Are The Characters Writers Create Aspects of Themselves?

It’s common in real life for people to project and attribute their own characteristics, reactions, and feelings onto others.

For example, if we idealize someone or feel a magnetic attraction towards them, it may we be because they fulfill some emergent potential or positive characteristic we already have. Thus our heroes and heroines may well hold the key to our anima or animus or our ideal selves.

If our characters are negative, it could be a way that we subconsciously avoid these attributes, responses or emotions we do not want to confront in ourselves or take ownership of.

For example, the very things that irritate us about other people are quite often the shadow aspects of ourselves. He/she’s mercurial, we think, and sure enough, we are too. Our protagonists or anti-heroes may well reflect the darker side of our personality that we repress.

Writing may be, therefore, a way we leak or project hidden aspects of ourselves, positive and negative, onto the characters we create.

It may also be a way that we dramatize, act out or perform these aspects of our personality hidden below the surface.

You may write something, and then see an echo of a character or their life in you and your life. It may take a while for you to recognize its significance.

Mastery of writing and being a writer means that you have a very clear idea of who you are as a person. This I/me that is the self as a subject/object has boundaries. This person knows where the I finishes and you begins. This is especially true with the authorial voice. One wrestles with characters so they do not sound like “the author talking,” and so they are distinct and recognizable as persons in their own right/write.

I believe that authors say a great deal about themselves in the books that they write. You can know their life's preoccupations and the kinds of people that inhabit their worlds by reading their books. However, you need to look for recurring themes and patterns in their work to read between the lines.

If you analyze your own writing over years, you will see subtle shifts in the themes and characters of your books which may well reflect some aspects of your life and your own character which are always in process.

This is the difficulty; just when you think you know someone, they have changed. And this is true with writers and the people they meet. We do not write in a vacuum. We do not live in a vacuum. People will influence us. People will change us in subtle and unequal ways. We will try to emulate those whom we love and admire. Even our enemies will change us. And we will affect others.

There may be aspects of ourselves to which we are blind. Writers are all on a journey towards self-discovery. Does this mean we are journeying towards a clear picture of the self at its very core? Or does it mean that writing is a great way of discovering who we were yesterday?

Food for Thought:

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves