Developing characters around stages of your life

In the fanfiction community, self-inserts — putting a character representing yourself into the fictional world you're writing about — get a bad rap. And in my opinion, it's very much deserved.

Most self-inserts I've read paint themselves as Mary Sues: they're you, but smarter, hotter, and somehow the solution to every single problem the pre-existing characters have. Also angsty, but not cringe about it, and mysterious, and all-powerful but also super humble and liked by everyone. Every Persona 5 self-insert I've read was against my will — I have a bad habit of barely skimming the tags before jumping into stories. Each and every one was...uncomfy, to say the least. (Thirsting over a fictional character is one thing. But writing yourself into the story so you can make him fall in love with you?)

I grew up hearing the writing advice of "Write what you know," and I distinctly remember eight-year-old me hating that advice with a burning passion. What did I know at eight besides multiplication tables and how to piss off my brother?

But "writing what you know" can manifest in a million other ways besides writing yourself into your own fantasies.

Right now I'm working on a story about a coven of witches. One member of the coven is Alana, a teenage witch with a quiet demeanor and odd, unpredictable powers she refuses to — or can't — explain. She excels at things she's interested in, and fades into the background for everything else. I realized halfway through writing her profile that I was basically writing how I felt as a 12-year-old; having high potential, but shrinking away from it, afraid to rock the boat or give adults any more reasons to "persecute" me. Whether my perception of how the world worked aligned with reality at the time, that was how I felt at that stage of my life.

Alana's twin sister, Akira, is a preppy perfectionist who would compete with Alana every second of the day, given half the chance. She's obsessed with attaining fame, her compliments always come with a jab at the end, and she believes she can charm and outsmart her way out of anything. At first I thought I couldn't be more different from this girl, only to draw more and more parallels to myself when I was an angsty 16-year-old — frustrated by the mundanity of daily life and scared to death that working until I die would be "all there is."

And both of these characters are named after my mom's ex-boyfriend's granddaughters, whom I met twice when they were maybe five years old. I never truly knew them in any meaningful way, but the stark differences in their personalities, even at that young an age, stuck with me. And now I'm "writing what I know:" wrapping my own struggles into the vastly different approaches toward gaining independence I observed in two little girls twenty years ago.

Many people who've been through traumatic experiences, myself included, get locked in a pattern where we end up in relationships that re-traumatize us in similar ways. Psychologists say this is a subconscious bit to rewrite the story with a happier ending; maybe things will be different this time. Maybe someone will save me this time. I think writing what you know by telling the story through completely different characters' eyes is an opportunity to rewrite the story on your own terms and in a safe space, whether you're doing it with a complex character you put time and love into, or a Mary Sue.

I could be wrong...but hey, it works for me. What struggles have you had developing your own characters? How much of you do you end up adding to them?