# Self-insert problem



## Thou Dog (Feb 28, 2010)

This is a stylistic issue, I think.

I write, quite often, with a first-person narrator. Now, the narrator's age, sex, profession, general appearance, etc. will vary between stories (ranging from a bored college student poking his nose where it doesn't belong, to a paralegal who finds herself turning into a monster, to a spider witnessing a war), but certain things I don't seem to be able to shake:

- The narrator tends to be introspective and thoughtful,
- The narrator tends to be somewhat shy as well,

What am I missing? To be honest, I'm not sure.

The reason I bring it up is that I don't want to be putting _too much_ of myself into the characters, at the same time that I feel like I must try to see the world through their eyes if I want to describe to the reader how they feel and what they do.

Anyway, here I ask a serious question: how do I avoid doing too much self-insertion? I'm not talking Mary-Sue Syndrome here, just so that's clear, but uh, a person who knows me would potentially be able to recognize me in a few of my narrations. Am I being foolish to want my narrators to be apparently different from myself, such that someone can't compare me to my characters? If not - if this is a worthy goal - how do you balance the need for that mental separation with the need for serious empathy with the character, in order to make him or her believable?


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## M. LeRenard (Feb 28, 2010)

To me, this is a problem best fixed with editing.  The fact that you're bringing this up means that you can recognize when it's happening, so when you go through the story the second time, change those portions where you see it happening.
So far as empathy is concerned, have you considered you're empathizing too much with these characters?  I mean, they're not your children.  They're not even real people.  I don't think empathy is that important, honestly.  Understanding is what you should be going for, so you can write them realistically; empathy is just going to make it harder for you to put them in difficult situations.  So I don't even see that as an issue.
It could be that your problem lies in 'trying to see the world through their eyes', as you put it.  Maybe, instead, you should just be thinking, 'Based on how I developed this character previously, how would he think/act in this situation so that his personality remains consistent?'  In other words, take a more distant approach.
Maybe I'm biased because this idea of 'empathy' strikes me as one of those hokey hippie writer concepts I so dislike.  Speaking to everybody here, despite how it sometimes feels, your characters are not driving the story.  You are.  That could be why, when you let your characters drive, they become more like you.


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## Scarborough (Feb 28, 2010)

Thou Dog said:


> Anyway, here I ask a serious question: how do I avoid doing too much self-insertion? I'm not talking Mary-Sue Syndrome here, just so that's clear, but uh, a person who knows me would potentially be able to recognize me in a few of my narrations. Am I being foolish to want my narrators to be apparently different from myself, such that someone can't compare me to my characters? If not - if this is a worthy goal - how do you balance the need for that mental separation with the need for serious empathy with the character, in order to make him or her believable?



Besides running the risk of writing the same character over and over, I honestly don't see the problem here. Tao Lin self-inserts liberally, yet each of his stories feel different enough that they don't feel redundant. Emily Dickinson's and Sylvia Plath's poetry are arguably full of self-inserts, yet they're regarded as good poets. Charles Bukowski commonly uses himself (as in, the main character's name is Charles Bukowski) in his short stories, yet they're regarded good, if not controversial.

I guess if you wanted to start writing different characters, you could. You could do some character studies/sketches and toy around with those. Though, it depends on your writing style. Some writers could get away with outlining their characters before writing a story about them. I could never write like that, but I think it might be useful? If you can handle writing that way? I dunno.

As far as "empathy for characters" goes, I get attached to some of my characters, sure. But most of my characters are highly dispensable, used for the sake of art.

I'd say character studies/sketches. Write a completely implausible character who you'd have a hard time empathizing with. If you're looking to write new MCs.


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## Murphy Z (Mar 1, 2010)

Well first of all, you're most likely an intelligent and decent person. If you write stories with "positive" protagonists (not an antihero or "badass"), they'll probably at least have a very similar moral compass to you. You and your characters both dream, love, hope, look both ways before crossing the street, etc. So often, there will be many similarities.

In order to make protagonists different from you, you have to make a conscious decision to do so, otherwise, you'll just "naturally" make him like you. I'm not sure how you go about writing, but there are different ways to go about this. Maybe start a character that's different from you (think I'm x, so he's y) and build a story around him. Or in a story at an important juncture, have him take a different path. 

It's a fun challenge to make a character different from you while making him believable, logical, consistent, etc. It gives you ample opportunity for self reflection and helps you realize "your place in this world."

Also it helps having different types of protagonists if you want to make a collection of stories; it keeps them from seeming to be "samey."


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## Thou Dog (Mar 1, 2010)

Scar, Murphy - thanks for the ideas. I know I tend to write in fits and starts. When it flows, it flows typically because I can imagine being in the positions of the characters, so I understand what they might do, and why. I know that in some of my earlier writing, my biggest failures of characterization (and motive to act, and events in the story, as a result) were with characters who were too foreign to my imagination: I could see them from the outside but not from the inside.

M. Le Renard, I hope this explains more what I meant about "empathy". Not necessarily liking the characters, but being able to think about what it is that they think they need and want compared to what it is that they think they have, and so on. That way I can describe the character's choice of actions so that, where I want readers to understand what's going on, they will. Otherwise, characters' actions seem arbitrary, senseless, and so on.


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## M. LeRenard (Mar 1, 2010)

Thou Dog said:


> M. Le Renard, I hope this explains more what I meant about "empathy". Not necessarily liking the characters, but being able to think about what it is that they think they need and want compared to what it is that they think they have, and so on. That way I can describe the character's choice of actions so that, where I want readers to understand what's going on, they will. Otherwise, characters' actions seem arbitrary, senseless, and so on.


Well, again, I don't think empathy has anything to do with that.  Maybe we have different definitions for 'empathy'.  To me, what you're saying is more of a cerebral exercise.  You know?  If a character's actions seem arbitrary, you just have to ask yourself why that is and then fix it.  Empathizing is like trying to change yourself into that person while you write, which just isn't going to happen to your satisfaction, because you have your own prejudices and ideas that you've developed throughout your whole life, most of which you're not even conscious of.  You need more objectivity than that.
This is getting kind of pseudo-mystical, but it seems to me that if you try to become a character, everything you do as that character is going to seem right for that character, which leaves you with no way of knowing if that's true or not.  You have to step outside to make sure you aren't slipping back into your old self without realizing it.  See what I mean?  So either you don't try to 'get inside the character's head', or you resign yourself to fixing the inevitable problems afterward.  Seems to me like the first option is less work.
That's what I mean by 'a more distant approach'.  And I don't even know if that's your problem or not.  It's just a thought.


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## Thou Dog (Mar 2, 2010)

It's food for thought. I have to say it hasn't come up all that lately, except that I'm now in a bit of a flurry of editing to remove self-referential notes from my work - and I realize I might be doing it even where that stuff fits into the story perfectly, IMO (like this one). The problem of characterization here comes with the character I would naturally understand less. Of course, the only real model I have for her behavior was less than stable... blah.

I wonder if this is a problem particularly related to first-person narration.


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## jinxtigr (Mar 2, 2010)

M. Le Renard said:


> To me, what you're saying is more of a cerebral exercise.  You know?  If a character's actions seem arbitrary, you just have to ask yourself why that is and then fix it.  Empathizing is like trying to change yourself into that person while you write, which just isn't going to happen to your satisfaction, because you have your own prejudices and ideas that you've developed throughout your whole life, most of which you're not even conscious of.  You need more objectivity than that.



I think that depends on the writer, to a large extent. Because of some psychological stuff, for much of my life I've grappled with ego/antiego problems: coming off terribly arrogant because it was a shield for feeling extremely empty and 'not there'. I don't believe you can have that for the asking- the price is kind of high (apparently a childhood abuse history is part of the cost  )

If you as a person are 'not there' and you turn to reading, fantasy, sci-fi etc to fill you, it becomes a knack to get out of your empty self by taking on the point of view of somebody or something else- the whole point is that anybody else's POV seems more valid than yours, so long as it's coherent. That's just what is needed to write with- a coherent POV. It's filling the void of what normally would be a self.

Yes, years of therapy have helped, thanks for asking 

I guess what I have to offer here is just this: if you're writing from this empty place of becoming the characters, you'll know it because they won't seem arbitrary. You'll probably have a history of 'filling yourself' with an endless series of books to read, which is all to the good- and it won't be a matter of finding out what the characters intend- that will be clear, even overwhelming- the trouble will be expressing it gracefully (or appropriately gracelessly!) and fitting their desires into a narrative that actually goes somewhere.

Take Piers Anthony as an example of naive empathy- my sense of his work is that he's constantly flooding himself with the internal state of his characters and writing from the heart, but rarely has the self-criticism to put that in a larger context and question it. As a result, his work is compelling and sells, but it's naive in that he wears his obsessions on his sleeve...

Thou, it seems like you're asking the right questions- at least from where I'm standing. Maybe it will help to hear that it's okay to write empathetically while also having doubt? It seems almost as if you're able to write blindly from POVs very like your own, but when you begin to shift the POV around, you're looking for a similar confidence and it's not forthcoming.

Studio musicians (some, anyhow) have a phrase which goes, "don't GROOVE in the studio". This sounds crazy, but it's not a joke. When you turn that click track on and set about laying tracks to build a studio recording, if you're using an 'organic' musical flow that feels natural as it's being expressed, it probably doesn't line up with the mechanical clicktrack- or the musical flows of all the subsequent tracks to be done. So they remind themselves not to 'groove', resorting to a musical flow that's less confident but more rigorous.

By the same token, you might be doing just fine when you write from a POV that doesn't become automatic- or when you secondguess yourself as far as your POVs being introspective, shy and thoughtful. It's not about having the right feelings while writing, it's about whether you can put the words together to establish the desired effect. Maybe you're expecting to 'groove in the studio'?


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## Kindar (Mar 2, 2010)

I think you should do some exercises where you create a scene and then create different characters, each with a different personality. then write teh same scene but narrated by each of them and get a sense for how they talk,think and feel. the shy person and a braggart will not describe it the same way they will not act the same way within it.

for me it became easier to write different characters once I gave them permission to be who they were, when I stopped censoring them and simply let them live they life they wanted to live


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## M. LeRenard (Mar 2, 2010)

@jinxtigr
That's a completely different way of looking at it that I hadn't even considered.  Although your remarks about 'grooving in the studio' kind of echo what I mean about putting more distance between yourself and the characters.  I guess the argument then is how much distance you should put before you find your comfort zone, which I should think is something you'd have to find out for yourself as a writer.


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## jinxtigr (Mar 2, 2010)

M. Le Renard said:


> @jinxtigr
> That's a completely different way of looking at it that I hadn't even considered.  Although your remarks about 'grooving in the studio' kind of echo what I mean about putting more distance between yourself and the characters.



No accident- I think you're entirely right 

I'm just saying, it can be hard to create if you believe you have to have appropriate feelings to do it- and it's scary when you realize your feelings aren't the best guide to how you're doing 

Rather than 'groove in the studio', play the parts you know need to be played, and put enough distance between yourself and the characters that you can keep a light self-criticism going. Close enough to hear them, but far enough that you can go 'no, wait' and revise on the fly...


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## Thou Dog (Mar 3, 2010)

You guys have given me a lot to think about. Thank you.

jinxtigr - what you're suggesting, if I understand correctly, is that I plan the basic plot of the story first, and then flesh out the scenes according to that, rather than letting it all sort of flow out of my head as it comes?


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## Tabasco (Mar 3, 2010)

If the character still wins the heart of the reader, I don't see the problem. Don't plan out your writing beforehand if that feels unnatural to you, but go back and make changes that alter them if you're comfortable. Ultimately, write for yourself, not for others.


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## jinxtigr (Mar 4, 2010)

Thou Dog said:


> You guys have given me a lot to think about. Thank you.
> 
> jinxtigr - what you're suggesting, if I understand correctly, is that I plan the basic plot of the story first, and then flesh out the scenes according to that, rather than letting it all sort of flow out of my head as it comes?



Well, bear in mind that some sorts of 'plot' are lame. If your 'plot' is 'kid's coming of age, away from home, tested nearly to destruction' that could end up pretty exciting. If the same story's 'plot' is "Jimmy is in a small town. Then he moves to the big city. Then he should go back to the small town again", that's not much of a feeling. Many people will tell you not to plot at all- in that case you totally depend on being lucky as far as the flow of your story goes- or, it ties you to keeping everything really fast-paced because there isn't an overall purpose.

I'm doing a couple thousand words a day and hoping to get up over 3000 a day at some point, and it's definitely not all chained to my pre-existing notes for what happens. Sometimes it's wildly different from what I thought would happen. But in a more general sense, I know what the book is about, what's going to be important.

It's MY job to convince the READER of what's important, and sometimes that requires a lot of planning that doesn't read like planning. If there are things I want to establish, they'll come through in myriad ways. I have to understand both what I'm trying to do, and how it's going to be heard by a reader, which includes understanding what the reader's like. I've even done a little survey (during the last bit of my story in comic form) to learn what people were picking up and what they weren't, and what their expectations were- lines beyond which I could not go. To me that says not that I can't write the touchy subjects, but that I can't write them blindly- I have to remain aware of what people are willing to cope with.

I don't feel this precludes brilliance. I feel it stops you from being unpolished- and I've written enough furry lit by now that I want to produce polished work from here on in. 

So what _I'm_ doing is, having pretty specific ideas of what things mean, and improvising on that framework. I won't be suddenly going off on some tangent to be creative and personal- but I may totally go off my plans if something turns up that advances what the larger-scale story can be. And that story is designed to be read not by me, but by people I happen to have a lot in common with- I could say, 'me when I was younger and had no escape but reading', but if those people are different from how I was, I'd rather aim for them than aim for myself 30 years ago. The general theme is the same, but the melodies can be different.


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## Atrak (Mar 4, 2010)

I just want you to know, OP, that I had written a lengthy post detailing my thoughts on the subject when your thread was just posted, but after I lost it due to internet failings, I didn't feel like retyping it all.


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## Thou Dog (Mar 4, 2010)

jinxtigr said:


> Well, bear in mind that some sorts of 'plot' are lame. If your 'plot' is 'kid's coming of age, away from home, tested nearly to destruction' that could end up pretty exciting. If the same story's 'plot' is "Jimmy is in a small town. Then he moves to the big city. Then he should go back to the small town again", that's not much of a feeling. Many people will tell you not to plot at all- in that case you totally depend on being lucky as far as the flow of your story goes- or, it ties you to keeping everything really fast-paced because there isn't an overall purpose.
> 
> I'm doing a couple thousand words a day and hoping to get up over 3000 a day at some point, and it's definitely not all chained to my pre-existing notes for what happens. Sometimes it's wildly different from what I thought would happen. But in a more general sense, I know what the book is about, what's going to be important.


Yeah, I'm familiar with this. I mean, when I don't just write stuff that flows out of my brain, it's typically something I've sketched out in a framework from before. I have at least two original worlds bumping around in my head, although I'll probably abandon one of them because now that _Avatar_ came out, it ends up looking too derivative.

The thing with those worlds is that I sketch out the grand arc of fate, if you will, but I haven't necessarily come up with characterizations and scenes to fit within them. That's what the story-writing is, really.

The problem is, I think when I decide to flesh out this scheme of what should happen, I think it ends up sounding kind of... stilted, stiff, artificial. Not at all like the more easily-flowing prose from my as-it-comes work. Granted, I'm not that good at evaluating my own work anyway...



jinxtigr said:


> It's MY job to convince the READER of what's important, and sometimes that requires a lot of planning that doesn't read like planning. If there are things I want to establish, they'll come through in myriad ways. I have to understand both what I'm trying to do, and how it's going to be heard by a reader, which includes understanding what the reader's like. I've even done a little survey (during the last bit of my story in comic form) to learn what people were picking up and what they weren't, and what their expectations were- lines beyond which I could not go. To me that says not that I can't write the touchy subjects, but that I can't write them blindly- I have to remain aware of what people are willing to cope with.
> 
> I don't feel this precludes brilliance. I feel it stops you from being unpolished- and I've written enough furry lit by now that I want to produce polished work from here on in.
> 
> So what _I'm_ doing is, having pretty specific ideas of what things mean, and improvising on that framework. I won't be suddenly going off on some tangent to be creative and personal- but I may totally go off my plans if something turns up that advances what the larger-scale story can be. And that story is designed to be read not by me, but by people I happen to have a lot in common with- I could say, 'me when I was younger and had no escape but reading', but if those people are different from how I was, I'd rather aim for them than aim for myself 30 years ago. The general theme is the same, but the melodies can be different.


Interesting, again.

Atrakaj - sorry to hear...?


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## jinxtigr (Mar 9, 2010)

Thou Dog said:


> Yeah, I'm familiar with this. I mean, when I don't just write stuff that flows out of my brain, it's typically something I've sketched out in a framework from before. I have at least two original worlds bumping around in my head, although I'll probably abandon one of them because now that _Avatar_ came out, it ends up looking too derivative.



Hah! I had probably thirty or forty thousand words, in second draft, TYPED on paper- of a furry 'school of magic' fantasy, before Harry Potter came out 

I still have it somewhere. It was well before I started Kings of Rainmoor, and it was supposed to be a big plot epic but I didn't know how to solve the problem- and the real story was two 'totemized' students, both cat forms, who were empathic and stuck in a feedback loop where they were getting overwhelmed with lust and romance against their wills. At the time I didn't have a resolution for that type of story either, and it kept trying to turn into hurt/comfort fanfic with original characters 

Don't let it frighten you. Sometimes a big project that fizzles is really useful practice- no point practicing HALF serious writing, is there? Once you get past your first few pet projects it gets easier. It's okay to abandon a world that doesn't end up being the first-line project. You might sneak some of it out into the world in a casual way just to see if people latch on to it... if it has its own traction, it won't matter if it has resonances with other stuff, and if it doesn't have traction, no harm done


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## Alexis (Mar 24, 2010)

Thou Dog,

  As people have said, its maybe not a major problem that you are SIing .  But lets say you want to SI but you don't want the character to be what it is, you.

   Does this mean you want to be more of an extrovert, brash and a good study of character?  Why not *be* this person?  How hard can it hurt? You could take a look at ecmajor as a character study maybe :-D.


  Do you want to make your character more rounded and less 'nice'?  I'd suggest reading Steinbeck and Ian M Banks, both those authors make characters that are dirtier than those who write within their comfort zone.  The formers are more human studies and the latter's are somewhat cartoony but then a caricature is maybe what you want 


The reason I say all of this is because we are kin in our writing style and I cannot change mine, so here is the way out I can take :evil:


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