Characters and Self-reflection

The more stories I write, the more I find I am learning about myself. And not only in terms of writing--although I am learning a lot with literally every story I write--but also in terms of how I feel about the world around me. This is something I suspect everyone who writes fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter) has experienced. I have added this to the reasons writing is important to me.

When I develop characters, I have to use some notion of common human experience to create them. If I want to make a character into someone a reader can understand, I have to make that character's reactions to the world around him what, I assume, most people would feel in the same position. The thing is, I am just objective enough when I am wearing my Editor Emil hat that I can read what I have written and recognize that maybe not everyone would feel the same way.

For example, in a recent draft of a story, I have a character motivated by a sense of loss. He has lost a friend because she gained an intense drive to pursue her own goals, without him. (Sorry about the vagueness; this is still a work-in-progress, and I do not want to divulge too many things that might change, should the story ever go anywhere.) This motivates him to go to almost any length to get her back, even if it means destroying her sense of motivation.

For this story to work, a reader would have to sympathize with this character. I figure we can all relate to losing a friend because that friend changes, and the desire to win a friend back for selfish reasons can lead us to sabotage the happiness of others. Those are valid concepts. But the way I wrote the character, I had given him very little that seemed sympathetic, from the outside. From the inside--as I was first drafting the story--he seemed like someone I could be. But with even a modicum of distance, I could see that I had not written a sympathetic character, I had written a selfish jerk that believed himself to be sympathetic. The lesson I think I learned: We can be sympathetic in our own minds even when others would say we look out only for ourselves. Also, it is easier to spot selfishness in others than in oneself.

I should amend what I wrote a moment ago. It is not that writing helps me learn about myself; writing and then editing helps me learn about myself. No matter how much planning and outlining I do, the moment I start writing a first draft of a story always feels like a leap of faith. I worked hard on my notes and then I set them aside and just plunge in, headfirst. So much of what comes out of it is how my experiences say others should act and react, with the assumption that everyone is like me. The real beauty of writing comes in editing and revising, when I can read those barely-conscious thoughts and see what they say about how I respond to the world. My stories can grow from that, and hopefully I can, too.