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This month’s question: “Have you ever slipped any of your personal information into your characters, either by accident or on purpose?”
Hmm, an intriguing question posed by IWSG. “Personal” could mean just about anything in my mind so I’d have to answer this honestly with a YES.
Many of my main characters have pieces of me injected in them which make the stories I write personal and meaningful to me. They entice me to finish each story so not to leave them incomplete which borders tragic in my mind.
The characters may have some of my physical attributes, but mostly I inject events and emotions that I’ve experienced in hope to make the stories more dramatic and real to the reader.
Granted, majority of the stories I write are short so it’s relatively easy to finish. Writing a book-length story is a different matter in that I’ve yet to complete a full first draft since 2008 (my first and only full draft from NaNoWriMo which still sits on my hard-drive). However, this year I hope to change that. I will post more about this later this week.
What about you? How much of yourself do you include in your writing?
I have little things here and there that end up in stories. I’ve also drawn on past emotions for a current scene in hopes that it will help me give it more punch.
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Thank you, Patricia for stopping by 🙂
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I tend to put myself in the mc’s situation and go from there. As they make their decisions, so different from mine, we tend to part ways. 🙂
Anna from elements of emaginette
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That’s true. If an event happened to me years earlier, I’d put my MC through it and more often than not, they handle it differently and the outcome is usually not the same outcome I had experienced. I find this to be very interesting!
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A lot of my main characters have a small part of me (different from each other), whether it’s that their dad is like mine, or they have a similar relationship to their siblings. One might have my social weaknesses, and another might have my tendency to over-analyze things. But then I will also make them unlike me in ways that allow them to overcome things that I might not be able to, and of course to avoid making a Mary Sue. Characters who are wholly unlike me are usually harder to write, so while I still create some like that, they don’t come as naturally.
I like what you say about it making the stories personal and meaningful to the writer; it’s so true.
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I too find that if the MC is too dissimilar from me, I tend to lose interest quickly.
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Don’t give up on finishing a full length story. In the meantime, if short stories are your thing, rock on.
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Thank you, Alex 🙂 🙂 🙂
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Good luck on getting more novel length writing done!
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Thanks, Shannon 🙂
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With my first novel I certainly used a great deal of my own character as I had an artist protagonist, and I knew the struggles from my own experience…this made it very close to my heart. The current one I’m writing I’m using a setting which I worked in for a few years – a department store, and this has been very rich for my writing, and great fun too!
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Is it possible to NOT include real-life elements in one’s fiction?
I’m sure there’s always an overlap of sorts…whether deliberate or accidental.
Good luck with the short stories and the longer ones too! 🙂
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I think it could be possible to try to avoid injecting any personal items in a story. Not sure how often this occurs though without asking every single author/writer 🙂
Thanks! 🙂 🙂
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Some of my characters stem from people that have made an impression. It can be someone in my family or a complete stranger. Some of my stories have certain elements of my experiences woven in. Sometimes, it can be an experience I haven’t come to terms with. Sometimes, it can stem from dreams.
I say there is a lot of my personal stuff that I pull into my stories. Sometimes, it’s unintentional. But I feel connected to the story because I have something to base it on.
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