One of the best things about writing is something that’s also great about reading. It’s falling in love with the characters. You know, you meet them, at the beginning, and you only have some idea of where it’s going to go from there, and then you get to watch and cheer them on as they grow and develop as people. You get drawn to the nuances of them, the quirks, the little details of their personality, and even though every well-written character has flaws, you learn to love those too.
As a writer, you get to experience an enhanced version of that same emotion; that same experience of falling in love with the character, except this time it’s your character. And what’s so beautiful about that is they say we don’t *make* characters so much as we take parts of ourselves and give them names. So you’re not just falling in love with a character — you’re falling in love with yourself.
That’s such a big deal because we hold ourselves to impossibly higher standards than we hold everyone else to. But when I take my own traits — and their corresponding flaws — and treat them like they’re not mine they’re suddenly so much less of a problem. That’s also the jump between reading the character and writing them — there’s a definite and profound difference in, “I identify with this trait and corresponding flaw in someone else’s character, who I love,” and, “I love this piece of my soul that I have named, now that it has a name.”
