How to distance yourself from the character

[Almonds]

When I write, I think from my point of view. What I'd do in this situation, what I'd say to that kind of person... since I'm the readily available "reference", many characters often mirror my actions and thoughts.

However, not every character can be me. Every character is different, and people have different ways of thinking, different ideologies, and different beliefs.

How do you make your character different from yourself?

 

[Misfit Angel]

Personally, I watch a lot of a specific TV show, to the point where I'm picking up on a specific character's mannerisms. I was doing this with Star Trek: Enterprise for ~2 months. T'Pol's dry sense of speaking, Trip's southern charm and way of speaking and Reed's stuffy British accent really started to rub off on me and I found it very easy to write characters in their style. Watching a lot of mafia films after that, I started to notice that a lot of my characters started to talk like wise-crackin' Italian mobsters. It can even change already established characters, so be careful with it if this method does anything for you.

 

[canisaries]

not gonna lie, this is a big problem for me. i have a hard time getting into other people's heads. for any in-depth description, i write my scenes thinking "what would i think about this" and then evaluate that through the past and personality for the character, but that still probably only describes what people with a similar way of thinking as me would do.

i try to give different characters different thought patterns and ways of speaking thoughts aloud in their head, though i'm not sure how well it's working. i don't write that many different characters or even that often, so i don't have much reference.

 

[CrystaI]

Don't think of trying to inserting yourself into each single characters. Oppositely, think of trying to insert those characters into yourself, like a film actor playing the role of a fictional character.

Because my current project is written in 1st person perspective and additionally focus character changes for each chapter, hence I need to know the mindset and thought process of each character I'm going to write.
What I do in my method is, firstly I'll create a character profile for each character with many important background information of them, of course with the most important part -- their personality and characteristics, how do they react to something specific and how what will they say or do under specific situations. Of course at the beginning stage, I need to understand the inner of those characters from my understanding, or else I can't theorize their thinking pattern.
Then next, once I started to grasp the framework of their mindset, I'll then try to create a persona within my head, let that "person" answer the questions of "How do you feel about this issue?". The key point in here is, forget myself. Yes, forget my own self, forget what I will say and react to specific things. Just try to converse and ask questions with that imaginary "person" I created in my head, do not answer the questions on their behalf.
As more and more questions are asked and as that character profile thicken, I feel like there exist another person telling me what to write whenever I write to the scenes of that specific characters, I become able to always role-play that character at anytime.

To be fair, I'm not sure how distanced are those character in my fanfic from my Real-Life self. Because despite their clear distinctness, you can still say they all contain at least 1% of myself. You can't help, because in order to grasp the mindset of other people, there need to be at least 1% similarity with you in order for you to view from their standpoints. I can imagine the thought of a character that is 99%
different from me, but I can't imagine the thought of a character that is 100% completely different from me.

But, please, do not mind about that 1% similarity. Yes every character should be as different as Real-Life humans. But Real-Life is constructed by billions of people, whereas the universe in one's fiction is constructed merely by one single person. So I wouldn't scratch my head for a fic where every characters are 1% similar to one another.

 

[Drakon]

I just scramble personality traits from people I've met and make up new ones. It's like making a salad with personality traits from people I've encountered.