Thread: Is it bad...

That I base most of my main characters off of myself? Is this something I should avoid..? Will it inhibit my writing..?

Depends on how much of a nutter you are; nutters are easier to write. Of course if you're anything like me, you might find yourself staring at four walls in an asylum.

Seriously though, it makes little difference. Plenty of famous authors have based fictional characters on their inner selves or other people.

Btw : The only rule I'd make on this is to never base a villain on any real life person/s you don't like. You never want your writings to be contaminated with such filth.

Honestly, it just depends on how versatile of a writer you are. If you can create a convincing, realistic CAST of characters, not just a single character or a group of characters who all are for whatever reason very similar, than go ahead. But if you're creating seven different characters and they all seem similar in thought and emotion, then you might want to reconsider...

This is a good question. I've had lots of folks ask me if one of my stories is autobiographical or, in another, "Which one is you?" The answer is always that every character I write has an element of me in them. Some flavor of everything I write is based on personal experience. That's what lends the stories their credibility. Credibility equals reader involvement equals return sales and recommendations.

To the point: I am a big believer in using personal experience as a kernel for character development. That's where the creative part takes over and makes a brand new character. It becomes incidental that the character and I both share an experience .

Keep plugging at it!

I'm a Gemini with Gemini rising, mercury and mars in Gemini. I have my father and mother in me, my brother and sister too. Having been a psychiatric crisis counselor, I guess I have some of my patients in me as well. I carry a 20-year-old suicide victim in my left chest pocket. A psychic told me that I'm empathic, I dunno. I tend to pick up accents and ways of speaking pretty fast. But my characters seem to start speaking for themselves rapidly. They go their own way. Does that mean that parts of my psyche are beyond my control? Is the Grand Design of my life and writing controled by a super-concious higher reality being playing the saxaphone in the medial prefrontal cortex of my brain? Beats me. All I know is that my best writing, meaning only that its writing that I enjoy, happens when I get my ego out of the way and let it flow.