The Perks and Pits and Self-Insert Characters
Sharing your negative life experiences with characters can be therapeutic. If you don’t have anyone to talk to or if you have trouble explaining your difficulties, writing your negative experiences into the lives of your characters can help you find an outlet for your feelings and shed light on important problems in your life.
Sharing your positive life experiences with characters can be therapeutic. The reasons for this are the same as above, but are positive and more about sharing than informing.
Sharing your traits is inevitable. Whether it’s your vices, your virtues, your likes, your dislikes, your insecurities, or your fears, some of your characters are going to end up having commonalities with you. If you want to talk about how you don’t like your nose, give a character your nose and write about it. If you want to talk about your favorite hobby, give it to a character and write about it.
Semi-autobiographical fiction exists. There are countless published works that are semi-autobiographical featuring a character based on the author. These works are not frowned upon nor are they considered lazy writing. However, they are still fictionalized and while they may go through the same experiences as the author, they may have different personalities and differences in back story.
They can serve as a base. If you just started writing, you may have difficulties creating characters. You may not know where to start or you may get overwhelmed with giving your characters traits and back stories. Using yourself as a base can help get you started.
The biggest downfall of creating a self-insert character is making a perfect version or an idealized version of you, in which case the character becomes unbelievable, flat, static, and boring. To avoid this, your character should not be too much like you. There still needs to be variety and differences.
Another pit of creating these characters is reacting too negatively to criticism of these characters. Although you may have based a character on yourself, that character is not you. You should not see that character as you.
Creating too many self-inserts will make your characters too similar and you’ll have trouble developing them as separate characters.