The receptive-reflective distinction is a very useful description of the writing process--how we go back and forth between the two modes / perspectives of feeling and thinking.

I know this is obvious, but all characters ultimately come from the writer's "character." Something I learned from reflecting on a post outside of Medium is that when we allow characters to guide us, what we're actually doing is suspending our conscious (reflective) self in order to face certain truths about ourselves that we're not conscious of. Once we have confronted that hidden / shadow self of our being, we can use our reflective self to shape the understanding into a story that will be apprehensible by someone else's (i.e. our audience's) self. If we don't process our receptive self through our reflective self, then the chances are good that an external (real-world) audience will have difficulty understanding / identifying with the characters we create.