Particularly in my larger stories, I have often wondered if someone I knew was going to look at the main character and tell me "that's you, isn't it?" Truthfully, all my characters are me. Everyone, from the most critical starring role, to the quickly forgotten background character, they are all a piece of me in some way. They might be an exaggerated characteristic I see within myself, or they might just be some voice that I hear sometimes when I think of other. But in one way or another, they all come from me, and they are all some part of me. But also truthfully, my main characters usually are a greater portion of "myself" than the other characters. It makes them easier for me to write and understand, easier for me to cast their objectives and motivations, and even makes it more natural for me to write their dialogue. But I never really considered them to be "self-insert characters" because I could also see so much that was different between them and myself. But lately I've been working on a story where the protagonist is far more of a self-insert character than any I've written before. And as I've been putting this together, I've been stumbling into some writing problems, and I've realized the true problem with self-insert characters. Since the character is me, I already feel attached and connected to this character. But the reader does not. And I keep failing to show to the reader why this is a character they should care about. In all my attempts, I grow attached to him too quickly, and I can't properly see how the reader will really react. I underestimate what it will take for the reader to care about this character. I misjudge what qualities the reader will find valuable/interesting. In the end, I've made a shallow and boring character who fails to capitalize on the good character traits I thought I had given him. I suppose I've had this problem in the past with my other characters, but I've still made them distant enough from myself that I could still give them some interesting traits, and ultimately they become slow-burns. But a character that is a true self-insert? It's hitting too close to home for me to be able to see what are the aspects that I truly need to build off of.
Well, you are probably right. I've written a self-insert and a pretty big one. We aren't talking about a characteristic aspect of me, we are talking about a fictionalized me with a different name. Even some past events that I consider life-changing are included in the character's history. The book(s) are an exploration of my soul. Here's the kicker: I don't believe that my character is uninteresting. Far from it. I wrote a story around the effect of technology on humans, and what a future of virtual reality could look like. And because I understand myself, I was able to tie my character strongly to the negative... but also positive... impact of computers in humanity. Actually, it was almost as if I cheated a little by using myself. My character is pretty multi-dimensional and since I already know all my aspects, it wasn't hard to build on that. I'm usually pretty insecure about what I write, but I think this is true. Still, the book(s) need to be rewritten as I wrote them something like two years ago. There is some pretty messy writing and story choices. Like everything in writing, it really all depends on how you execute something. I had a vision in my head and a story I wanted to tell which I thought was valid. Everything ties together and that makes the work complete. Now if I inserted that character in a completely different story, like say some fantasy one, then yeah, it'd be probably fall flat in the way you describe. There's no place for her there. Her place is a world with computers and brain interfaces. That's where she belongs. Nowhere else. So, basically, yes that problem exists, but there is a way to work around it.
We put a bit of ourselves into every character, no matter how minor they maybe. At the same time, we have to develop that ideal of our reader. I like the concept of SAM, that the story grid uses, the single audience member. Who is Sam? That you have to know when creating a main character. What traits, decisions, etc will help Sam identify with the character. What makes your character a likable person. It is not about how much or little of you is in the character, rather it is how much of themselves Sam can see in the character.
Are many authors so alien that readers would find them hard to relate to, though? Lately the human condition has been seeming pretty universal to me. Perhaps if the author is vapid then his self-insert won't land well (ahem, Velma), but frankly he's got larger problems at that point. Actually, now that I think about it, it's what happens in the story that matters. A character could have 100% the author's likeness, but if the world around him still rings true, it won't be dissatisfactory. When "hot young student shares professor's enthusiasm for old literature and also thinks he's really attractive" is dished up, it's not the clearly self-inserted professor that smells bad, it's how the world caters to him that does. Same thing with Mary Sues: there are lots of likeable Mary Sues that fly right past people's critical radar. We only notice and complain when intelligence is really just clairvoyance, when every endeavor is a success in spite of variables she can't control, when the opposition is ceaselessly gullible or uninformed, when other characters never fail to validate Sue's superior skill and character.
I don't mean to sound rude, but... How interesting do OTHERS find this character to be? That's the real problem with self-insert characters, we as the writer think this character is just perfect for the story, we think they are the bee's-knees, but others read it and are not so enthralled as we are. Even if we do a good job of writing some depth to the character, and even if the rest of the story still works, we will still always see that character in a greater light than will any of our readers.
To be fair, I said the problem with the characters, not the problem with the stories. I would argue that even if someone had a good story for a self-insert character, the work would still be improved if the character was successfully written with some distance from the writer. Thank you for pointing this out; it seems like no one these days understands that there are plenty of good/loved Mary Sues, they just think they are all bad while not realizing how many of their beloved characters are a Mary Sue. My favorite Mary Sue is James Bond.
I think one of the main problems with a self-insert character is you don't construct it as a character to function as an integral part of the story. Assuming we're writing genre, a story is conflict between characters (usually). Character traits and flaws and motivations etc should be carefully considered and integral to the conflict. But if your self-insert character ends up being mostly just an observer or just wandering through the story not engaging in real conflict, then it isn't driving the story forward, it's being carried along like a piece of flotsam on a stream. That's not what a main character is supposed to do. I think part of it is that you don't want to give a self-insert character flaws, you want to be really nice to them, and end up making their journey too easy. Since the character is you, you don't get 'real' with it, you don't really even create a character, it's more of an amorphous blob. You can tell when someone is writing a self-insert because when you ask them what the flaw is they'll say something like "He's too perfect," or "She's too nice." Those aren't dramatic flaws, and they're not capable of driving a story forward. It needs to be a serious flaw that causes him or her massive problems and that he or she must need to solve by the end. My theory is that when we write self-insert characters we write them 'from the inside,' but we write all the other character 'from the outside'. Meaning not just that we physically see the other characters from the outside, see what they look like etc, but also that we see them more objectively. We're willing to make them assholes with issues. But our self-insert characters we're way too nice to. We don't want to see our own worst flaws, and put them up for the world to see. So we make them bland and uninteresting. I mean think about it—in terms of behavior and flaws etc, you can clearly see other people's behavior, but you give yourself all kinds of leeway and don't even realize it. That's what I mean by 'seeing it from the inside'. From the inner workings, from behind the curtain. You pull the levers and project your false persona image like the Wizard of Oz does, but you hide who you really are and all your real flaws behind the curtain. Give the story to a friend who's known you since you were a child, or to a family member, and see if they agree you presented yourself realistically. I'll bet they laugh at parts and remind you you left some flaws out or made them way milder than they really are. Or distorted them massively to make them seem not so bad. But meanwhile you make others' flaws look terrible.
I suddenly realized my character in the Beastseekers is really just a 'stuck character,' as Bill Johnson puts it in A Story is a Promise. He's just too afraid to stand up for himself, and the climax is when he finally does. That's really just a stuck character, and as Bill says, the story doesn't begin until after he becomes unstuck. He was afraid to engage in conflict. It isn't until he loses that fear that the story can begin. A story is supposed to be about fierce characters with indomitable wills who go head to head over the issue the story is built around. Actually my second attempt was much better, where he was already starting to stand up for himself against his asshole friends, but in the third one I decided to start earlier, when he was too wishy-washy and let himself get walked on.
The reader wants to know deep truths about the characters, and if the character is a self-insert, the writer needs to know the deep truths about him/herself. It requires a great deal of self-knowledge, self-understanding and self-acceptance. Only then can the writer take the character through the same introspection. Then what the writer has learned about him/herself, and the human condition in general, can be translated to a character from which the reader will learn, too.
Well said the character needs to change, either internally or externally. Their attempts at avoiding that change can help drive the story. That is why both story grid and save the cat talk about the lesson impeded in the story. Even if the character doesn't learn the lesson, the story can deal with the consequences of that.
As an octogenarian with Parkinson, I wonder where my characters come from. I write about young women in historical settings in places I've never been with a narrative I find too fast and busy. When I read it back, I believe someone may have taken over my body. I heard that a man can't write a woman, but I used four female betas and two female editors, so now the reviews speak of the author as female.
No worries, you aren't being rude. This is a discussion. The nature of the problem you're describing is bias. If a writer inserts themselves into the story, the narrative can become biased and bland. Often times, we get Mary Sues because of this. It's just people writing themselves into a fantasy they have. And they like this fantasy, but others won't like that fantasy and won't react to it as well as the writer is. That's putting it pretty well. In that case, there is no argument being made from a broad perspective in the story. It's just the writer pushing a view which stems from their fantasy. There is no story at all. Good writers don't think like that. They include dramatic turns and flaws within their characters, and that's the truly hard part. Its human nature to be biased towards yourself because it's an internal psychological defense. Can you honestly portray a flaw within you, the self-insert, in the same way you would portray it in an entirely fictional character? If so, you can create a character that is really no different from a fictional one. You just borrow those building blocks from within you. I'm not really sure I get you here. Can't that be said for pretty much any character? After all, when we write a story, we create characters that we think are suitable for the story. We write them because we like them, regardless of whether they're self-inserts or not. Now whether the audience will find the character interesting will mostly depend on the writer's skill. Actually, you have to also start from what makes a character interesting. A common thing is the character being relatable. And a goal of self-inserts can be just that. If the writer is a white-collar worker looking to write a white-collar worker character, what better place to use himself? If there is honest portrayal, without the narrative being obviously biased towards that character (character being too cool, too perfect, too bland) then other white-collar workers might very well like that character. Self-inserts can therefore be just as interesting as entirely fictional ones as long as there isn't bias. If a writer thinks their self-insert is perfect, it's likely not.
I think it ultimately depends on the author and what kind of discomfort he is willing to experience in that process (and how interesting he is). It lots of hypothetical cases I agree, and in quite a few I don't. Oh man, no kidding. A lot of my favourite characters in books, movies, video games... they beg aspiration, some sort of pop-culture appendage to concept of perfection idealized and never reached (Jesus or whatever). I'm glad I got to grow up with them (and still enjoy them to this day of course), shallow as they are when compared to real people. I don't agree with the notion that an author is inherently blind to his most compelling flaws or features. A lack of objectivity about ourselves is certainly common, but not an absolute. I've met people in real life who are well aware of their own shortcomings, either through thinking deeply about themselves or listening critically to what others say about them (not accepting everything, of course, but paying attention to it). The process of writing is largely introspective as it is; it both demands introspection and aids it. And from which period of his life is the author inserting? Childhood, young adulthood, present? We tend to gain understanding of ourselves after the fact for sure. I think writing the best way to unravel deep truths about... well most things in life in the first place. Though it's probably less challenging to do it with characters that reflect parts of the author's personality rather than the whole hog. Sometimes the author's fantasy has a particularly broad appeal (which is fine). Think military thrillers, supernatural romance, etc... It works out well when they know how to craft a story on top of that, and quite poorly then they don't: consider the success of Gray Man or Twilight, contrast with My Immortal.
Like the fan fiction book? Oh man, I had a read of that last summer. Golden stuff. I couldn't read more than three chapters for obvious reasons but it was great because it was bad. But I knew that the person writing this probably had problems in their life, so I looked up the background of the work a bit more and came to discover that the author was a child in foster care at the time... and one hope with writing the fanfic was finding her lost brother. I'm not sure he said that that's the case. He probably just meant that its common. There are some great people as you say, but most I've met aren't really like that.
Or you can be too nice to them by giving them plenty of flaws that get ignored. The heroine of the first novella I completed was a blatant self-insert, with all my perceived flaws. I won't go into what they were lest I fall into the "I'm gonna go into the garden and eat worms" state of mind I was in for much of my twenties. Believe me, they were far from "she's too nice" or "she's too perfect." The false thing in that story was that despite all these very real faults, the tall, dark, handsome hero still fell in love with her, supposedly because she was so devoted to him. This was bullshit, and any discerning reader would know it was bullshit. I still liked the suspense plot, so I fired the self-insert and hired her first cousin of the same name. I gave her some nice hangups that aren't my own and a backstory that isn't mine, provided the hero some real reasons to fall in love with her, and rewrote the book as a full-length novel. Yeah, she's still got pieces of me. For that matter, the hero does, too. But she's real enough now, I think, to get at least four books out of.
Yeah, I'm thinking this is the solution. Create a new character that's built with the right traits andissues to fit the story. 'Seen from the outside', meaning you can objectively see the character. I suppose after a while, possibly after finishing the book, we can see them properly and realize our mistakes.
I suppose it's worth stating, it all just comes down to what aspects of yourself you are trying to incorporate, or perhaps, what the reasoning behind the self-insert is. I can easily imagine someone in a foul mood creating a self-insert character who is mopey and filled with problems, just to be set up as a representation of all problems and frustrations they are dealing with. It still effectively runs into the same exact problem though, just as the mirror image. We could go from a character with no real flaws because the author can't see these within themselves, to a character with no real qualities because the author can't see these within themselves. Imagine living in a society where no one had figured out how to create mirrors yet. Imagine someone in that society trying to paint a self-portrait. They could be the most talented painter who creates the most vivid portraits, but they still wouldn't quite know how to create themselves. Well, our true selves are something we can never see; there is no such thing as a mirror that shows us how others see us. So as writers, when we try to write this self-insert, we are grasping straws, vainly trying to guess at our appearance. Whether we exaggerate a flaw or exaggerate an admirable trait, the result is still the same. The best we can do is create some new creation and try to fill in the blanks. The way I see it, all romance stories depict romance about as realistically as DragonBall Z depicts fighting. I would still consider the "first cousin of the same name" to be a self-insert. As should be evident within the long and rambling intro I wrote at the start of this thread, I see all characters as differing ranges of "how much of a self-insert" they are. Some are more like me than others; some just represent a single voice in my head or a single memory. I recall reading that the creator of the cartoon The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy based the three main characters off of himself, trying to deal with his personality disorder. One character was the angry and cynical side of himself, another was the goofball and silly side of himself, and another was the part of him that is tasked with pulling himself together. I sometimes see a lot of me in my various characters. In the webcomic I made back in the day, there was a character who was my serious and analytical side, exaggerated and developed into the kind of guy who irons his bedsheets. (Which is something I have done.) He is a foil to another character who is energetic and snarky, a side of myself that I have often seen. Both of these characters are me, parts of myself that I often have to keep under control, but getting to go loose in my story. Yet I never realized that this is who they were when I first devised them. And yet at the same time, another character in this same story is so heavily based off of myself that his name was is phonetically similar to a name that my parents almost gave me. But I just used "me" as a starting point. I grabbed specific parts of myself, specific things that I like, and made them more prominent features. I gave him a different addiction, and made him run from different problems. But he is similar to me enough that I can often figure out how he would react in a given situation because it is how I would react, or at least I can use that as a starting point. And yet all three of those characters have far more depth to them than the one from the latest story I have been working on. I need to, as was stated, "fire him and hire his first cousin with the same name."
I haven't done a self-insert character since I was trying to write a revenge novel in my twenties. Fortunately, I got that out of my system and was able to go on to more interesting characters. Characters I write about in my old age may have cetain characteristics in common with me or people I know, but I don't need to base fictional characters on real people. I have absolutely no desire to star as the protagonist (or antagonist) in my own story. That being said, when writing about, say, a manipulative person, I consider the manipulators in my acquaintance and how they exhibit that characteristic. I don't, however, make the character a thinly veiled version of the real person.
Self insert would be okay if we could write ourselves as we are and not as how we hope to be perceived. It can become wish fulfillment rather than journey. Most of my own self inserting is done by my tone - I can't rid my stories of my humor, that twinge of sick tragedy or ray of hope. Once I tried to base a story off of my experiences when I was 11 at my friend's grandparents cottage. But when I designed the two characters they didn't quite resemble me or my friend. There were some familiar incidents I put in (we found mica chips on the walkway to the water and tried to catch a mole that lived among the rocks) but for the most part it was fiction. It allowed me more control to abandon making them exactly like us.
Yes, this is always true. Human beings are unbelievably complex—so much so that they seem to consist of a bunch of random impulses and drives that have no coherency. Or maybe I should say they have many aspects to them, far more than you could hope to capture in a story. I ran headlong into this fact on my Beastseekers story. Fact is much weirder and more complex than fiction, and when designing characters you can't use every facet of a real person, you must be extremely selective and cut a lot out. So it really isn't possible to write a story about a real person, you can only select certain aspects of them and of their story and must exclude a lot. In my case the reason I used myself and my friends is because we used to write stories together, about ourselves. My friend "Eric" would come up with ideas every few years for a new series featuring us, but always older and with something like superpowers. I would write stories in each series, and so did he, but our treatments were always very different. I was gradually figuring out that he was pretty self-centered and our values were very different. Around 16 I finally created my own series featuring us, called The Beastseekers, but my innovation was that I was totally honest about who we were. The characters were actually us, a pair of 16-year-olds who had taken a paper route and split it, and used to hang out in the woods a lot. He hated it, and when he wrote stories in that series he made us ambiguously older (he just said 'youths') and he didn't want to reveal any details about home life, family, or anything else. And he hated the fact that I did all that in my stories. Mine were designed from the ground up to be records of who we were and the things we were doing at that point in our lives. I'd write about specific areas in the woods we liked, and events that actually happened, only I'd have strange creatures show up that we had to fight. To this day I love reading them, because they're such specific records of our lives at that time. I was basically journalling my life (something I have always done), but with some level of fictionalizing going on. He hated the realism, and the fact that my characters didn't have any superpowers, they just were us. His were nothing but ego-boosting power trips, and he hated that at times I had our characters fear for their lives and react out of desperation. His had no fear, and no enemy held any real threat to them. This is how I learned about Mary Sues, long before that term existed. I gradually shed my naiveté and innocence and learned by stages to stand up for myself against my various friends, many of whom were very much like him. It turns out my personality type attracts them. I studied Stoicism and assertiveness and many related things, and basically became anathema to toxic people who wanted to take advantage under the guise of friendship. I literally lived a hero's journey, and decided I would commemorate it by writing one more Beastseekers story, where Cody learned who the real beast was and how to fight against it. The beast is actually inside, and we project it onto other people. The real fight is interior. The monsters we see are distorted projections of our own fears and weaknesses magnified dream-style. So the only appropriate way to tackle it was by writing us even more real than I ever had before. Good for self-therapy and finding closure etc, not so good for writing a story for the general reading public. Ok, enough oversharing. Sorry to use the board for my own therapy sessions
A lot of writers can start out this way, some grow out of it and some don't. I used to write about preteen girls that were all hot, attracted the most gorgeous guys and their biggest problem was hair frizz. very dull stuff. Some readers or even movie viewers can't relate to characters that bungle things or show weaknesses. My father's side of the family has a real hard time getting through movies or TV shows without wanting to walk out on them. Why is the character just letting this happen!! They want a Mary Sue and I think it's because it's safe. Deep down I don't think they're actually wired to enjoy a story, it's too agitating for them, what they want is a vignette. Sounds wonderful! For me difficult people offer a great opportunity to develop character. It's not always comfortable to think, thanks for being a jerk you made me a more patient person - but it's more like some good came in spite of the bad. I enjoyed the read! - sometimes I get bored reading the same answers or writing them.
My current protagonist is a bit of a self-insert, though I wonder if that's partly a product of my writing in first person? He certainly shares my voice and the nature of the story rather requires that he shares a good deal of my professional knowledge and experience. I think am trying, if I'm honest, to figure out some stuff about myself through him. Maybe lay some things to rest. I certainly don't go easy on the bastard for our similarities, though. I put him through the ringer and make sure his flaws bite him on the arse and leave a mark. I do have to ensure that we don't share too many traits, though, as I'm told that I'm not a very realistic person.
Echoing some of what's written above, it's hard to see the flaws in a self-insert (or in ourselves). The things that we do usually seem reasonable and semi-logical at the time to us while from the outside they might look odd or even offensive. But this means that the actions of the self-insert are just "natural" from our POV, while when we write outsider (outside of us) characters we need to think about and show the "why" they took the actions they did. I'm thinking specifically of a book and later bad movie called I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. The author claims it's semi-autobiographical, but it was a teen/20s sex comedy along the rough lines of the American Pie series. For me (and this isn't a point of pride) it worked as a book because it was told in the first person and put us into the place of the juvenile, alcohol-abusing, promiscuous author. Who really loved his life. But when this was put onto the big screen (among other flaws and issues) it forced us to confront him as a character whose head we weren't riding in, and boy was he an asshole. He was always an asshole, but the book was written such that we could become that same asshole for a few hours (and yeah, he's a little prick who treats women terribly. So is Humbert Humbert, but Nabakov managed to write it such that we could see why he was what he was and suck you into his perspective. Or I'm a monster, I dunno). The movie wasn't able to do that, even though the character, his actions, and his motivations were the same. So that was long, but if you do a self-insert you have to show your reader a lot to get them to like or at least be able to go with the flow of your characters actions and attitudes. My MC has a little in common with the Constantin character from the Keanu Reeves movie (never read the graphic novel) of the same name and I just today realized that committing suicide to get to Hell is not something that most people would think of as a first course of action to Save the Girl...
