, and beautiful. It took me a while to walk far enough, figure out the digital way to order a smoothie (you can’t just walk up to a counter and talk to a person), and finally sit down, plug in, and open my laptop. When I did, the words kept flowing.

For structure, I envisioned my memoir in alternating chapters—one tracking the Philippines trip from arrival to return, the other beginning in childhood and carrying forward to my departure—until the timelines met in the middle: the chapter where I come home followed by the chapter where I leave. I still love that idea. But I soon realized my two-week adventure couldn’t keep pace with an entire childhood. I’d only been there two weeks, after all.

So I pivoted.

Two paths appeared: a memoir, and something else.

The “something else” became a first-person, autofiction-leaning thriller—a man travels to the Philippines and gets pulled into a murder investigation that touches someone from his past. Different genre. Different energy. A different kind of momentum. And yet the writing felt surprisingly natural, because I wasn’t inventing everything from scratch. I knew the places. I knew the humidity, the traffic, the way a street corner feels after rain. I was translating lived experience into fiction.

That project is now titled Tears of Rain—still in progress, still finding its shape, but already one of the most enjoyable creative experiments I’ve taken on. If you’re curious, you can read the early chapters here: https://davidjgailey.com/tears-of-rain.

What surprised me wasn’t the pivot into a new genre—it was how naturally I’m enjoying the process. Lived experience has given the craft traction. And that got me thinking about why certain authors make me lean in as a reader.

I can usually tell when a writer truly knows the world they’re building—when they’ve lived it, or carried it, or studied it so deeply that it stops feeling like “research” and starts feeling like lived truth on the page. This is especially true for first-person thrillers or stories rooted in the “real world.”

I feel the same respect in any profession. When someone truly understands what they’re talking about, they don’t just know the product—they understand the problem it solves, the context around it, the pain points people don’t always say out loud. You listen differently when they speak.

I felt that kind of grounded knowing while reading The Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley, which was one of two novels I selected during my latest MFA term. Boulley is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and she writes from and about her Ojibwe community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: https://angelineboulley.com/.

The novel follows Daunis Fontaine, a biracial teen who witnesses a crime and becomes involved as a confidential informant in an FBI investigation into a dangerous drug operation—an investigation that puts her community, her identity, and her loyalties under pressure. But what stayed with me wasn’t just the suspense. It was the way culture was present on the page—not as a lecture, not as decoration, but as lived reality: community ties, traditions, identity, and the complicated push-pull of belonging. If you haven’t read it and you like smart thrillers rooted in community and identity, it’s worth your time.

The Firekeeper’s Daughter reminded me of something I want to keep chasing in my own work:

That feeling that the writer isn’t performing expertise—they’re inviting you into a world they genuinely know.

Maybe all writing is autofiction in some way. Not because it’s secretly autobiographical, but because it’s filtered through what we’ve seen, heard, loved, lost, and carried. And when that’s real on the page, we all lean in.