I want to tell you something weird about writing fiction.
The people I invent — the ones who live entirely inside my head and on the pages I am perpetually rewriting at two in the morning — have taught me more about actual living humans than most of my real-world interactions have. Which says something either about the quality of my fictional characters or the mystifying complexity of actual people, and honestly I am not sure which one it is.
Probably both.
I have been chewing on this for a while now because someone asked me recently why I write. And the obvious answers are there — I love story, I love language, I have things I need to say and this is how I say them without screaming into a parking lot. All true. But the answer that surprised me when it came out of my mouth was this: I write because it is the only way I actually understand people.
That landed weird for both of us.
But I meant it. And the more I sat with it afterward, the more I kept finding evidence everywhere in how I think, how I observe, how I handle the baffling tornado of human behaviour I encounter on a daily basis. Writing fictional characters has been, without exaggeration, the most significant empathy training I have ever undergone. More than any book on psychology. More than any well-meaning workshop on perspective-taking. More than most conversations.
And I want to try to explain why.
First: The Problem with Real People
Real people are chaotic. They contradict themselves constantly. They say one thing and do another. They hold values they violate without noticing, and then they hold guilt about the violation that they also refuse to examine. They love people they treat badly. They treat people well out of motives that are not entirely clean. They are generous in one area of their life and absolutely withholding in another, and they do not experience these as contradictions because they are too busy just living.
When you are on the receiving end of a person — when you are their friend, their kid, their coworker, their person — the contradiction lands as confusion or hurt or frustration. You cannot see the full architecture. You only see the wall that just hit you in the face.
I have spent a significant portion of my life being confused and hurt by people I loved, in ways I could not articulate or understand. Some of that is my autism doing its thing — the part of my brain that processes social cues and unspoken emotional subtext does not exactly run on the latest operating system, and I have had to learn a lot of things manually that other people absorb by ambient exposure. But some of it is just… people are hard. People are hard for everyone.
Fiction is where I figured out how to look at the architecture instead of just the wall.
You Have to Know Why They Do It
When you write a character — a real character, not a cardboard cutout villain or a flawless protagonist — you cannot just make them do things. You have to know why. You have to build the whole basement of motivation before a single word of behaviour shows up on the page, or the behaviour reads flat and unbelievable and your readers will clock it immediately and put the book down.
So you ask the questions. Why does this person lie? Not what do they lie about — why is lying the tool they reach for? What did they learn, early, about what happens when the truth comes out? What did the truth cost someone they loved? Why does this character give and give and give and then suddenly, in one specific context, become immovable and closed? What is that context protecting? What happened the last time they were open there?
You have to build the wound before you can write the scar.
And here is the thing — once you have trained yourself to ask those questions about fictional people, you start asking them about real ones. Reflexively. Almost without meaning to. Someone does something that hurts or baffles me, and instead of stopping at what they did, my brain has started reaching for why would someone do that. Not to excuse it. Not to make it okay. Just to understand the architecture.
That shift has been quietly enormous for me.
Contradiction Is the Point, Not the Problem
One of the biggest lessons writing has smacked me with repeatedly: contradiction is not a flaw in a character. It is the proof of life.
A character who is brave in battle and terrified of one specific conversation. A character who is ferociously loyal to a group and completely dishonest within it. A character who loves deeply and still makes choices that damage the people they love, not out of malice but out of fear or need or a wound that never got properly looked at. These contradictions do not make the character unreliable or poorly written. They make the character true.
Real people contain multitudes and the multitudes do not have to harmonize. I know people who are spectacularly kind to strangers and genuinely difficult to their families. I know people who will fight fearlessly for justice in public and quietly rationalize cruelty in private. I know people who preach one thing with full sincerity and live another thing with full sincerity, and both are real. Both are happening in the same person at the same time.
Before I wrote fiction seriously, that used to break my brain. It felt like evidence that someone was fake, or a hypocrite, or not who I thought they were.
Now I understand it as: they are who they are, and who they are is complicated, the same as every character I have ever tried to write. The contradiction is not the lie. The contradiction is the person.
Secrets and What They Cost
Every good character has a secret. Not necessarily a dramatic one — not always a murder or a hidden identity or a double life, though those are fun. Sometimes the secret is a shame they have never said out loud. Sometimes it is a belief they hold that contradicts how they present themselves to the world. Sometimes it is a grief they never processed, or a decision they made that they have built their entire self-image on top of, load-bearing and invisible.
Writing secrets into characters taught me to see the weight of them in real people.
There is a particular quality to the way someone moves through their life when they are carrying something they have never said. A stiffness in certain directions. A subject they veer away from with a specific kind of casualness that is not actually casual. A defensiveness that appears out of nowhere when nothing obvious provoked it. I was not always good at seeing this. I am better at it now, because I have spent a lot of hours building fictional people and learning which architectural choices produce which visible behaviours.
This is not me claiming I can read minds. I absolutely cannot. I get it wrong constantly. But I am at least looking now, instead of just reacting to the surface.
And more than that — writing characters with secrets has made me more compassionate about the secrets real people keep. Because in fiction you know the full story. You know what the secret is and why they cannot say it and what it cost them to keep it and what it will cost them if it comes out. You feel the weight of it. You root for them even while you watch the secret do damage. And you carry that feeling into real life, where you do not know the full story, and it becomes easier to extend grace.
Loyalty as a Moral Complication
Oh, loyalty. The thing I find most morally complex in fiction and in life.
Loyalty is beautiful. It is one of the qualities I respect most deeply in people and that I try hardest to embody myself. But loyalty is also the thing characters — and people — use to justify staying silent when they should speak, protecting someone who is causing harm, choosing their in-group over the truth. Loyalty is the reason good people participate in bad things. It is the reason whistleblowers are so rare and so isolated when they do blow the whistle. It is the reason families cover for members who do not deserve covering for.
Writing characters in loyalty conflicts — where every option is a betrayal of something real and the question is only which thing you are willing to betray — has given me a framework for understanding some of the most painful patterns I have witnessed in real life. Why someone stays in a situation that is clearly damaging them. Why a person defends someone the evidence is stacked against. Why someone who knows a truth never speaks it.
It is not always weakness. Sometimes it is loyalty to a version of someone or something that they cannot let die. Sometimes it is loyalty to the people around that person who would be collateral damage if the truth landed. Sometimes it is loyalty to an identity that the truth would demolish.
When a character makes that choice in my fiction, I write it with full understanding of what it costs them. That understanding has made me slower to judge when I see it in reality.
Slower. Not completely non-judgmental. I am still a person, not a saint. But slower.
Mistakes and the Question of Goodness
The characters I find most interesting — the ones I return to, that I root for hardest, that haunt me when I am done writing them — are the ones who make genuine mistakes. Not comic mistakes. Not misunderstandings that get resolved in act three. Real mistakes: choices made from fear or selfishness or a moral blind spot that does actual damage to people they love and cannot fully be undone.
Writing those mistakes is uncomfortable. Because you have to be honest about them. You cannot let the character off the hook too easily or the story goes dishonest, and readers feel dishonesty in fiction the same way you feel it in a conversation — something is off, they cannot say what, but the trust is gone. So you have to write the full weight of the mistake. The damage. The consequences. The inadequacy of the apology. The thing that does not get fixed.
And doing that over and over has changed the way I hold the mistakes of real people.
Including my own.
A character who does a genuinely harmful thing is not automatically a villain. A character who does something I respect is not automatically a hero. Goodness in fiction is not a category — it is a direction. It is the question of whether someone is moving toward accountability or away from it. Whether they are willing to look at the damage they caused or whether they have decided it was necessary or someone else’s fault or not that bad really.
The same is true in real life. And having that framework — goodness as direction, not category — has been one of the most practically useful things fiction has handed me. Because it means I do not have to throw whole people away when they do something that hurts. And it means I do not have to accept ongoing harm from someone just because they also have good qualities. Both of those used to be harder for me than they should have been.
They Are Not Real People. That Is Exactly the Point.
I want to be clear about something: my characters are not based on specific real people. They are not romans à clef in disguise. The people in my life are not showing up fictionalized under different names — that is a thing I find both ethically murky and creatively limiting, because real people are too fixed, too themselves, and you cannot push them the way a story requires.
What I mine from real life is not people. It is patterns. The way a particular kind of fear produces a particular kind of behaviour. The way love and control can get so tangled that the person doing the tangling genuinely cannot tell them apart. The way grief that never gets named finds other exits. These are not specific people. These are things I have observed and felt and been on the receiving end of, distilled and rebuilt into someone new who serves the story.
The distance is important. Because in the distance, I can be honest in ways that would be impossible if I were writing a real person I actually know. I can follow the logic wherever it leads. I can let the character be wrong in ways I understand and right in ways that cost them. I can write the full complexity without protecting anyone’s feelings or my own relationship with them.
And paradoxically, the honesty I can access through fictional distance often illuminates real situations more clearly than staring directly at them does. It is the same reason you can sometimes only cry at a movie about something that has happened to you, not at the thing itself. The angle matters.
What God Has To Do With It
I think about the verse in 1 Samuel where it says that people look at outward appearances but the Lord looks at the heart. I have always found that both comforting and kind of terrifying, depending on the day. But I also find it instructive about what it means to really know a person.
Most of the time we only get the outward appearance. The behaviour. The words. The choices that are visible. The version someone has decided to present, edited for the audience. We do not get the heart — the full interior, the fear underneath the confidence, the love underneath the anger, the hope underneath the cynicism.
Writing fiction is the closest I can come, in my human limited way, to practicing looking at the heart instead of just the surface. It is not the same as actually knowing. It is not spiritual insight. It is craft and imagination and the discipline of asking why until I get somewhere that feels true.
But it has made me a more patient person. A more curious person. Less quick to conclude and more willing to stay in the question of what is actually going on underneath what I am seeing.
That is not nothing. In fact, for me, it has been quite a lot.
The Practical Upshot
If you are a writer, you already know most of this. You have felt it — the way your characters start talking back, the way a scene goes somewhere you did not plan because the character would never do the thing you had planned, the weird grief of finishing something and losing access to people who were never real but felt completely real to you anyway. You know the thing I am describing.
If you are not a writer but you are someone who struggles to understand people — and honestly, who among us is not, at least some of the time — I would gently, non-prescriptively suggest: try writing someone. Not a real person. A made-up person with a problem. Give them a contradiction. Give them a secret they cannot say. Give them something they want and something they are afraid of and watch what happens when those two things collide.
You might be surprised what you find out. About them. About the people in your life. About yourself.
Because here is the thing I keep coming back to: we are all the unreliable narrators of our own stories. We all have the parts we present and the parts we protect and the parts we have never looked at directly because we are not ready. We all contain contradictions we have not resolved and loyalties that cost us and mistakes we are still in the middle of deciding how to carry.
Fiction does not fix any of that. But it does give me language for it. It gives me a way to hold the complexity without demanding it resolve into something simpler than it is.
And in a world that is constantly telling us to sort people into clean categories — good or bad, safe or dangerous, worth keeping or worth discarding — the ability to sit with complexity feels like something worth protecting.
Story matters. Character matters. The question of why matters.
The people I invented told me so.