Did you know many people can’t picture their future selves? Worse, they see their future selves as strangers?
According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, “Some people, when thinking about their future selves, do not actually picture an older version of themselves. Rather, they picture a stranger. This failure to identify with your future-self . . . lines up with the tendencies towards short-term now-ness, as opposed to long-term planning.”
I’m fascinated by this research and recognizing that many cannot picture their future self led me to question whether any of us can be truly objective about our pasts. The answer? No. Not even a little. And that’s by design.
Human beings are delightfully creative creatures. We can imagine things that don’t exist, recall past events, and fantasize about the future. But the reality of the human condition is that we are biased creatures who lean on our experiences, principles, and values to construct what we believe is objectivity, though, from a scientific perspective, is anything but objective. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this research comes from Princeton University’s Emily Pronin, who discusses the “bias blind spot,” in which people are largely immune, or blind, to their own biases.
Time and distance don’t help deconstruct those biases, either. Pronin and her colleagues found that “when evaluating one’s own biases, the self relies on and highly values introspection. When evaluating others, we tend to rely on behaviors. Behaviors reveal bias in many situations. Introspection fails to reveal bias.”
I, for one, am a believer in the idea that all fiction writers put themselves into their fictions, in whole or in part. And I’m not just saying this because the main character of my novel-in-progress is, as I’ve shared before, an analog of myself. But if introspection fails to reveal bias and many folks can’t picture their future selves, how must we go about writing about the self as objectively as possible, inserting the self into our stories honestly?
How can we show our readers aspects of our truest selves while giving ourselves enough narrative distance and processing space to write ourselves well?
When writing yourself as a character in your story, putting some distance between the two selves — your character self and your real-world self — is necessary for writing yourself well. That’s because it’s easier for us to remain objective when we’re looking at and listening to someone else, rather than getting stuck in introspection-feels.
Whether your character is yourself from the past, present, or future, set your character-self apart in a few ways:
Avoid your name for character conversations
When writing my main character, it would have been easy for me to use my own name. I’ve shared before that I am Evelyn; she is me. But even the literary masters — like Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and Sylvia Plath — used aliases when writing themselves into their stories. For Vonnegut, that alias was Kilgore Trout; for Dick, it was Horselover Fat; for Plath, Esther Greenwood.
And this is a solid trick for getting out of your own head to you can write yourself on paper.
- You’re not desperately running around town trying to find another job because the electricity just got shut off; Imelda Howe is doing that.
- It wasn’t your car that was broken into, not your cash that was stolen; that car break-in happened to Genevieve Wilson.
- Benjamin Gotzon didn’t leave his pregnant girlfriend without support; that was the ignoble Kyle Cartecia.
Now, you can sit across the proverbial coffee table with your second self for conversation, preferrably over a hot cuppa.
You can ask Imelda why she waited so long to look for additional work despite being in the financial trenches for months — and listen to what she says: her fears, her hopes, her tendency to brush problems under rugs until the rugs resemble Cousin Itt.
You can ask Genevieve whether she remembered to lock her car, why she left cash inside the car in the first place, what she was doing in that part of town anyway — and hear her complaints about being too sheltered and craving a bit of risk.
You can talk to Kyle about the realities of parenting, how terrifying, messy, and stressful it can be, but also how beautiful and healing and empowering — and see how his face either lights up or doesn’t at the prospect of raising his child.
Naming your character something other than your own name immediately sets the character apart from you and makes it just a bit easier to have those critical deep-thinking conversations between your two selves that allow you to write yourself well.
Choose an unexpected point of view
When writing yourself as a character, it’s tempting to write in the first person, I. After all, you are the I to which things happened or are happening and which causes things to happen. But if you find yourself not writing more than you’re writing, it may be the I holding you back, because using the first-person I puts extra pressure on us as authors to be perfect. At least, it puts pressure on us to be perfectly flawed but still fabulous.
I don’t know about you, but there are days when I feel anything but fabulous. Frumpy? It is autumn, and I’m living in flannel. Funny? Sometimes when the stars align and someone lobs one up for me. Fickle? I am a Capricorn, and capriciousness is literally written into my astrological personality description. But fabulous? I’ll take a rain-check, please and thank you.
When writing Evelyn, I don’t want to get caught in my own gray-matter trappings, my people-pleasing, my childhood traumas, my anti-corporate values, my biases. Instead, I want to see what’s caught in Evelyn’s gray matter — her anxieties, personal and professional; her childhood memories, the good and the bad; her purchasing habits.
Using the I quiets Evelyn’s voice, and when I can’t hear her, I’m left listening to myself. To quiet my mind, I’m writing much of my story from the third-person point of view, setting Evelyn apart as “her” and not me. More, she’s also part of a group to which I don’t belong, has friends I’m just meeting, has a romantic relationship I’d never ask for and frankly don’t envy.
To quiet your mind and remove the pressure of perfection, especially if you find yourself spinning your writerly wheels, set your character-self as the “you,” “he,” “she,” or “they” in your story. You may find the character voice speaks more clearly when the character feels separate from the self.
Add personality and speech quirks
What’s something you just can’t live without in your day to day? For me, it’s coffee. Waking up to a house that smells of fresh drip is a joyous start to the day. I get out of bed, head to the kitchen, pull a too-big mug from the cupboard, pour myself a steaming cuppa, and hope for a solid ten minutes of morning-joe enjoyment before my daughter wakes and I move into Mom-mode.
But Evelyn? She hates coffee, thinks it tastes like bitter brown water, generally avoids it. Evelyn would rather down a handful of chocolate-covered coffee beans or swallow a caffeine capsule than sip 12 ounces of brown water she already doesn’t want. For her, coffee in the morning doesn’t even smell good.
Part of me hates this quirk of Evelyn’s personality. I mean, would we even be friends if we met in the real world? I don’t know. But I do know that Evelyn’s hatred of coffee is jarring, serves to remind me that — while I’m drafting the story — she is not actually me.
And this isn’t the only quirk I’m employing while writing my character self. Separate from Evelyn’s general disdain for coffee, she also has a few speech quirks. In her dialect, “ask” comes out “aks” and “asked” comes out “ast.”
Writing all instances of “ask” and “asked” in Evelyn’s dialogue to “aks” and “ast” means I’m listening only to Evelyn’s vernacular, not my own. I never say “aks” or “ast;” those variations of the words don’t compute for me. But Evelyn’s dialect is not about what I would say; it’s about what she would say, and how.
Consider what your character would say, how they would say it, and any dialectical and personality quirks that will help your self-character stand apart from you, such that you can maintain at least a modest level of objectivity while relaying character to your readers.
TL;DR: When writing the self as character, distance and objectivity matter.
Readers are more likely to engage with, understand, and root for a character who reads like a real person, but many writers struggle to write themselves into their fictions authentically because they are too close to their character-selves.
If you find yourself too close to your character to maintain objectivity, separate the character from the self using a character-specific name, a creative point of view, and a few quirks you don’t have so your character-self will read like a real, flawed human being, rather than a two-dimensional paper doll.
Happy writing.
<3 Fal
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Fallon Clark is the book pal who helps you tell your story in your words and voice using editorial, coaching, writing, and project management expertise for revision assistance, one-on-one guidance, and ghostwriting for development. Her writing has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine. Check out her website, FallonClark.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn or Substack.