Reading fiction is about a lot more than just entertainment. And writing fiction is about a lot more than just story.
It’s about putting imaginary people in imaginary situations and letting them figure out how to deal. Which really means that it’s you figuring it out while inhabiting the character.
It’s not an easy thing to do, and more often than not you’ll default to your own gut reaction, and then you catch yourself. Wait a minute – this character would never do that. So you start over and come up with a different solution. Sometimes it takes many iterations to arrive at the one solution that makes the best sense for your protagonist. But nobody ever said that putting yourself in another person’s shoes was easy. Not even if it’s an imaginary person.
It can make for a lot of writing that will only get cut in the end, but that’s a small price to pay for the insights that may well lurk in those discarded lines. Insights that may have nothing to do with your story, but everything to do with your story. The way you show up in the real world.
Of course, many situations that you put our characters through will be irrelevant for your own day-to-day life (and if you write grimdark, you fervently hope that that’s the case). A few, though, will reflect questions you’ve encountered in the past, or issues that you’re still wrestling with. And sometimes, seeing the situation through your characters’ eyes brings in a much-needed “outside” perspective.
The big advantage of trying out different solutions on the page is that they don’t have any real-life consequences. If it doesn’t work out, you just do it over. You can play. You can try on solutions for size, and they can be so devious, violent, outlandish, or courageous that in real life you’d never even consider, let alone attempt, them. You can be as daring as you want to be. And sometimes you’ll find that some of that daring has been missing in your own approaches, and that’s what’s been holding you back.
Writing fiction may well come with side effects. It can stretch your mind and expand your social skills. Most of all, though, you’ll exercise your empathy, that is your willingness and ability to look at things (and maybe even other people) from a perspective that doesn’t come naturally. The side effect of that may well be that some strongly held opinions soften into a more nuanced worldview. Sure, character development is an important part of most novels – but it doesn’t have to stop on the page.