I think it's interesting to see if anyone else does this- I for one put myself into alot of my characters, 99% of the time it's the lead Protagonists. I write what I wanna see because I'm sick of what I see on screen(tv and movies). I wanna see people who are like me, people that wanna heal themselves and others.
I think there's a little of myself in every character. But I try to take myself out of things as much as possible.
For me, it depends on the character. I need to relate to each character in some way, it allows me to understand them, but it does not need to come from me. When it does, however, it is only a tiny piece of their personality or story. Personally, I consider it poor writing to base a character on yourself with any kind of depth. It speaks of poor character creation and an unwillingness to move past what you have experienced. 'Write what you know', to me, is the worst writing advice ever given. How a character reacts to something should be based on their story and personally, not how another would react in the same circumstances. Research can only take you so far, because much comes down to how, as an individual, a character will handle something.
You could argue that every character is you. They're the best and worst parts of you arranged for effect. You can draw influences from outside yourself, but those live in you too. After all, you were the one who remembered their natures. You could go out and research some brand new personality that you didn't know of yesterday, but you're still the one choosing which elements go onto the page, and so that is some part of you too. Maybe it's not your day-to-day self, but whatever consciousness / soul / clockwork-biology that lives within you chose A over B, and so that is also a reflection of yourself. I've heard it said that the formative events of your life are in every story. Like, if you could make an honest list of the 10 greatest life-changing moments which defined you, you would find that everything you write contains one of those themes and probably more. The same goes for characters. They're almost like psychological facets of yourself reacting to those events. So every story is really an exploration of ourselves.
It's important to make the distinction that writing characters with similar interests doesn't make them proxies. It's not about writing oneself AS a character, but sharing similar traits or interests (and not all of them, or all in the one character). Characters can still be vastly different, but personal interests, opinions or traits can certainly work their way in. Life views, habits, quirks, speech patterns. It's likely some characters will posses a similar taste in art, music and pop culture as the Author simply because that's of interest to the person writing. It can't be helped. It can be a challenge to write a character that loves death metal and have that be authentic and believable if the author hates it. More than likely, if a writer likes jazz, a character will like jazz, and the authenticity of the appreciation will be stronger. For example, I like hippy girls and alternate culture, so I tend to write characters that way. I can't stand uber wealthy and flashy show offs, like the Kardashians et al, so tend to avoid writing them.
At my best, I have a foot in both the familiar and the unknown. Anything too safe is boring and uninspired; anything too out of reach, while perhaps construed by some as an honorable challenge (as if writing *any* good story that sells isn't challenging enough), will be a slog and probably come off as if I didn't know what I was writing about because... I didn't. Writing what I know doesn't literally mean transcribing my life in chronological order. This is still fiction, not an autobiography. I take what I am familiar with, super impactful moments in my life, my understanding of emotions, my interpretations of people I know and their personalities, and try to create something new and interesting from it. Like alchemy. Of course, it doesn't usually hurt to step outside of yourself now and again to keep things fresh and dynamic. And having good alpha/beta readers can help with this too, along with taking a good amount of time away from a finished draft before reading it back to yourself.
I think that a little of ourselves is in each character, as we're using our imagination to create them based upon our life experiences, innovative ideas and, well, imagination. That said, I do not base characters on myself.
It depends on how it's interpreted by the writer. I've always understood Write What you Know to mean put some of yourself and some of people you know into the characters, and also base stories on experiences you've had. Not the specifics, but the underlying emotions and situations. I always shuffle the deck when I create characters, many of them will have traits similar to mine, but they're not like me.
In that context, I agree. As writers we put bits of ourselves and the struggles around us into our work without thinking about it. I was talking about the way my high school english teacher used it. They basically told the class to only write about personal experiences, otherwise it would be lying. I got poor grades because I kept on writing whatever I wanted.
I rejected the Total Woman and Fascinating Womanhood visions of femininity by the time I was eleven. If you're ever out this way, call me and I'll introduce you to some real life female heroines, including my daughter.
"I am my paintings." -Van Gogh, as portrayed by Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate (2018) It's not so much that I put myself in my characters, this one or that one, or an inversion of myself in this one or that one. It's more that it is easy to psychoanalyze me and my work and see how the entirety of my work can be traced to my personality and my past. I'm not just in the characters; I'm in the plot, the themes, the costumes, etc. Having said that, there is only character who I am writing who is based off me. She is not me, but she is based off me, a bit of a shameless self insert. She has her own arc and theme to tell, but she also allows me to express some emotions.
Unless I'm deliberately basing a character off of something else (I once created an Iron Man equivalent for Naruto, arc reactor and all) I tend to take a small piece of my personality and put it into my characters. How that trait manifests itself in those characters depends on their past and their companions (after all, those around you shape you as much as you shape yourself) Most of my characters don't have the same past as I do, therefore it's likely that even when having similar traits, they're bound to be quite different. Sometimes the traits are exaggerated (to a cringeworthy degree) while others are the same but more muted. For example I have (slight) paranoia issues. Not so much a 'everythings gonna get me' way. More of a 'anything COULD get me' way. One of my female characters is a caricature of that. Taking that to it's logical extremes, although she's literally afraid of her own shadow and any sort of conflict, you do NOT want to make her angry. Unless you want essentially a mortal kombat death from ice powers lol
About 6 months ago I did a pretty big writeup about how I construct characters and let them come to life. I'mma just link to that right here.
Not remotely. Occasionally, I might include something that happened to me once and I might think what I'd have done in that situation, but I don't do self-insert at all. I am not my characters and they are not me.
On a deeper level, every character will "contain part of you" because that's just how writing works; we can't fully separate ourselves from our characters and we'll portray struggles and traits we consider important. That's a deeper level, though, and should remain so. Author self-insertion and Author's Avatar are both tropes to be avoided, especially the former. The former's widespread in RPGs and young adult literature. The specific issues why you'd want to avoid self-insertion: 1. You are largely static as a character while writing, or at the end of development strings. This'll create static characters or those that only developed in the past. 2. You will feel strongly about the character's identity / identities and will be unable to present them in a subtle or nuanced fashion. 3. You will be unable to accept critique of your manuscript or characters. Any critique of your character will feel like a subtle jab against you. Ironic that I found these forums through a chronic case of the latter and its developments here.
It's a difficult question, because I don't really think in terms based-on-me/not-based-on-me. I think about the situation and what that character would do in that situation. When I give it some serious thought, though, I rather fear I'm putting too much of myself into my characters, or more precisely make them act the way I would. (With emphasis on "too much", which is still far from "always".) Nobody has complained about it so far, though. So I guess I've been successful in making them varied enough. In my current WIP, I'm writing a female protagonist who is in fact a feminine aspect of myself. Still, as the story progresses, she turns out different from the real me in some respects. As for other characters, they do and say things as the situations and events require, and thereby acquire personality traits that may or may not be similar to mine. I can totally relate to that. It's one of my main motivators for writing. It's very difficult to find really good books, so I have to write some myself.
To determine if this is a problem you need to look at the list @Lazaares provided above and see if any of it applies to your protagonists: Do these characters have the necessary strength of will to propel the story forward, or do they react passively to events happening around them? Story is conflict, and the protagonist needs to be a powerful agent of conflict, not a helpless cork bobbing on the waves of an ocean unable to determine his or her own course.
IN fact, I just looked this up and it's very revealing: ag·o·nist /ˈaɡənəst/ noun 1.BIOCHEMISTRY a substance which initiates a physiological response when combined with a receptor. 2.ANATOMY a muscle whose contraction moves a part of the body directly. Note in each case there's a self-determined aspect, it's an agent that creates its own destiny, not that is acted on by outside forces. It moves or changes other agents through direct action. There are 2 agonists in a story (usually) one pro (for) and one anti (against).
Yeah. Pretty much. The story that's currently itching to get released - the one I never really knew what genre it was - could basically be considered a hypothetical autobiography. If I were ever in the situation that I needed to get my car back from the Devil, this is probably how it would go. Including the utter bumbling with the love interest. The MC is definitely me, but better. His best friend is me, but more like I was. Another character is me, but if I was a receptionist that cared. Birdman Willie is me, but if I'd lost my mind and lived in a dumpster. I'd hazard that, with few exceptions, every character is a version of me appropriate to the situation or role at hand. Which is why I'm looking into a story about six legged lizard people, provided I can get the science of their planet figured out. Though I'm sure I'll probably make at least one of them me, but with six legs.
In the story I sometimes work on I'm taking my current stoicism and assertiveness, which took me years of hard work to develop, and transplanting them into a character representing my 17-year-old self. He begins with a hint of it and develops it much more strongly by the end. At no point in the story though is he as passive as I was then. And I'm considering changing some character elements so he's a lot less me.
Usually not. However in the latest one I'm writing is almost 100% me. She's just going to look different.
I actually don't think there's anything inherently wrong with self insert characters. I think where things go wrong is that people are often not honest enough to look at themselves objectively. We all inherently want to believe ourselves to be good people and so we tend to write our own flaws as good traits when they aren't always. And so what they become is very bland, unlikable characters with no sense of self awareness. And that's not a very good set up for things like individual character arcs.
It's like Jungian dream theory: I am everyone in my dreams. Every character is a manifestation of some aspect of myself. If they hadn't come from inside, they wouldn't exist, and if I can't understand them inside out, I can't write them honestly. My current WIP though is the first time I've attempted anything semi-autobiographical, and I disagree that inserting yourself into a story should be avoided. What should be avoided is dishonesty and perfection. If the character is a paragon, the work will likely be pointless and masturbatory. A flawed and raw self-portrait on the other hand can make for a very compelling read. Take Charles Bukowski as prime example. His MC is barely even an alter ego. By all accounts, Henry Chinaski was Bukowski. Hunter S. Thompson wrote a barely fictionalized version of himself and his own misadventures into his work brilliantly. Sometimes it works.
