Here's the thing, Anr: I've read hundreds of times that all fiction is autobiography. That doesn't mean you're writing your memoir. What you've got access to are the feelings you've experienced. You can translate those into different characters who are in different settings. But if you're forcing your character into too many situations and too many settings with which you are completely unfamiliar, it will be all that much harder for you to really understand how they would react to whatever is happening, and therefore harder to write about. Write about situations you might know about but change minor details -- change a lot of them. If you're writing a character based on someone you know (even yourself), change their hair color, maybe their gender, their family structure, their job, their favorite breakfast cereal. Give them a favorite phrase that the real-life person doesn't use -- small things like that. The feelings and emotions could be the same, even though the "factual" (i.e. fictional) details are different. Keep exploring those feelings you mention -- again, they're universal. Everyone feels lonely or isolated at some point. That's what makes a book memorable and touches people -- the character's feelings about love and isolation and their place in the world. It's not that the MC was an auto mechanic or a gym teacher or whatever, but that readers could relate to the character. Don't be afraid to explore what you're really thinking. That's what will give you a really rich story. It sounds like you've got a lot to say, so that's great -- write down everything you're thinking about that you mentioned in this post -- you might cut out a lot of it, or maybe not even use any of it. But it will give you, at the very least, more background to establish your character.
Outline. An outline is easy to change. You can start over. Go back to an old outline. Mix and match. Outline instead of trying to organize a million pages.
I might be futile, but I'll try and explain it once more. When I was fifteen I wanted to be a comic books writer. I drew every day. After a few years of drawing the same character in the same pose every day, the drawing became rehearsed and predictable; The pattern became automatic. I started to hate my own drawing. In order to continue I had to ask friends, friends who never drew, to draw a picture of a face. Because they didn't draw their sketches, their portraits, had a naïveness to them, an innocence; The drawing wasn't rehearsed, self-assured or predicable. It was pure... It came from the heart. It's the same with writing. Five years of writing paragraphs and character sketches, the words become rehearsed and predictable... So, when I finally sit down to write a novel, I've heard the words before, and they are all so contrived, so worn, that they seems to reveal nothing at all. Case in point Haruki Murakami's "Underground". This book is a collection of interviews with people who were a part of the Tokyo gas attacks. Because these are ordinary people, not writers, then they are asked to re-tell their childhood, their words are pure, true and honest. They are not trying to use big words, or be poetic, just honest and true. THAT is what I want in my novel. And THIS is what you read in Catcher in the Rye, and to some extent, The Graduate. But most writers are unable to do this. Most writers have written for decades and can come up with (subconsciously) pre-made sentences that manage to capture perfectly a character. Like any trade of this nature, art, writing, music, the craft is perfected. *Sigh*... Point is, even though it's just my own un-distanced eye, I want the writing to be true and pure... And that is why I wonder if making a character that shares SOME aspects with me but is also foreign, will force me into being more thorough... Like an investigative journalist... EDIT: Ok. What about this: I keep changing my mind over what the plot is going to be. Every day it's something new. I know it's insecurity, but, what can I do to make up my mind for the right plot? How can I decide? How do I know?
