Writing yourself as a character
It’s one thing to think about new beliefs and values in the abstract, but what do they look like when actually applied in a life? More importantly, what do they look like when applied in your life?
Several years ago we were staying abroad for a couple weeks in the home of some family friends. They weren’t on vacation and so were carrying on with their daily lives of work and school for the most part. Living among them for a few days of ordinary life and witnessing their routine interactions blew my mind. They were so nice to each other, so interested, so warm, so patient. What I had thought were mandatory reactions of irritation or boredom or criticism to certain situations were actually nothing more than my own unimaginative choices.
It’s hard to change in ways we can’t—or haven’t tried to—imagine.
Fiction provides the perfect answer to this dilemma because it allows for an imaginative modeling of a new reality. It also has the added benefit of adding some distance to our perspective, and zooming out is always a good thing.
So write yourself as the character you want to be.
One exercise is to choose your scenes according to the area of your life you want to work on. They could include:
a tough parenting moment
an argument with a partner
an upcoming event you’re anxious about
a serious mistake or piece of bad news
an experience living a conscious value you don’t usually make time for
For example:
She woke to a stripe of warm sunlight crossing her cheek. She stretched and smiled in gratitude for the miracle of the bright vastness beyond and the dark coziness within. She rose, walked quietly downstairs, and lit a candle in the kitchen she had tidied though exhausted the night before. The empty sink and open counters soothed and welcomed her, as she had known they would when standing in the same spot seven hours before. It no longer mattered that after a full day of work and kids and chores, the couch called more loudly than the next day’s peace ever could. It had taken years, but she had finally learned to not weigh the now against the later since it was never a fair fight. She paused to witness the water warming from the faucet curve and fall over her hands, the pitch of its melody slowly rising with the level in the bright, heavy teapot below. Glancing around the room, with its pile of unsorted mail and its half-painted wall, she was flooded for a moment with the undone, as she often was. But the ritual of raising the warm mug to her chest and inhaling its heavily spiced steam anchored her. She settled against the couch and made the discovery, no less shocking because it was daily, that every life under that ray-slinging sun was measured in the constant rise and fall of breath. She followed the warm and cool of borrowed air to the quiet space in her that was nothing but her. Like orange-juice concentrate. An almost unbearably sweet meeting.
Another exercise is to take the role of a narrator who is giving readers a sense of who you are as a character in general.
For instance:
She had spent the first two-thirds of her life getting better at planning, but the last third had been devoted to the practice of throwing her plans out. As a result, she was someone that people could rely on without being so rigid that they resented having to. In her, friends found a dependable presence who, when confronted with a contrary opinion, would launch into a passionate response, then pause. Pause and look up and out, as if opening to whatever ephemeral force might be floating by. Her features would soften and she would say “tell me more about that” in a voice neither saccharine nor demanding. She had planned herself right into curiosity, one that bred a real desire to watch herself being wrong, or small, or closed—and choose the opposite.
Look, the writing doesn’t need to be “good.” But the more concrete you can get in your description, the more useful a map it will provide. And to be clear, this map isn’t one that you must then slavishly follow to a single destination. It is a guide to imagined possibilities. You might start close to reality and build from there . . .
. . . until you end up somewhere you never even thought to want to be.