RE: Critique and Advice; the treadmill of adventuring.
05-09-2016, 11:18 AM
I think there's two levels to author self inserts.
On one level all authors channel parts of themselves into the characters they write, and that's entirely natural and a-okay thing to do. Even then what should be avoided is the author using a character as a soapbox for their ideas - that gets old real quick.
On the other level is the author inserting themselves as a character in the story they're writing, and that can be really offputting unless the story is explicitly autobiographical, because at that point the person is basically writing fan-fiction about themselves.
Now, even that can be made to work but it requires caution. What I did in my previous forum adventure was to have my forum avatar directly address the audience occasionally, but I kept that within the metafiction - that is, I wrote another level of fiction to the story, where the characters were actors playing roles, and my forum persona was the director of the show (and the actual forum adventure was that show). Basically a fictional behind the scenes view! Even then I ended up dropping that, because some readers started giving suggestions to me the author instead of the characters in the story.
On one level all authors channel parts of themselves into the characters they write, and that's entirely natural and a-okay thing to do. Even then what should be avoided is the author using a character as a soapbox for their ideas - that gets old real quick.
On the other level is the author inserting themselves as a character in the story they're writing, and that can be really offputting unless the story is explicitly autobiographical, because at that point the person is basically writing fan-fiction about themselves.
Now, even that can be made to work but it requires caution. What I did in my previous forum adventure was to have my forum avatar directly address the audience occasionally, but I kept that within the metafiction - that is, I wrote another level of fiction to the story, where the characters were actors playing roles, and my forum persona was the director of the show (and the actual forum adventure was that show). Basically a fictional behind the scenes view! Even then I ended up dropping that, because some readers started giving suggestions to me the author instead of the characters in the story.