All authors have made characters like themselves in some way or another. It's not too hard to figure out in the Honor Harrington books which character is David Weber...I'll lay money on Hamish Alexander and probably win every time. Just like when he collaborates with Eric Flint, it isn't hard to tell who is Eric Flint...the character of Victor Cachet is Flint...so we all do it. Kate Almir is me..she is the warrior side of me that I cannot let loose except on a battle field...so it's nothing knew...
I don't think I put myself physically into my character, other than my age, I find it harder to write about anybody that isn't an adolescent, force of habit I guess. However, I do find there are a lot of simillarities at first, and sometimes my favourite characters have the traits that I don't necessarily like in myself or other people. I find that I am embarassed to show my work to anybody if it's too much like myself.
There's nothing wrong with having a character that is yourself, provided you don't make it too obvious. The only reason i say those two characters is from what I see from them after reading many books by those two authors. As for my MC, who in their right mind would EVER think a female MC would have any connections with a MALE writer...LOL....some might, but I'm not sure many would.
Likeable and believable but not boring? My two main characters in my story are complete opposites. But they are both like me.
I often find myself giving my characters pieces of myself or someone I know. I think it's inevitable and in a way makes them seem more real. I think our characters are somewhat extensions of ourselves, alter egos to some extent.
My main characters are never really me, however they always capture an aspect of me yes. I think this is important, at least with me, because I need to be able to relate to the character somehow in order to really tell the story.
The more I write, the more my characters differ from me. I think this is a natural progression. You start out, perhaps unwittingly, writing about yourself, and gradually expand your capacity to navigate the psychology of another.
I agree with this too, mainly because I can recall my first stories. They were basically just, me's going through adventures. Now, the characters have a personality with only, like I said, an aspect of me, so this goes along with his theory.
I'm jumping in rather late in the game, but I have to think that at some level, purposefully or without our personal admission, our main characters in fictional works must contain some part of us.
Who I am as a person often does come out through my characters. With that said, I should add that I almost never write my main characters as female. They are often male. I find they are always discovering their limits, as I myself so often do.
Good question. Yes, my characters are always somewhat me, or some form of me. However, I find that I write best when I can distant the character from myself. However, I can't do that totally. For example, in my next book, Alex, the main character, is playing accoustic guitar, like I do, instead of an electric guitair or the paino. So I don't think it's totally odd. Maybe your main characters just attach onto you for some reason.
Humans are complex multi-faceted beings and as a result each individual is capable of being many things at some point. Which is probably why why I think all my characters have a bit of me within them. But by the same argument, I could say every fictional character I've ever read displayed some part which I could identify with and associate some tiny aspect of my personality with. But really, writers should strive to create diverse characters. The further away they are from you, the greater the discrepancy between that character and the one you're preconditioned to write ie. yourself. My main characters usually have some resemblance to myself, but I actively try to make them different, even if I fail to some degree. It pushes me towards diversity, which I often battle with.
Call me immature, but I always like to see myself as the protagonist in my stories. It really allows me to get into it, and I understand my emotions and thoughts and can make a more believable character that way. Though now I'm starting to base more characters off of people I know, and that's starting to work out well for me too.
I don't write characters that are "me" per say. I don't think I'm interesting enough of a person for that. *laughs* But oftentimes they do contain something about me. Like one of my characters is a writer, like me. Another loves horseback riding, like I do. In some cases I actually put in a trait or two that is opposite of me, just for a bit of fun (i.e. the character who's extremely bad at French). Since I love creating characters and have literally hundreds makes it's impossible for me to be one of them, but many of them have little bits of me. They also often have bits of other people I know, or even people I just read or heard about.
My main character usually ends up with one at least of my own traits. Whether or not I choose to edit the character depends on how much of me is in them. If there are just a few quirks I'll generally let it pass, but if they turn out to be a mirror image of me then I'll go back and edit them. There is one character I made that is an exact copy of me. I use that character to test all my other characters, and so far it has been working quite well.
Because I hate writing about myself and I hate other people writing thinly disguised versions of themselves, I always make my main character as unlike me as I can. For instance, I mostly make them female, so that I'm instantly distancing them from myself. But bits of myself do tend to find themselves into my lesser characters. Often they have a way of being into what I'm into. I think you'd go mad if you tried to make every character completely different from yourself.
I usually write horrors about sadistic serial killers and psychopaths so the characters are exactly like me…. Seriously though this happens to every author even if you don’t have the same traits or quirks, you will notice something that reminds you of yourself, like a particular speech pattern for instance, as its part of the adage of writing what you know, and some of this will be provided subconsciously
My characters are part of me in the sense that I understand and empathize with them, even if I don't always agree with them. My main characters will inevitably have world views that align with my own, or ones I've held previously in life, or at the very least, world views that I can appreciate. I could never write a convincing story where the main character stood for something that repels me. They make mistakes, are confused and sometimes contradict themselves, but in their essense they have values I can agree with. When it comes to villains I try to avoid the trap of judging them and turning them into scapegoats and simple tools that must prove my world view to be the better one. I don't turn them into dehumanized representations of evil. They're part of me as well - perhaps as what I might fear I could have become if things had turned out poorly for me in life. In that sense I empathize with them equally. Characters that are too far from myself to allow me inside their heads are usually taking up very minor roles in my stories. They can be great fun and add alot of color but they never become real, fully formed people. As for the superficial behaviour and activities of my characters, I borrow and steal widely from people I know or characters from other stories. Otherwise they'd all be sitting in front of computers writing fiction rather than living bold and interesting lives.
I wrote a story once, realized I was writing myself in the story, man I hated that guy so the villian won in spite of himself!
Many of my characters have my traits. My main character has my homosexuality, my heroine has my love of psychology and sociology and will analyse everyone, my secondary main character has my uncertainty and lack of trust in people, my villain has my belief in balance (but his sense of balance is warped) There is so much more. I don't even mean to do it usually. Generally, each character has a piece of me in them, somehow. I don't see this as a bad thing.
I can relate to this, I tend to base characters not only on myself but my friends or people I know. Currently in my script, all four of the main characters feel like splintered parts of my personality. I suppose it's not only natural to try it, but also much safer, because after all, you know what you want and what your motivations would be.
I'm sure some have some superficial similarities but beyond that, no. I spend enough time talking about myself in real life, no point in writing about it too.
I'm actually surprised that no one's said this already, but I actually really want to write a character that is myself into a story. The first idea for a novel that I ever had was technically non-fiction, but it was going to be told in a fictitious style because I always wished that I lived in fiction... I then decided that such a work would be too difficult for a novice to pull off, so I'm starting my writing career with stories that are unrelated to me in most ways. And I have constructed characters who are very different than myself, but like EVERYONE has said before: They definitely resemble as least one trait of myself most of the time. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that most people start off using their selves as a guideline for how they make characters, but I'm going with a reverse method where I want to ultimately gain skill as a writer before I even think about using myself as a MC.
