Xeng He wrote:The Rich Port wrote:
And besides, I object to the implication this couldn't happen.
It has happened already, fer Crissakes. CM's sample, while done to death, is very realistic: they keep it bottled up, and that's what causes the problem of integrity and the horror in writers.
Speaking of metafiction... How often do you guys relate fictional events to your real ones?
My favorite example is Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. She plays around with perspective and agency in terms of literature. It isn't just her story; it's her father's story, her mother's story, her brothers' story.
I generally try to avoid writing myself. That said, I think there are certainly times "I" stood out in a character or someone a character knew.
...actually, what I sort of noticed some time ago is that many characters I create for RPs and things will often have formerly known someone that...doesn't necessarily resemble me, but I always think "myself" when I think of that person they formerly knew.
None of my characters are Mary Sues, but there's often a Sue hidden in their backstory.
To be fair, just because you associate with your character doesn't make it a Mary Sue automatically. If that were the case, there's plenty of authors throughout the many centuries that have been guilty of that, and it either can't be the case and the Mary Sue label is too broad, or it doesn't matter because the character isn't automatically a Sue for other reasons.
Are we going to accuse Ishmael for being a Gary Stu for being a self-insert of Herman Melville, now? Of course not. That would be silly.
I don't understand myself well enough to write myself, so I either write fiction based on actual events that happened in my life or emotions I felt or things I think and so on. And... Like Alison Bechdel once said, "I best understand my parents in fictional terms."
It's sublimely tragicomic when she does it. Like, wow.
