Like all of us, I tend to draw upon my personal experiences in creating my characters, inhaling some element of personal behavior and filling part of a character with it. Of course, I don’t use only my own experiences – it’s topped up with my extrapolations/observations of others, too. How else could I write fiction?
The point is, though, like all of us I have to be careful about turning fictional characters into wish-fulfillment versions of my own private imaginings which are no more fit for unmodified public scrutiny than the contents of my dressing room of a morning.
Whatever angst I may be experiencing about life, finances, family, health, turmoil, etc., are my personal private story, and don’t belong directly on the page (outside of memoirs). Nothing is more tedious than discovering the unmodified and ill-examined musings of a bare author pretending to be a central character, or even a walk-on just for giggles.
But you know what also works for fiction writers? Reversing the flow — drawing personal inspiration from the characters we invent to play their roles in the story rather than seeking sympathy for ourselves as we are (thinly disguised or mirrored in fragments on the page).
I can’t tell stories focused on straight-out villains (outside of comedy or ordinary hero-impediments) because they soil me, they make me feel unclean. I understand how to do it, but there are genres like horror that I will never write by choice. What I like are heroes – naïve, mistaken, unsuccessful, bitter, clueless… they are objects of inspiration to me. Through them I can vicariously toughen up my own impersonation of a person of worth, imagining “what would so-and-so do? He wouldn’t back down… he would grit his teeth and toughen up some more, and do the right thing, whatever the cost. Even if it failed.”
There’s enough of me in my characters that I can draw upon their instantiations at need, reversing the flow to toughen up myself. Of course, I created them in the first place, but for their honest use in the story, not as my own thinly veiled avatars — they grow into that outside of their original beginnings, and I can look at them independently.
This may be a far cry from professional commercial fiction production, but what can I say? I write for the pleasure of creation more than for money, and there’s a place in the market for that, so what does it matter? I’ve already had several decades of a business career – doesn’t have to happen again to satisfy me. The work itself does that.
What’s your take on the psychological back-and-forth between you and your characters?
Mad Genius Club 
2 responses to “Reversing the Flow”
I mean, my characters obviously reflect my values more or less, and if you asked me to swear I never had and never would place them in a situation where they did better than me in the equivalent real life situation, I do not know that I would be able to swear to that. But normally I set them problems very different from the ones I face, because mine fo not make for entertaining fiction.
I don’t think I can write first person without injecting myself into the character, at least at this point. Even when role playing a character in games that is as far from my personality as possible, “I” still leak into it. 3rd person automatically reframes the point of view and goes a long way to shielding me from thinking “I”. I did a 5-page paper exercise for one of my English courses way back when where we had to convert the entire paper from 1st person to 3rd person. Drove most of the class nuts. Wish I’d kept that, but it probably got lost in one of the PCS moves.