Simple enough question - Do you put yourself in your stories?

I used to put myself in my stories a lot when I was younger. It was fun, you know, like role-playing. I'd just imagine myself into all different situations and explore them.

Now that I'm older, I find myself making my MCs less and less like me. They still have core traits that connect me to them (most notable being a stubborn streak), but I've lost the need to tell my story. I want to tell other people's stories now.

Occasionally I still put myself in a story as a side character or as part of a crowd scene, but sometimes I'll change my in-story gender or ethnicity to work better with the setting. The personality is all me, though, and I kind of have to admit that I like effing up my own storyworlds. (Which is what my self-insert characters do most of the time.)

 

No, I havn't done that.

But now that you have me thinking about it...maybe just a bit part later on...

 

I wouldn't consider my MC to be me, but occassionally I think of something that I might say and decide to have my MC say it instead because it would sound better coming from him.

I have written myself into the story as a one scene part, as a herald of the Empress.

 

I love doing my Stan Lee cameos.

 

Only in my head to escape reality. But, if I want to write it out I just put in an MC and I'm mostly done.

 

I've never done self inserts. I might do a minor side character sometime, but that's it.

 

I am the Nameless Narrator in every one of my stories.

 

I've done it a couple of times. Once for a short story WIP, once for a potentially-longer fanfic WIP. It's an interesting exercise, trying to gauge how I'd react to all sorts of fantastical situations like fighting orcs or reciting poetry to a dragon.

 

My speech patterns are so distinctive that I have difficulty changing them for a character who should speak in a very different voice. I don't think my characters tend towards my personality, though, but rather that of my childhood best friend.

 

I ran a comic strip for four years in my college paper and charity paper for the homeless in NYC where the MC was based on me, worked out well, and was easier to write due to that.

I came close to expanding but, a larger publication that hired me went out of business before a bigger print could be run. Kinda scared me outta persuing it as a career.

 

By the Gods, No!
I used to write as a form of redactive therapy which was pure first person PoV.
That said I freely admit that my "issues" crop up in my characters, and writing in general, a little too often for my liking. So I guess I'm not done with the therapy after all.
I've tried writing FPPoV for fantasy and I can't make it work the way I want it...
And as I'm a 20th Century Boy and my fantasy really isn't I think that I'd feel out of place in anything I've written.

 

In traditional psychology the ego is simply the self--a person's sense of "me". We've sort of corrupted the original meaning, perhaps by confusing it with egotism, which is the inflation of self, an unhealthy focus on "me".