Characters that mirror you

[face-face12]

I do not know if this is the correct place to ask this question so my apologies if its not. I had a very quick question. I have heard from multiple people that when making a character you should be careful not make the character mirror yourself, is this true and why? how could it negatively effect your writing?

 

[Noma Galway]

When I write a character, I tend to take qualities from myself and put them in the character, mostly because I can understand what the character is doing that way. When I hear the argument that you shouldn't have the character mirror yourself, I usually hear it as a "Don't make the character an ideal version of yourself." This makes more sense to me, mostly because no character should be an ideal form of anything, in my opinion. Characters are flawed. An ideal character is not an ideal person, and that is where a lot of authors go wrong. It is hard to base a character off of yourself because you have to keep the character just as flawed as you would a character not based off of yourself. For my part, I don't like reading characters who have no flaws. Not sure if this really answers your question or not, but that's just what I think.

 

[Mythopoet]

It's not really a problem unless you're (consciously or unconsciously) using the character for wish fulfillment. Then it becomes a Mary Sue (or Marty Stu).

Though this doesn't necessarily mean that your story won't succeed either. Many, many people point to the Twilight books as an example of an author using a main character for personal wish fulfillment. But at the same time, any teenage or young adult girl was able to see themselves in the character as well so it didn't make any difference.

 

[Bluesboy]

If you base a character on yourself, you have to be very honest about who you are. After six months of developing my story I realised that all of my most important characters had in essence the same problem deep down - the same thing that frustrated me in my personal life at the time, but I didn't see it as a bad thing, because in various forms it gave the story a theme and so I embraced it.

So now I draw inspiration from my interests and give them to certain characters. You can have a history geek, a cynical idealist and more. Giving the characters your flaws is even better, because resolving them makes for a powerful narrative, it affects the way you structure the story, it may even be the core of your story - that even though it's set in a world with a rich lore and you explore many different themes in it, it's basically about the characters battling their own faults and coming to terms with them.

 

[Reilith]

I don't think that mirroring yourself completely in a single character is possible. As humans we can't always see (or rarely do in life) how we really are in our entirety. That's why it is impossible to completely show yourself as a character. The character can have most of your basic qualities and quirks, but when you get to the flaws, sometimes people are oblivious to their own. And as Mythopoet said, just don't idealize yourself and base the character off of that, and you should be fine.

 

[TheCatholicCrow]

But then they say "write what you know" and who do you know better than yourself?

I think this advice is important if in every story you end up with the same MC. [Most writers tend to have an INFP personality type so there's an over representation of this personality in fiction.] What I take it to mean is that you can write the character to experience the world the way you would but don't give them your exact qualifications and history and background. Also, make sure to change some other stuff up. IMO this is how Charles Dickens fooled the world into believing Oliver Twist and Great Expectations (and probably others) were different books but when you consider them side by side we can see quite a bit of Charles in the MC's. [Both are about impoverished/unfortunate boys who inherit wealth/fortune, screw around & lose it.] When I pick up another book by Dickens I'm already expecting the characters to lose their money. This is not a good case of "writing yourself in".

Jane Austen usually uses the same handful of names (one of which is usually "Jane").

It can become a problem if you're writing more than one thing. You can run the risk of basically writing the same multiple ways. This is not usually a problem with Romance but can become problematic in other genres.

I'd say a well done example would be Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.

I believe you can start with a character based on yourself but you should make sure that they are well rounded and flawed. As you begin to write the character allow him/her to take on a life of her own and if that means taking yourself out of it and letting him/her shine through as their own person then be ready to do that.

 

[Antaus]

Creating a character that is not at all based on yourself is, in my opinion, practically impossible. The reason for this is that because we as people draw inspiration from personal experiences and what we know best, even on a subconscious level in this regard, is ourselves. Every writer to some degree, large or small, puts a part of themselves into a character, it's almost unavoidable. While a lot of my characters do carry a 'bit of me' there are two in particular who stand out. They're a set of identical twins who, until about a year ago, I didn't realize almost exactly mirrored me in many ways.

They're polar opposites of each other, two sides of the same coin. One is loud, abrasive, aggressive, and mouthy. The other is cool, calculating, manipulative, and a thinker. Yet despite these differences this set of twins operate in almost perfect harmony because they compliment one another. After doing an in-depth character review of the two I realized they also represented the two polar halves of my own personality. There are some considerable differences as well, but these two are the closest to me in real life, however they're both also quite flawed like me and by no means ideal or perfect.

 

[Reilith]

I see my characters as extensions of me, and my children. They all have some part of me in them, but they will never fully be me.