Putting Yourself in Your Fic

Meta
Title:	Putting Yourself in Your Fic
Creator:	rexluscus, blonde_cecile
Date(s):	May 19, 2007
Medium:	online transcript, podcast
Fandom:
Topic:
External Links:	online transcript here, Archived version
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Putting Yourself in Your Fic is an essay and podfic at Slashcast by rexluscus, read by blonde_cecile.

The topic is self insertion.

Excerpts

You are all familiar with the near-universal fanfic injunction against self-insertion. Writers of Mary Sues are the objects of more scorn than virtually anybody else. In slash, this comes up less often, but you still hear occasional complaints about authorial self-insertion: out-of-character writing that clearly represents the author's own preoccupations rather than the character's; dwelling on topics only because they are of interest to the author despite their awkward fit with canon; in general, any sense that the author is allowing elements of their own life to dominate the story to the point where readers no longer feel they are reading about the characters they love and recognize. Whether or not an author is guilty of this is, of course, wildly subjective, but it's a phenomenon that's made me hit the back button more than once, and it's a quality in fanfic that most people seem to agree is a faux pas.

There is, however, a flip side to the issue, which is that drawing on one's own experiences can add enormously to the authenticity of one's writing. In mainstream fiction, putting yourself into your work isn't considered self-insertion, it's considered part of the craft. Mainstream writers run up against the same problem if they write an autobiography no one can identify with--"writing as therapy," some have derisively called it. Our greatest blind spots are often ourselves, or our families. But good writers can draw from their own lives in a way that is accessible to everybody. This need not be literal--Tolkien, for instance, wrote about an imaginary world, but his depiction of war was almost certainly rendered more authentic by his experiences in World War I. His work is, in fact, riddled with elements from his own life, though you'd never know. That last bit is important. He universalizes his experiences so that they don't stand out as something he alone experienced. In fanfiction, this is more difficult to do because you are not creating something from scratch; readers can compare your story against canon to test its faithfulness and detect "foreign objects" that don't blend seamlessly with the canon world. But it's still possible, and when it's done, it often results in some of the best stuff you'll read.

Fanfic readers criticize self-insertion, but they're thinking only of the stories that show the man behind the curtain. Self-insertion goes on all the time, and we never notice because the writers do it well. The writers make their own experiences relevant to the characters and to us. They're in their stories, you just can't see them. If you're going to err, err on the side of putting too much of yourself into your story. I'd much rather read an authentically written story set slightly sideways from canon than an accurate but generic missing scene. Maybe you wouldn't. But I feel confident saying that the best writing draws in some way on the self, and that in shying too much away from self-insertion, we risk writing stories no one can relate to, least of all ourselves.