Not specifically, no. But my feelings, convictions, and passions have informed the characters, settings, and actions in my stories. I write about things that inspire, motivate, and anger me.
As I have gotten older, I have found that this problem has disappeared.
Writing characters convincingly means understanding what drives them. Whether that be characters of a different culture, social standing, sexuality, gender, or any other characteristic, what matters is their inner lives. There are commonalities among virtuallly all types of person. Everyone wants to be happy, for example. What happiness is and how to achieve it is peculiar to the indiviual psyche. That psyche is formed by nature and modified by life experience.
When it comes to making characters that feel real, the most important skill that a writer can have is empathy.
The people we encounter in our lives are a font of imformation about what specifically defines and motivates someone. Being a keen and sympathetic observer in life teaches us what makes people real. This information is invaluable when it comes to crafting realistic characters, characters that the reader will bond with.
I wrote my first story when I was nine years old and I've been hooked ever since. Making worlds and populating them with people who feel real is a more rewarding activity than anything else I have ever done. When I was younger I made friends, literally.
There is no easy way to do this. Writing is a difficult habit to make and a depressingly easy one to break.
There is a method of achieving the writing habit that has worked fairly well for me. It's called writer-proofing your life.
Writing needs to be the writer's highest priority. In order to be productive, one must set aside a specific time every day for writing and plan the rest of one's day around that time.
For example, if you set aside an hour every morning for writing, be where you need to be when you need to be there and stay for the whole hour.
It doesn't matter if anything is actually written down. You can spend that hour mulling over some aspect of the story you are working on without actually making any changes to your manuscript. That hour spent thinking about your story still counts. Do not break that date no matter what you are feeling.
