Dead Versions Of Me

Some versions didn't survive the telling. This one did.

This book is a raw, semi-autobiographical memoir about my madness, method writing, and the ghosts we carry in the name of writing a story.

Elliott didn't set out to become a writer. He set out to survive himself. What began as handwritten letters during a baseball career in psychological decline evolved into poetry, then screenplays, and eventually, a psychological descent so immersive it blurred the line between storytelling and psychosis.

This isn't a how-to book on writing. It's a how-you-break book. A brutally honest account of creative obsession, emotional collapse, and the cost of living too long with characters who won't leave you alone. This was never meant to be a memoir about the path to recovery. It was really about witnessing and becoming the version who lived long enough to tell the truth.

"I wasn't writing fiction. I was writing funerals.

And the characters weren't invented; they were just versions of me I'd already buried."

Dead Versions Of Me is part memoir, part confession and part a creative autopsy. It chronicles Elliott's deep dive into Method Writing where he lived and breathed through the minds of fictional characters so vividly, they began to take over his waking life.

From the haunting letters he wrote to future and past versions of himself, to late-night visions where ghost-like characters whispered their confessions in the dark, Collinson charts a harrowing path through grief, rage, healing, and creative possession.

This is a story for anyone who's ever lost themselves in the work they thought would save them. Written just to survive the night. Doubted their sanity in the pursuit of truth. Carried the voices of others long after the writing stopped. Tried to escape the past, only to find it staring back through the words on the page. Anyone who's ever stood at the edge of their own narrative wondering if they'd make it out alive.

"The ghosts didn't leave; they just stopped screaming when I started writing them down."