Did you decide to write about things you know, or run as far away from them as possible? Do you feel that your writing style has been influenced by school or work? I do scientific technical writing in real life and am trying to figure out how to make my characters more vivid and emotional.
That is a really tough question to answer.
For example: I have some old stories. Like, really old. I plotted them from the age of seven and the oldest was basically the planting pot which grew every other. The one story I have on here and another, which I started before and dropped instantly again, like many others in recent years, have both similar lores. When you pit them against each other based on certain values, they are very similar, because they both hail from a piece of lore that I dropped from that really old OG universe. In the long run, some things just don't fit and end up discarded, but after literally twenty years, I can say that even discarded PARTS of this universe even have a mind of its own.
Now why do I say this? Not just to subtly hint at my story and that other which I may or may not restructure and put on SH, but because those really old lores still harbor my childish spirit, and every story that fell off of it does so as well. So especially the lore that I couldn't change or somewhat update to my standards nowadays, to i.e. deepen characters and relationships, was just as it was made back then when I finally realized the first part of that story a few years back, and the roots go all the way back into a time in which my mind was very vocal about things, but I never spelt them out. Today, I speak them out loud, while my stories remain mostly neutral to my own believes.
I once had someone think I loved horses, among other things. That is especially funny, because I hate horses (I always did, same with dolphins). One of my very clear believes was to not believe a god exists (expect, that one time I thought I might be the anti-christ when I was eight or nine - I watched too much Criminal Minds as a child. Well, anyway). So in every older lore, which is why I mentioned all of them being somewhat connected, I made a point of saying the world, in the way works, doesn't have a god. Like, none at all. It's all just a big cheese story.
Nowadays, I'm still atheist, but I had a story once that revolved around the daughter of a pastor. People thought I was very religious then.
What am I trying to say? I believe you will find parts of me in every story, not necessarily in the characters even, but in the world, in the way it is told, and how I inform the reader on certain things when I'm passionate about them and thus, know a bit more about the topic. But at the same time, you can never take a character of mine and simply expect me to say those exact words; in fact, I might not have anything to do with any of the character's traits or believes at all. I might just find them interesting to explore in the moment.
Of course your character, as you also mentioned, will reflect on your writing per se, but not inherently on the characters itself or their feelings and convictions, but just in how passionate you will explain how to groom a flower bed if you are, in fact, a gardener, even if the one talking is simply the narrator.
In the end, if real life took too much space up in our stories, every one of them would feel the sam and it would get boring fast.
