Protagonist-Author Similarity

[Venomfrog]

Something about writing came to my attention recently. Currently I am writing a first-person narrative, my only fan fiction, Sea Cottage, which revolves around the protagonist. I made him quite similar to myself, being of similar age (18), appearance and philosophy. This is a benefit to myself because it lets me create a character of whose traits I am well aware, as well as makes writing a process which can help me work through personal problems. Yet there are difficulties with this approach, mainly that I cannot get an ideally intimate perspective of other characters, and this often leads to difficulty describing them and developing their histories. Despite this restriction, I thoroughly enjoy writing with a character with many similarities and few differences to myself, and prefer it to any other type of protagonist, at least in terms of writing. Any other characters, I find, I describe better from an outsider's point of view because I do not have as clear of an idea of their character as I do of a protagonist similar to myself.

Is this true for you other writers? Do you find that you lean toward your own personality when developing a protagonist, or do you subconsciously or purposely seek to center a story around a character with a physical, mental and emotional make-up notably different from your own? Do you find it more difficult to choose the latter path than the former? How comfortable do you feel writing a protagonist based strongly on yourself? I thought that this would be an interesting discussion topic, to see how the writers on SPPf generally feel about the similarities between the main characters of their writing and themselves.

In this thread, discuss your experiences and opinions on writing into a story a main character similar to yourself. Also feel perfectly free to discuss how these experiences and opinions contrast with your those of writing characters notably different from yourselves.

 

[Giratina!]

I find that it's pretty helpful to make protagonists with one aspect of their character similar to mine, but not a direct reflection (I have Giratina for that ;D). I don't really care whether the protagonist is like me or not as long as it doesn't affect the quality of my writing, and it never really crosses my mind when I try to make a protagonist and think "Okay, should he/she be like me or not?" Most of the time my thought processes go more like this: "I want the protagonist to be a real jerk." or "I want the protagonists to fit the Five Man Band dynamic." or "One of the protagonists should be totally immature, one of the protagonists should be mature but easily angered, and one of them should be... well, I already know exactly what the third is like." (This last bit was in reference to one of my stories where one of the protagonists was a canon character.) I think the closest I've got early on was Kris, the aforementioned mature-and-easily-angered one. She is be more of a smartmouth, which I tend to do mentally.

Like many others, my protagonists tend to be male. Metal Coat and Rock Megaphone had two males and one female, Delta Species has four males and two females (of whom both are sisters), and Don't Stop the Future and To Know the Unown (plot bunnies woohoo) have one male and one female (well, in the former genderless-who-thinks-she's-female). Only Double-Time (plot bunny again) has more females than males on the main cast, two to one, but the central character is a guy anyway. So yeah.

 

[Dragonite Ernston]

Well, I normally write about characters who have similar personality traits to me, but not always the same appearances or background. For example, Hikaru Hoshimoto, in Generation 2021, is a 15-year-old boy who's pretty much 100% Japanese, whereas I'm 16 years old and pretty much 100% Chinese. Rachel is half-American, whereas I've never even been a permanent resident in America (I'm Canadian all the way).

Actually, pretty much all the characters in my story act like me in at least one way or another. Rachel has a dismissive personality, Ken is just a boy, and Hikaru is the "person like me", except for the fact that he's actually good at taking care of little kids.

 

[Ysavvryl]

I don't make my protagonists exactly like me. They may have some aspect of me in them, but I like experimenting with different frames of reference and systems of belief. I can immerse myself pretty deeply into any kind of character so long as I understand what makes them tick. It also helps if they're like another character that I've read about, as a point of reference between what makes the characters similar or different.

Some of my characters are rather similar to me, but there's always a difference. The one that comes closest to me is separated by a large factor in that he's a guy and I'm not. I mostly want my characters to feel real to me, even if they're not the same as me.

 

[Breezy]

I mainly use canon characters in my works, albeit the quiet, playable game ones that really have little to no personality, so I really can't answer this question fully, though I don't think I pick canon characters because they are like me. I may give them quirks or traits that I may have, like getting seasick (which, I suppose, isn't that quirky), but in terms of full blown personality/looks/what have you, I don't think I could create a character like that. Mostly because while it is important to have that emotional/mental connection with the characters you are working with, it makes it all the more harder to imagine a character who looks/acts like you and put them through a difficult or painful situation if such a situation comes up in your story. After all, no one wants to imagine themselves in emotionally/physical/mental distress, even in fiction -- at least I hope not. And at the same time, while something bad may happen to this sort of character, it never ever lasts long, or the character triumphs over it without having emotionally/physically scarring. I couldn't do it anyway. I have enough issues giving characters unlike myself emotional problems and whatnot.

However, I will acknowledge that perhaps it is easier to figure out solutions/reactions toward these sorts of situations if your character is somewhat framed toward you, in the "in my shoes" sort of way. "What would I think if this really was happening to me?" and etc.

(Then again, you could do that with characters who are not like you if you developed them well enough ...)

That and I like writing about guy protags more than girls, like Ysarvvryl (with me being a girl, too). I have no idea why. Maybe fangirl Breezy is still hanging around somewhere ... =P

 

[Mel-Girl]

I tend not to base characters entirely off myself but whether it's intentional or not, they do tend to have some things in common with me without being exactly like me. For example, one of my characters is to put it bluntly a smug ass troll type and I'm not like that at all but we do have a rather spontaneous thought train where the randomest of things can pop to mind and more often than not, we'll voice this randomness we've thought up. Then I have another character who's rather unconfident and insecure and I'm not entirely like that either but we do share the fact that we're passionate about our particular hobbies and can go with the flow when required to.

I don't really like it when characters are blatantly based off the author to the point of sharing names or anything like that. Characters will always contain a part of the author but not the entire author on one character, kthnx. Otherwise that's practically the same as a self-insert and self-inserts get on my nerves. XD

I share Breezy's preference towards writing male characters despite being a girl. XD

 

[Dragonfree]

I don't think it's very correlated either way for me, to be honest, or at least not anymore; if anything, however, it's definitely more of a tendency to write protagonists unlike myself. Mark from The Quest for the Legends is a little like me, but he's eleven and a boy while I'm a twenty-year-old female (though, granted, I was twelve when I started the fic), and the similarities are mostly rather superficial - he has a couple of experiences similar to experiences I've had, tends to sort of stay out of conflicts if he can help it (which, actually, I do now but not so much at the time I created him) and is generally a pretty nice guy in a sense in which I hope I'm a nice person as well, but I don't at all consider him any sort of a reflection of myself and most of the time he doesn't do what I'd do in a situation.

As far as my main protagonists go, he's probably the most like me, since in my other work they vary widely. That said, however, I don't find him or most of the others I'd consider similar to me very interesting, precisely because there is less fun stuff you can do with relatively normal, nice, quiet, well-adjusted people than with people who think in more twisted, messed-up ways. So I guess you could say I'm at least more interested in writing protagonists who are very different from me. In general my characters gravitate towards the twisted and disturbed more than real people do, so all in all my protagonists do the same, but that's not an issue specific to my protagonists and is only really incidentally related to similarity with myself, so it might not precisely count.

I might note I also have the aforementioned tendency to write male protagonists. Out of all my semi-recent/current work, the POV character (Mark) of The Quest for the Legends is male, Morphic has an ensemble cast with a mixed POV but who I'd call the most prominent or important characters (Dave, Jack and Gabriel) are all male, Razor, Stormblade and Shadowdart of Scyther's Story and The Fall of a Leader are all male, and the protagonist of my original short story Rebirth was male, while only my one-shot Curse has a female main character.

 

[Little Wishling]

Well, I don't find it hard at all to make up a completely new personality for my main character. Coming up with characters quite different from me is more enjoyable than making a character based on yourself, in my opinion. Usually I tend to steer clear of having main characters be like myself, since that might lead to Mary Sues. They might share one or two things in common with me, such as, say, we both like the color purple.

But I do tend to make my main characters female since I'm a girl, like the main character in my first ever fanfic (which sort of died).

 

[Bay]

I tend to have characters have at least one trait of me, but other than that I make them totally different from me. For instance, Bunny. The only traits we have are that we both love history and also we're shorties. For the differences, loads. Bunny doesn't like nicknames while I'm cool with them and her speech patterns are different from mine in that she speaks more formal than me (although we both are the quiet types XD). If anything, I think Jenny is more like me because we both like to make jokes, would always do the right thing, we don't trust or forgive people as easily, etc.

Reason I have my characters more different from me is I think it's more fun getting in the heads of characters different from me. Also, I'm afraid I'll make a self-insert and suddenly make everything go my way. -_- When I create characters different from me, I'm the one calling the shots and see how they'll go by it.

I tend to make more male characters though because my interests lies more in the typical things guys like, basically.

 

[Gazmof]

I remember when I set out to write my first original trainer/journey fic ages ago, I made very sure that I set the main protagonist to have noticeable differences from me. I guess it was from writing a primary original character in a canon universe for the first time - there's no real "template" to work with, so I wanted to make sure I didn't take traits from myself without thinking and having it become a self-insert. I think that in order to write any good character you have to empathise with their motives and personality, or else they come off as flat and unrealistic. The question is where to draw the line before you begin to duplicate yourself into that character.

With Zak I feel like I did a really great job in fleshing out a character who isn't particularly like me, but who I could also relate to at the same time. Now that I'm writing the sequel to this original trainer story, I actually find myself having to go back and reread parts of the first to make sure that I'm keeping his motives in character with the person I developed in the first fic. He also seemed pretty popular with my readers, and pretty much the only things he and I have in common are a like of certain Pokemon (because if you don't write about Pokemon you like, I find you don't tend to get inspired when writing their battle scenes), and his strong sense of justice. But hey, that's par for the course with any hero, right? ^^;

As for the sequel, the primary protagonist is currently the main antagonist from the prequel, so writing him from a different angle is very challenging, and if it's possible, he's even less like me than Zak was. But to restate my initial response, I think every good author enfuses a bit of their "soul" into all of their characters; the question is just how much.

I mainly use canon characters in my works, albeit the quiet, playable game ones that really have little to no personality, so I really can't answer this question fully, though I don't think I pick canon characters because they are like me.

This isn't really related to the topic, but I found myself doing this in my first fic, too, since back when I started writing it (around the time of Crystal) it annoyed me that the Gym leaders had such great designs, yet only got three lines of dialogue in the entire game. Fleshing them out was a lot of fun, and I'm sure that I instilled a bit of myself into their personalities without really thinking about it, but I think they still came off as faithful to their original designs (or at least, my interpretation of those designs).

 

[Unicorn]

I feel like it's almost impossible not to make at least some element of your characters like you. There's always a piece of you that you can just relate to the person you've created. When you're the one writing about them, you're the one controlling them and telling them what to do, so just by the fact that you're making their decisions you're sort of putting yourself in their place right?

When writing about my characters I always put myself in their place. I try to think the way they would, and essentially that's the way I think. So some of my traits get passed on to them. It's sometimes unintentional, but I can't really help it. So to answer your question simply: yes I do put some of my elements into my characters.

 

[Sinnohdragon]

I base a lot of my characters on different parts of me, but i also get an awful lot from people i know. Kai from Card Tamer is basically a self-insert but mind-wise only. What he does in my fic is what i would do internally, bacause on the outside i'm pretty quiet and i keep my self to myself (Kai is rather stubborn, loud and argumentative although he has a good heart). His looks are almost entirely based off my best friend, which just happens to match some of my features too most significantly eye and hair colour. That was a bit of an issue when said friend actually became part of the story as a second character, so Kai and Isaac look extremely similar but Isaac's personality is his own where Kai's is mine. There's also the fact that Kai's male and i'm female XD But my personality is very male so i'm pretty good at getting into a 'Kai' state of mind.

And then my other character, Jack, comes in. He is nothing like me in looks but he is my exterior personality of shy, smart, self conscious and law abiding. He is harder for me to write because although he's so much like my outside personality, and when i write i'm using my inner personality in my head which is much more confident.

But i am planning on a straight self-insert, actually as a female, at some point in one of the sequels. I'm not sure how i'll manage that but i have a few ideas to stop her from becoming a Mary-Sue like her being incredibly unsocial.

And i too find it a lot easier writing males as main characters. I have only written a total of 2 female mains and one was in a one-shot so she doesn't really count

 

[spareux]

I really think that most of the time, it's only coincidental if I happen to share a trait with a character - as in, I will need to actually notice the character having the same attribute rather than me moulding the character to be like that on purpose.
I think that might just be because I genuinely think I'm a rather boring person as far as being a "character" is concerned. Sure, there are elements of me that I suppose I could implement, but personally I wouldn't like to read about me so I never see any need to make other people do so!
But that's just my two cents. I just like drawing my inspiration for character traits from looking at other people, rather than looking at myself.

 

[Aladar]

Well as far as appearance goes, Kale's based around my height when I was his age and has the same hair. Kinda. But little things like his tastes in food and music and the like are lthe same as mine.

But on the other hand I find it funnier and easier to write from a different character's POV. Lucas seems the only sane guy around but is forced to face the fact that some people have for a given the skills that took him time to learn, Viviane is constantly trying to prove she's top dog while doubting her major decisions, Steven is a shy guy who barely says anything but goes through a visible change while battling, Rico is a wannabe Don Juan with strong believe in honor in battles and stuff.

Now writing from Jed's POV... that's, well... it gives you the chance of wlaking a mile in the shoes of a complete nutjob. xD

 

[SilentMemento]

I'll base a few aspects of a protagonist and characters in general (usually flaws) off of myself (a.k.a., selfishness, anger issues, apathy, laziness, arrogance, hypocrisy, etc.), but physical appearances are usually vastly different from my own, other than the age and gender (since I'm an eighteen-year-old guy, I'm usually more comfortable writing about teenage males than other characters.)

 

[Timetraveler:Pikachu]

I usually split my self into the protagonist and the antagonist so that the two are destined to clash so I get to show my evil side and my good side in my stories.