Author crush

miseh said:

How much of the author is actually in the story? I mean there has to be something. After all the author's brain somehow made the story up (if it's fictional).

How much of you is in your stories?

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I have a character or two I based somewhat pointedly on myself, but it was less about self-insertion and more that I needed an easy filler character to move an experimental plot. And down the road, they developed personalities all their own and stopped being me.

Pretty much any character I invent will have something in common with me, because it's what I know. Very few are like me in the grand scale, though. My favorite characters are so unlike me, and yet so compelling to write that they take over my brain a little bit and I start thinking like them until I snap out of it.

As far as author crushes, I don't have them as much as I get author envy. Jim Butcher is a big one. I think his writing is superb, and similar in genre and tone to how my husband and I write. (Our quality, of course, is still a work in progress. I wouldn't dare presume that we're as publishable as Butcher at this time.) And he's already published with all his awesome ideas. But rather than get mad at him for his success, I take home that it means stories in our niche are being read, and if he can succeed, so can we. So, not envy in the strictest sense... Maybe a rival-crush?

Of the writers I know, most have some of their experience in the books they write, myself included. I have a friend that when I read her work, I see traits of people we know buried in the characters. But none are the real people.

She once told me she writes like the person she wished she were. I kind of have to agree, though sometimes it may be writing like the person I wish I wasn't.

I once had friend complain I wrote a character based on her. The truth is, I wrote the story before I knew her, it just took seven years to get it published.

I can't personally identify any writer who has a character that matches themselves in any work. Except Clive Cussler. Whenever he's written his character into a pickle they can't possibly survive, he throws in a character named Clive Cussler who's about as in love with himself as Cussler is. (Opinion only, don't stone me. I even like the occasional Cussler novel).

Jeff