This is, perhaps, a heavy topic for my third blog post. But it is a not-insignificant part of my writing and writing process, so it seemed appropriate to cover. I was speaking recently with a good friend about how hard it is to write sometimes when my characters display some of my old bad habits, self-destruction being a big one. We both realized that our characters, especially our main characters, tend to embody the same sorts of traumas that we ourselves have struggled with. And, since characters need to go on a spiritual journey to develop themselves throughout the story, they tend to be further back in their path to healing than we are now.

What this looks like, practically speaking, is a character who constantly makes choices that will result in worse things happening to them. And when you’ve been through that process yourself, it can be hard to watch even a fictional person do that to themselves. Is it any wonder that Lit’s My Own Worst Enemy often finds its way onto my playlists?

I also recently had a conversation with my therapist about writing as trauma therapy, and I said I wasn’t ready yet to write out my own story. But this conversation with my friend made me realize that in a lot of ways, I’ve been writing my experience for years. Just never all at once and only through fictional characters.

In the end, writing has always been a type of therapy for me, and this is part of why. When it comes to bettering yourself, healing from things that have been done to you throughout life, it can often be hard to recognize just how far you’ve come. When you put a character through that same journey, and you cringe at all of the awful decisions they make, it can really help put that into perspective.

I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago, and the proof of that is displayed in each of these scenes I write. So as difficult as it can sometimes be to keep writing, watching my character, in real-time, dig herself into a deeper and deeper hole, it’s also rewarding, being reminded of just how far I’ve come.

And she’s learning too. So hopefully, by the end of her journey, she’ll stop making such terrible decisions, and then she can cringe at other people doing the things she used to do.

What bad habits of yours do you see in your characters? And how do you get yourself threw writing that? Is it with late-90s pop punk ballads?