Behind the Story

My most successful stories tend to be the ones based on ideas that I thought of in a flash of inspiration, jumped on, and wrote right away because the time was right. Broken, Curtain Call, and The Road to Bethlehem were all those kinds of stories.

My Brother’s Keeper was not. It took me four years to start writing this story from when I first got the idea and almost four more years to really start working on it consistently.

The idea came to me in the summer of 2013. There were a couple of things that inspired it. The first was a mini-trend of fanfics about one of the Boys being in a wheelchair that popped up on Absolute Chaos that summer. By “mini-trend,” I mean at least three stories by three different authors. Although the actual storylines were vastly different from each other, it seemed so random that they would all appear around the same time. I remember asking a friend, “What’s up with all the wheelchair stories on AC all of a sudden?” Prior to that, I only remember reading one story about a Boy being in a wheelchair, My Missing Half. I had never really thought of using that as a premise of one of my own stories, but I jokingly said, “If this is the new trend, I should jump on that bandwagon. I bet I could write the shit out of a wheelchair story.”

I had only written one “disability fic” before MBK, which was Broken (and its sequel By My Side, but I tend to lump those two stories together as one). Although I think of Broken as more of a cancer fic than a disability fic, it definitely fits that trope, too. I loved writing Broken, and the amputation arc turned out to be my favorite aspect of the story to write. So I was down for another disability storyline if I could come up with a good enough idea.

The other thing that inspired the idea was the song “Take Care,” one of the bonus tracks on the In a World Like This album. I fell in love with it the first time I heard it, and it’s still one of my favorite BSB songs. It’s such a great hurt/comfort song, and you know how much I love hurt/comfort fics. The more I listened to it, the more I was like, “I need to write a story based on this song.”

That’s how I came up with the rough idea of what would become My Brother’s Keeper. The original premise was basically, “One of the guys gets hurt and ends up in a wheelchair, and the other guys take care of him.” The details would come later.

One of the first things I had to decide was which guy I was going to disable. Pretty quickly, I narrowed it down to either Brian or Kevin. I considered Brian at first because he’s the only one who doesn’t have a solo in “Take Care,” so if I was going to incorporate the actual song into the story somehow, it would make sense that the other guys were singing about him. But then I thought of Kevin because of Nick’s line, “You… you always stood so tall. I never thought you’d fall. But now it’s you that’s fading.” That line screamed “Kevin” to me. I could just imagine little Nicky, who must have looked up to Kevin both literally and figuratively when they first met, not knowing how to handle Kevin getting hurt. That’s when I decided it needed to be a Kevin and Nick bromance. Of course, Frick and Frack are my favorite pair, but I had already written a number of Brian and Nick stories and hurt Brian a lot. I had read some great Kevin and Nick stories before, mainly written by Mare, but had never written a Kevin novel myself. Ultimately, that’s what sold me on choosing Kevin over Brian. (Sorry, Kev.)

Fortunately for Kevin, I had just started Sick as My Secrets when I got this idea and was having too much fun torturing Howie and Nick to give it too much thought, so I put it on the back burner for four years. After I finished SAMS in the summer of 2017, I went back to my Kevin and Nick wheelchair story idea. That’s when it really took shape.

The biggest decision I made that really shaped the story was setting it in 2008 instead of the present. I had figured out that, in order to make the bromantic hurt/comfort aspect of the story work with Kevin and Nick, I needed to get rid of Kristin so that Kevin would have to rely on his friends instead of his wife to help take care of him. Kristin is way too cool of a wife to abandon her husband if he became disabled, so I decided I would have to kill her off instead. (Sorry, Kristin.) Then I had to decide if I wanted to set this before or after Kevin had kids. Although I don’t really like writing about the Backstreet kids, I did like the idea of Kevin struggling to raise one or both sons as a single dad in a wheelchair – which would be another reason why he would need help from his friends. I think, originally, I was planning to have this story take place in 2013 (which was “the present” when I first got the idea), when Mason was six and Max was a newborn. But when I started thinking more about Nick’s side of the story, my thoughts changed. I realized it would be better set further in the past, when Nick was still single and struggling with his own issues. That is when the full idea really came together for me. When Kevin’s perfect life fell apart, hot mess Nick would be forced to step up to help his brother, which would in turn help him grow up and straighten out his own life. Early 2008 seemed like the perfect time period to put all this together. Nick was still a hot mess, but only a few months away from having the health scare that would help him turn his life around (and, of course, I was down to write about that drama, too). Kevin was no longer a Backstreet Boy, which made things easier in one aspect because then the group wouldn’t have to decide whether or not to go on without him. Mason was a baby, which I liked for a couple of reasons: one, Kevin would need a lot of help taking care of him after the accident, and two, I could already imagine the dichotomy of Kevin watching his son reach milestones that he would never be able to do again, like learning to walk. That was really poignant to me. Once I figured out the timeline of the story, I got excited about how it was all going to fit together.

I spent a few days researching and outlining in early July 2017. That’s when I changed the working title from Take Care to My Brother’s Keeper, which I thought worked better from both Nick and Kevin’s perspectives. I also solidified more of the basic plot details. I always figured it would be a spinal cord injury that landed Kevin in a wheelchair. I know there are plenty of other conditions that could result in the loss of someone’s ability to use their legs, but a spinal cord injury seemed the most sudden and dramatic, so it was most appealing to me. A car accident seemed like the most realistic way to injure Kevin and kill Kristin, so that was a quick decision, too.

Most of my research in the beginning was about spinal cord injuries, which I didn’t really know that much about. One of the first things I remember learning was the actual definition of quadriplegia (also called tetraplegia) and paraplegia. Like a lot of people, I was under the impression that quadriplegics were all like Christopher Reeve – paralyzed from the neck down, unable to use their arms or legs – while paraplegics were paralyzed from the waist down, able to use their arms but not their legs. This is a common misunderstanding. Quadriplegia just means impairment in all four limbs, whereas paraplegia means impairment in only two limbs. “Impairment” can be anything from complete paralysis to a mild loss of function or sensation. There are quadriplegics who can use their arms, feel their legs, and even walk. That’s because spinal cord injuries are classified as either “complete” or “incomplete,” which has to do with whether or not the spinal cord was completely severed/compressed or not. If the spinal cord is severed or fully compressed to the point where no signals can get through, it’s a complete injury. That means there’s no function or feeling below the level of injury (except something called neuropathic pain, which is a different type of sensation that affects people with nerve injuries), and it’s most likely permanent. In an incomplete injury, some signals can still get through the damaged part of the spinal cord, which means people may still have some feeling and/or function below the level of injury and have more hope of recovery. The “level of injury” refers to where the spinal cord was injured, which is classified according to what vertebrae are at that level. The level affects what parts of the body will be impaired, with higher level injuries leading to worse impairment.

I decided if I was going to “write the shit out of a wheelchair story,” I was going to go all out and make Kevin’s injury pretty severe. One of the first decisions I made regarding that was that he was not going to make a miraculous full recovery and surprise everyone by walking across the stage or something at the end of the story. While that can happen in real life, it’s not the norm and felt way too cheesy for my fic. I wanted to go beyond the tropes and cliches, so I decided to make his injury complete, leave him permanently disabled, and show how he adjusts to that reality. After doing a lot of research, I settled on C5-6 as his level of injury. This made him a quadriplegic with some use of his arms and wrists but not his hands, fingers, or anything from the chest down. I read that C-6 is the highest level at which a person can live fully independently, although most people at that level still need some help. This gave me options. It allowed me to make Kevin’s injury seem more severe in the beginning, when he was paralyzed from the neck down and could barely breathe on his own, but let him gradually regain some function once the period of “spinal shock” ended and the swelling went down. Most of the real life quadriplegics who inspired me through their YouTube videos, blogs, podcasts, and/or books were also at or around this same level, so I could model his abilities and challenges after theirs.

I will be the first to admit that when I started this story, I did not personally know anyone with a spinal cord injury. By researching, I did my best to write it as realistically as possible, not just physically but emotionally as well. I tried to not only put myself in Kevin’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to sustain a life-changing injury like this, but also to find out from real people who went through it what it was actually like. In the course of my research, I discovered a podcast called The Quad Podcast, which was very helpful. One of the first episodes I listened to was about how disability is portrayed in movies, and that was super enlightening. I learned a lot about what not to do when writing a character with a disability. As the hosts, both quadriplegics, pointed out, most movies with a wheelchair user as a main character end with him/her either making a miraculous recovery or committing suicide, which sends the message that life in a wheelchair is not worth living. As an able-bodied person, it’s easy to feel sorry for someone in Kevin’s situation and think, Oh my god, I would never want to live that way, but the main thing I took away from that podcast was that most people with disabilities still find life worth living. Of course, getting to that place of acceptance is a process. Each person’s experience is unique as everyone handles grief differently, but I tried to portray Kevin’s journey in a way that was both sensitive and believable.

I included a list of people, YouTube channels, podcasts, blogs, and books that helped me in an author’s note earlier in this story, but this seems like a good opportunity to give credit to another fanfic that helped to pave the way for this one. Earlier, I mentioned My Missing Half, the only “wheelchair story” I remember reading in the BSB fandom prior to the handful of them that popped up in 2013. Unlike those stories, My Missing Half was actually finished. I first read it back in 2003 as I was writing the amputation arc of Broken and found it helpful and inspiring then as another story about Nick dealing with a disability. It’s about Nick becoming paralyzed after a car accident and adjusting to his new reality. Sounds a lot like My Brother’s Keeper, right? The specific details are different, but that story has always stuck with me and definitely had an influence on this one. When I read it, I was struggling with guilt over chopping off Nick’s leg, which, at the time, was the worst thing I had done to one of the Boys in a fic, short of killing him. That’s laughable to me now because I’ve certainly done a lot worse since, but I had a bit of a complex over it back then. My Missing Half helped by reminding me that Nick’s situation could always be worse – losing control of half your body has to be harder than losing a leg – and reinforcing to me that it’s okay to include unpleasant details for the sake of being realistic. The most memorable scene in that story was a sex scene that, quite frankly, was uncomfortable for me to read but oddly fascinating at the same time. It wasn’t sexy, and it wasn’t supposed to be. It was real. I respected the author, Amanda, for being brave enough to write something like that, and I think it made me braver as a writer, too, not only with Broken but with everything else I’ve written since, including My Brother’s Keeper. When I was first researching and found out about the most unpleasant parts of being paralyzed, like “bowel programs,” I thought, Okay, well, I guess I need to know about this stuff so I can have a better understanding of what my character’s day to day life is like, but I don’t have to include it in the story. But I did eventually end up including it in the story because, well, it was real. It created conflict and hopefully helped readers to better understand both Kevin’s and Nick’s feelings.

In some ways, Nick’s side of the story was more difficult for me to write than Kevin’s. That surprised me because I’ve written a lot of Nick stories over the years and no Kevin novels prior to this one, but I generally enjoyed writing Kevin’s chapters more than Nick’s. Kevin’s chapters had more of the medical drama and angst, which I love, while many of Nick’s chapters focused more on topics I was less interested in writing about, like the music business and his substance abuse issues. I may have had to research more for Kevin’s parts, but I also got to make up a lot of the details, whereas with Nick, I tried to incorporate a lot of real life details from this time period. Revisiting his memoir and the various interviews he’s done over the years about how he turned his life around was really helpful, so thank you, Nick, for being such an open book.

Although my original plan was to just focus on Kevin and Nick, AJ became a more important supporting character as the story developed. He was the critical piece I needed to pull off my whole premise of having Nick move in with Kevin to be his caregiver. Nick needed a better motive to make that decision than just being a good person (because he wasn’t a person who always made good, selfless decisions at that point in the story), and it made sense to me that AJ might volunteer to do so first because he felt like he owed Kevin something for the key role Kevin played in getting AJ to go to rehab the first time. AJ could then guilt-trip Nick into moving in, too. At the same time, I remembered reading in an interview from a long time ago that AJ hated blowing his nose because it grossed him out. I don’t know if that’s still true or not, but it made me laugh to imagine someone who was that disgusted by his own snot doing the sort of caregiving duties Kevin required. Not gonna happen! I figured AJ’s heart was in the right place for wanting to help Kevin, but his stomach would prevent him from being as hands-on as Nick would end up having to be.

I really liked writing the dynamic between Nick and AJ. It was a lot different from how I’ve written AJ in previous novels, where he’s usually a source of comic relief. In this story, he was more about tough love. He was hard on Nick, and I liked the conflict that created between the two of them. Although I know that AJ’s own history of substance abuse is more complicated than he used to admit publicly, I went along with statements he made at the time where he claimed to be sober during this period and wrote him that way. It was more interesting to have him be the voice of reason who was trying to knock some sense into Nick than to write about him struggling with his own issues. I don’t really enjoy writing about addiction, so just tackling that topic with Nick was enough of a challenge for me.

Writing about Nick’s cardiomyopathy diagnosis was a different kind of challenge. It was obviously more in my wheelhouse than the substance abuse stuff, but at the same time, it was also difficult to write about because it was real. Writing about real problems the Boys have experienced feels a lot different from making up fictional ones. Despite my love of medical drama, this is a topic I did not feel comfortable tackling in a story until many years after Nick first told us about it. In a way, the timing of this story worked out perfectly for me. The fact that it took me so long to actually write it after coming up with the idea allowed me to write A Heart That Isn’t Mine first, which helped me get over my hang-up with this. That story also revolves around Nick having a heart condition, but in a much more fictionalized and dramatic way. After finishing that, this one felt pretty tame in comparison. All in all, though, writing about 2008 Nick over a decade later just made me appreciate the person he’s become even more. Seeing him grow into the happy, healthy family man he is today makes it much easier to write about his past issues because it feels more like fiction, even when it’s true. Proud of you, Nick!

I believe that everything happens for a reason and that things usually have a way of working out in the end, even if it’s not the way we thought they would. This story is a good example of that. I started writing it in the summer of 2017, but I don’t think I even finished the first chapter then. I was also playing around with different drafts of what would become A Heart That Isn’t Mine at the same time, so my writing was all over the place. I went back to My Brother’s Keeper over winter break that year and churned out the first three chapters so quickly that I felt good enough about how it was going to post a sneak peek of the first two on New Year’s Day in 2018. Within days of that post, two things happened that completely derailed my progress: my laptop died, and then my cat died. I wrote a whole blog about what a bad year 2018 was for me, so I won’t go into too much detail about that here, but I remained stuck on Chapter 4 of MBK for the next three years. It wasn’t until February 2021, after finishing The Road to Bethlehem, that I finally went back to it. I wasn’t even really planning to tackle MBK next after Bethlehem. I felt like I needed a break from medical drama, and I had a Brian horror idea brewing in my head. But after writing the beginning of the Brian horror story, I didn’t feel inspired anymore and decided to see what I could do with MBK instead. I ended up having to rewrite part of Chapter 3 and 4, but once I got through that, I was back into the story and felt inspired again. I’ve been writing on it regularly ever since. I just had to wait for the timing to be right. I don’t think I could have written this story as well in 2013 when I first came up with the idea as I did almost a decade later. It helped to have stories like Sick as My Secrets, A Heart That Isn’t Mine, and The Road to Bethlehem under my belt first. In some respect, each of those stories helped to pave the way for this one. That’s what I mean when I say that everything happens for a reason. It can be frustrating to sit on an idea for so long, but this one was worth the wait for me. Finally finishing it all these years after the fact makes it that much more satisfying. And hey, now it doesn’t seem obvious that I was just jumping on the wheelchair story bandwagon, even though I totally was, LOL.

I hope you enjoyed reading My Brother’s Keeper as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you for reading, especially if you’re one of the amazing readers who left me feedback along the way. I appreciate you more than you may realize!

I dedicate this story to L, who helped and inspired me more than she’ll ever know.

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Read the sequel, The World Will Be Waiting