Do Writers Realize When They Write Crazy People?

Obsession is a form of madness. When obsession becomes the only thing in someone's life, that person becomes at least temporarily insane.When a fiction writer creates a portrait of a person whose quest or search for something or someone or some ideal becomes all-encompassing...they are creating a character who, as they inhabit the story at least, is for all intents and purposes...unhinged.A writer should love something about every character they envision and inhabit, but to fully realize a character and to avoid sentimentality or what I can only call "falseness," the writer has to recognize that insanity. If the writer doesn't--can't pull back enough to recognize it, no matter how close-in and personal the writer gets within the story--then you get the odd situation in which the writer clearly thinks they're writing a story about a genuinely good, genuinely sane person when they're not.Just an interesting thing to observe, because although there are some subjective elements about characters and ambiguity, you can also say that if a character does certain things in certain contexts, most reasonable people would feel a certain way about that character after awhile.