Life As Imaginary People
For a lot of writers, writing is a form of therapy, and character creation is a form of wishful thinking. The process of becoming a good writer often involves jettisoning these impulses in favor of less obvious forms of wish fulfillment. Ideally, you learn how to transmute the personal and channel it back into the story in an unrecognizable form.
You take your issues, in other words, and you construct your characters and your story to embody those issues. The cheap way to do this is to write thinly-veiled self-fanfiction in which a character much like you wish you were faces hyperbolized versions of your own problems and overcomes them through whatever methods you wish you had at your disposal. This can be done well, absolutely, but an author needs more range.
The difficult thing is taking the dark road and coming out of the twisted forest with a seemingly unrelated story that is connected at an almost atomic level to every experience you have ever had. Take your problems with your demanding family or your disintegrating social life or your creeping dissatisfaction with your college education and then use that to write a story about a middle-aged ex-nun attempting to convince another gardner at her community co-op to try a vegetarian diet, without knowing that he's a vampire.
I have my own issues. I do. It often surprises people to learn that I feel rotten about my physical appearance, but I do, every day. And so I inflict scars and physical injuries on my characters with an almost pornographic glee because that is my wish fulfillment. A huge, visible scar is something people can see, react to, and then forget about; a visible flaw to draw attention away from the other imperfect things about a person; a thing to which society attaches no moral value.
If I were to suddenly gain an impressive facial scar I'm sure I would not be happy about that at all. What I really want is something to draw my own attention away from what I see as my flaws. But that doesn't stop me from wishing, and it doesn't stop me from making things up.
When I create the blown-out fortysomething warlock with a bad limp from that last nasty fight and a bitter streak a mile wide, I'm really saying I'd prefer if I had a reason for not being able to call up the magic I crave.
When I create the battle-scarred and chronically unlucky werewolf reluctantly forced to lead a band of rejects, castoffs, and lone survivors, I'm really saying I wish I had something in my past to explain my bitterness and pain, and I wish I had the strength to overcome it anyway and do right by the people who rely on me.
When I create the idealistic young religious fanatic vampire hunter who continues his crusade even after the trauma of being made one of them, and who never abandons hope even though physical contact with the sword that is the touchstone of his own salvation causes him intense physical pain, I am saying that I wish I was strong enough to have faith in something greater than myself even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and I wish I had any hope at all for the future of my soul - whether it exists or not.
When I create the handsome, sweet, and gentle young prostitute with a past unpleasant enough to cause SAN loss and a life-threatening boycrush on the loudmouth werewolf who is his unlikely best friend, I am really saying I wish I had the strength to embrace what I am without feeling bad about it and to live without fear, even though my past is still painful. I'm really saying I wish I had the strength to trust in spite of the life I've led, and that I wish I was still young enough to feel like I had time left to take risks.
And so it goes.
I'd be so much happier living in one of my own worlds as one of my own characters. Their lives aren't perfect, but they're good enough to justify the hurt. They read well. There's closure, purpose. Narrative.
The part that frustrates me more than any other is that I haven't been able to write anything for ages, years, and so these characters come and go, and their stories never get told, and I am still the same old imperfect person, with nothing to show for it at all.
You take your issues, in other words, and you construct your characters and your story to embody those issues. The cheap way to do this is to write thinly-veiled self-fanfiction in which a character much like you wish you were faces hyperbolized versions of your own problems and overcomes them through whatever methods you wish you had at your disposal. This can be done well, absolutely, but an author needs more range.
The difficult thing is taking the dark road and coming out of the twisted forest with a seemingly unrelated story that is connected at an almost atomic level to every experience you have ever had. Take your problems with your demanding family or your disintegrating social life or your creeping dissatisfaction with your college education and then use that to write a story about a middle-aged ex-nun attempting to convince another gardner at her community co-op to try a vegetarian diet, without knowing that he's a vampire.
I have my own issues. I do. It often surprises people to learn that I feel rotten about my physical appearance, but I do, every day. And so I inflict scars and physical injuries on my characters with an almost pornographic glee because that is my wish fulfillment. A huge, visible scar is something people can see, react to, and then forget about; a visible flaw to draw attention away from the other imperfect things about a person; a thing to which society attaches no moral value.
If I were to suddenly gain an impressive facial scar I'm sure I would not be happy about that at all. What I really want is something to draw my own attention away from what I see as my flaws. But that doesn't stop me from wishing, and it doesn't stop me from making things up.
When I create the blown-out fortysomething warlock with a bad limp from that last nasty fight and a bitter streak a mile wide, I'm really saying I'd prefer if I had a reason for not being able to call up the magic I crave.
When I create the battle-scarred and chronically unlucky werewolf reluctantly forced to lead a band of rejects, castoffs, and lone survivors, I'm really saying I wish I had something in my past to explain my bitterness and pain, and I wish I had the strength to overcome it anyway and do right by the people who rely on me.
When I create the idealistic young religious fanatic vampire hunter who continues his crusade even after the trauma of being made one of them, and who never abandons hope even though physical contact with the sword that is the touchstone of his own salvation causes him intense physical pain, I am saying that I wish I was strong enough to have faith in something greater than myself even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and I wish I had any hope at all for the future of my soul - whether it exists or not.
When I create the handsome, sweet, and gentle young prostitute with a past unpleasant enough to cause SAN loss and a life-threatening boycrush on the loudmouth werewolf who is his unlikely best friend, I am really saying I wish I had the strength to embrace what I am without feeling bad about it and to live without fear, even though my past is still painful. I'm really saying I wish I had the strength to trust in spite of the life I've led, and that I wish I was still young enough to feel like I had time left to take risks.
And so it goes.
I'd be so much happier living in one of my own worlds as one of my own characters. Their lives aren't perfect, but they're good enough to justify the hurt. They read well. There's closure, purpose. Narrative.
The part that frustrates me more than any other is that I haven't been able to write anything for ages, years, and so these characters come and go, and their stories never get told, and I am still the same old imperfect person, with nothing to show for it at all.