Hitchcock was famous for appearing 'out of the blue' in all his movies. If you were to appear in all your stories as a character, what type of character would you be? or which/what type of character would you introduce everytime in your stories?
I like to appear as myself from time to time! When writing a story I sometimes intentionally break the 4th wall, adding a completely subjective remark as a narrator, even to the point of "forcing" my characters to do things they "don't want to". I actually wrote a couple of short stories that go on and on, characters meet other characters and things start to happen - and then I come out telling the reader I (the writer) don't like where the whole thing is going for certain reasons, and I'm going to end it right there. Occasionally, a character might try to oppose me, and the story might go in completely different (and completely bizarre) direction. And when it comes to actual literal characters, I employ this couple of guys that always act cocky, overzealous, and utterly useless in whatever role they appear. They are strictly episodic, comic-relief characters that I "cast" as guards, police inspectors, bank clerks, cable guys, etc. and they are usually there to slow down the main character, or just irritate him/her. Think Laurel and Hardy playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern...
Hey Burlbird this is great and full of imagination..it is quite a clever idea what you are doing... I am not aware of the 4th wall yet, what is it?
Oh, it's the thing between the 3rd and the 5th wall! Just joking... http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BreakingTheFourthWall
hitchcock only appeared very briefly in seconds-long, non-speaking 'walk-ons' and not always as the same type of character... i'd do the same, since it would be boring to be the same in all of them... plus, that makes it more fun for the audience to 'find' me, as it was for me in re 'hitch'...
yes. It was strange thing he did, a kind of signature, it was non speaking which is again strange, but fortunately for us the viewers he was easy to spot because of his weight.
If my stories became movies, I might get myself cast as a minor character in each. But I don't know what inserting myself would mean for a book. I mean, all my characters come out of my own head and therefore have elements of my personality to them, but I've never had a character who is exactly 'me' - the closest are people who resemble an element of myself, idealized or exaggerated, but in other ways differ a lot from me. For example, I insert a lot of scientist characters because I'm hoping to be a researcher myself (in psychology), but none of them are exactly like me. Dr Lin and Liana are physicists and supernatural researchers, and Dr Lin is a mother hoping to resurrect her dead child while Liana is a doppelganger and differs psychologically from humans (she suffers no ill effects emotionally from assuming a fake persona because her identity is malleable). Tom and Joe have much less ethics than me, and are basically what I'd be like if I was a psychopath - they kidnap a guy, turn him into a vampire, and then experiment with mind control on him, and when they find an unexpected result they decide they'll do it all over again with another person to see if they can repeat their findings. I also have several female abused characters (I was sexually abused) but most of them have had it much worse than me, and they're a lot more ruthless and hardened than me as a result. However, they tend to be the ones that are mouthpieces for my own opinions - those which are relevant to the story. For example the one character like that who meets a fundamentalist Christian expresses the exact same flavour of atheism I believe in, using the same arguments I always use.
several well-known writers/directors have done this... m. knight shyamalan and harold ramis, for example... and not always as minor characters, since ramis actually played one of his 'ghostbusters'...
