Writing great characters isn't easy, it takes empathy and imagination. The better we get at it the easier it gets. What gets harder is dealing with the consequences of being able to inhabit the head of so many different people.

You'll often find yourself writing characters that are the opposite of you but still obligated to make them justified in actions that you would never do. Once you can rationalize a separate set of values it can become difficult to live your life as you did before.

Don't Love Or Hate As Hard Anymore

One of the joys in life is intense feelings about something. Loving your mate with all your heart or hating a childhood bully with vigor. Unfortunately as you become adept at understanding the inner workings of various characters from the girl next door to a cold blooded killer, you start to find they are not what they seem and never were. Soon you might become tempered in your adoration of your life partner and a little forgiving of that kid who tortured you in elementary school. You'll know they somehow they justify what they do and it's not all in relation to how it affects you.

Opinions Less Rigid

Politics is a subject that's sure to excite even the most stoic. They revel in argument and relish the chance to prove how wrong the other is. To accurately write a character you need to understand their point of view and often they are not the same as yours. As you begin to better understand worlds other than yours and motivations you normally thought foreign, you might not be able to so ardently debate your worldview since you can see the other side just as clearly.

Arbitrary Nature Of Pursuing Writing

We write to change the world. We have things to say that are important and people need to listen. As we continue along the writing journey we will come across forgotten geniuses and underrated artists. We will ask ourselves why a certain work didn't make an impact while more frivolous fair seems to pervade the culture. We may soon become disheartened about the whole game and quit. Soon it will become apparent that we write because we want to. That's all it is and all it need be. Life will go on without you and you can't single-handedly fix the whole world. The sooner you let go of lofty aspirations for your work and concentrate on being the writer you want to the sooner you may be able to change part of the world in a small way.

Become Cynical

If you're honest in your writing, your characters will never be all benevolent nor completely malicious. Discovering a villain has a reasonable rationale for evil-doing can rock your life's founding philosophy. Finding out that good people have selfish motives can be disconcerting. You soon might imagine your mom's true reason for birthing you. It wasn't to give you a great life, more likely just to get attention from men. This can color your interactions with everybody and anybody. You'll be circumspect of everybody's motives and sometimes downright paranoid.

No Single Reality

Everybody thinks the world they live in is the only world. They see things "how they are" and that's how it is. As a writer inhabiting the heads of people unlike you, it will soon become clear that each of us creates our own reality that we somehow reconcile with life. You'll learn everybody's conception is personal and there is no official reality. We each construct a concept of what life is and what we are. This reality is something that we have constructed and it's based on predilection, choice and circumstance. This fluidity may bother many writers who have come to see life as one thing rather than many.

In so many ways a writer's education is learning about life. The more you learn about life the better you can understand principles of writing. Learning about writing can also teach you about life, which is the unexpected part of it all. Life can teach you to be a better writer, and writing can teach you to be a better person.