Fiction Enables You to Write Coded Versions of Yourself

Fiction enables you to write coded versions of yourself that you know are true because you can decode them. Other people just think that's characterization. That's fine. You can observe until the cows come home. But when you really have put a character together piece by piece, what makes it work is a piece of yourself. And until that happens, the character doesn't really have a being at all. So the real joining in fiction-writing is that sense of finding all the possibilities of your own character and awarding them in an organized way to the different characters of your creation.

JOHN LE CARRÉ