Avoiding Self-Insert Characters

Do you hav other dolls, or a story actually revolving around them? I didn't develop a doll story till I owned, meh, about 7 dolls! When I got Hiro, I started coming up with a Story in my head revolving around him and my other 3 MSDs. And then every MSD after that has been selected as characters in the story.

so sometimes, I sit down and look at my molds or dolls and say 'who are you in this world- How would you relate to Hiro.' *Because every single one of my dolls had a run in with him at some point*

It may not be necessarily you fitting a story into a doll, but you fitting a doll into a story. How would they survive in the world? What would they do for maybe a job. Did they have a family? Sometimes that's easier to do, if it makes sense.

 

I wouldn't try to rush it personally. It took me ages to figure out who my dolls were, and I'm still discovering new bits of their personality even after having them for years. Just keep him around, play with different wig and clothes combinations, and his personality will show up in time.

(And, speaking as someone who does have a doll that's pretty much a self-insert character, even self-inserts can end up being different from you! My doll has no problem wearing skirts and dresses, while I absolutely hate them. I wouldn't worry about it that much.)

 

I would come up with the big stuff first (age, culture, family, job, sexuality, etc...) and then based on those things fill in the smaller or less visible stuff. Think of how those bigger things may have effected his personality, motivations, and choices.

 

the first question I always like to ask myself is why? I have a character who evolved out of a self-insert. She still has part of my name.

I think, in particular in non-published fiction, self-inserts are fun. They get scrutinized a lot online, but (at least when I was writing mine) people are writing for themselves, and sometimes that gets the writer somewhere to vent/feel what they're feeling/etc. As you very correctly say, theres a little bit of "bleed through" on any character, because its really hard to convincingly write a character who is absolutely nothing like you. But you didn't ask for a ramble in defence of self-inserts, so that's just my disclaimer for. the start.

So something I do to make characters that aren't me, is I find a song that feels like "them". Maybe I have an idea of their plot line, and there's a song that describes part of it, or there's a song that describes their relation to another character, or even just one that feels like their voice.

I also try to envision what their "role" is: who are they friends with? What are they doing? Do they have goals? If I'm working in a fantasy 'verse (like my extensive array of DND characters) what species are they? Do they do magic? Where are they from?

If neither of those have succeeded, I make characters based on what I "want". To concretize that abstract sentence into something useful, I'll give you examples. Right now I want to explore Erinyes in the dnd universe. So if I'm looking for a character to create, I might start there. Or maybe I have an idea for a scene, and I want a dagger-throwing scene like in divergent (where Four throws the knife at Tris) then I make a character who throws daggers, or one who has nerves of steel and doesn't flinch away. Maybe I have a line (in this case "I saved his world and that was enough") and so I build a character who would say that, who does some kind of charity work, or is close to someone who needs her support, or so on.

Once I have half an idea of a character, I ramble as them. Just write in first person and talk about things. I got this from an intro creative writing course TA. I'll take a prompt out of a generator like Sunshine, for example and run with it in the character's pov (in my case the character "talked" about how much it burns your eyes when you look into the sun, and how much she should have packed her sunglasses, so she borrowed her sister's but that means her sister has another bit of leverage...) And so on. I don't constrain it to any one topic, and just kind of let it go.

something I can do with dolls that I can't do with characters I don't shell is just taking the doll once I have it, and working with it. New outfits, wigs, eyes, until something clicks as a person. One of my characters arose when I decided I liked feeple60 Lacrima, and I looked at her photos online, ordered a. head second hand, and threw some eyes in her when she got here. Those eyes made all the difference. Suddenly she had a place in a fantasy verse I write. Sometimes just being able to see them in a bunch of different ways really helps.

so I really hope something on my list resonates or helps you to make that character! If I can come up with any other ways I make characters, I'll let you know!!

 

Honestly how i make characters is to intentionally take a feature of myself, big or small, and think about what sort of person different from myself might also have that trait and why. It's often a negative trait, or one i struggle sith, and it helps give them dimensionality and helps me in a roundabout way of self acceptance.
It can be really difficult and frustrating to try to approach a character with the intent on making them different, it can feel really unnatural and forced. Instead starting from a simple point of similarity can be a lot easier and more fun, a more natural flow without the pressure of needing to go a certain direction.
For a couple examples: My character Fenny feels all her emotions very fully, and sometimes isnt the best at metering them, snaps at people or burst out laughing in the wrong situations. Otherwise her and I are drastically different people, and we both have different reasons behind that trait. I also have a character, Harlow, where my concept was to make a character with the same sort of autism presentation as me, so we have far more similarities. Both of us are bright, enthusiastic people who get easily overwhelmed by sensory difficulties- but we come from rather different backgrounds and are distinct in other features.

Sometimes I'll build a character starting with something as small as us both liking plants- but starting on a common ground definitely takes a lot of the pressure out of the process.

 

I'm still trying to flesh my doll's personality out, still haven't even decided on a name. I've sort of been talking to him while I work on putting together his outfit. It's been really helping me to figure out character quirks by thinking about how he'd respond to me. If that makes sense? By interacting with him, I'm not just pulling from my own preferences and am treating him as 'other'.

 

I can also honestly say my SDs don't really have a well derived story
they have names and all, but I've learned their personalities through my time owning them

 

Chameleon already gave you some great advice - in particular I'd focus on the question of what your goal is. Are you actually going to be writing the doll's story? In that case you may want to start with the question of what kind of story you feel like writing, and then ask yourself 1) what traits would help the character in this world/plot and 2) what traits would hinder him. Then give him a couple from each category and see how that goes. ^_^

 

Have fun bonding, I'm sure you'll be able to flesh out your idea of him over time. Everyone here has given some really solid advice.

 

That's awesome! I'm a combined degree in English/psychology, but. I've taken a number of creative writing courses (including an intensive in my first year). Honestly, something you can always think about doing (bc I know how much people like us end up reading) is basing characters on readings. Rather than just taking a character out of something I read (which is also valid) sometimes it's fun to base characters on, say, pieces of poetry.

I'm working on one based on Woolf's A haunted House/the Hyacinth girl in Eliot's wasteland, as kind of an example, or I made a devil character for a dnd campaign based on the speaker in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Of course, that also doubles as a study strategy!

 

Just take your time. Dont force anything, it may take a while before the whole character emerges. I had my juri05 for over a year before i landed on her character, and now all my other SDs stories revolve around her. Once he gets home spend some time styling and pay attention to small things. Does he seem shy or confident, happy or broody. Then just build from there, little by little.

 

I don't know if this will work for you or making characters for dolls but... Write so many characters that 'you' become boring.


Make a ton of characters. Write any new interesting thing that comes to mind, every race, gender, hobby, job, and whatever you can think of. Write a blurb, a dialog with them, or sketch them out.
What's the weirdest job you can think of? What happens in the day to day of a Pet Psychic? What kind of person collects old keys? Why is there a stop sign that says 'hammer time' in the college campus? Why is the chess club guilty of murder? He's convinced 'Who Let the Dogs Out' is a secret code for an Illuminati group, who is he? She's got 50 fish tanks and 0 fish- why? A 40 year old only has velcro shoes, why?

They've come face to face with a robber, what do they do? A T-rex? Their best friend inviting them over to an awkward social event?

 

for me, I don't even have any story for my dolls...
I just have a very simple story: a boy falls in love with a boy, and happy ending. That is it.

 

I've had plenty of characters all sketched out for my dolls, but frequently when they come home, they just aren't who I planned them to be. They have the annoying tendency to write their own stories without my input. Even after all this time I really don't understand it; I KNOW that they are inanimate objects, I am irritated by the fact that they don't fit the mold I'd planned so carefully...but I've learned to roll with it. Among my horde I've got a single dad with two kids and their goofy 'uncle' who used to be his college roommate, and I don't even remember who all four of them used to be before they came home...certainly not who they are today. I say don't worry about it so much - who cares if you're letting your own personality bleed into your dolls - they're an expression of you, after all, otherwise why would you want them? Bring your boy home, dress him, let him tell you that he hates the clothes you've chosen for him. Let him sit naked on a shelf and glare at you. Eventually you'll figure it out. Don't force it! If you leave yourself open, you may be surprised by what your subconscious conjures.

 

I am totally the same! My dolls have personalities and names but there isn’t a story for them really.

The only thing I do kinda define them with is deciding what each of their favorite band is lol

 

Same ! I spend more time thinking about their names, and a little bit about their personalities.
And most of time I spend on deciding which boys will be paired with which boys
But their stories are just simple: fall in love, (maybe have babies), happy ending lol

 

I have a lot of characters that are deeply developed, from a series of books I wrote, but I had to work more on some than others. Some characters pop out fully formed, others require more searching. One of the techniques I use is to write scenes at random. Conversations are a good one: put them in an awkward situation with a friend or family member & see how they react. Or write scenes from their distant past or childhood. I have one document which is just around 200 pages of script style chats between characters.

I find getting to know characters is like getting to know people: I prefer to have a dialogue on paper more than ‘what’s your favourite food?’. In real life, my sense of who a person is isn’t built on a series of basic facts I gathered through q&a, but through years of discussions, watching reactions, even disagreements. While the basics are useful in character development, to go deeper you need to get less facts and more essence. How this person was formed by past experiences and childhood, and how they might react because of that. You don’t have to be too focused or work about story when doing this, just let them flow. I ramble on quit often and one character in particular has the tendency to slip into a stream of consciousness which tells me a lot about how his mind works (or doesn’t quite work in his case).

Some of my characters have a little more of me than others, hopefully in an abstract way. But a few are very different people to me and they can be challenging but very rewarding. Good luck with it, & feel free to ask if anything I’ve said helps!

 

some of my dolls are shelled characters from other media, specifically the death note series (i own two dim larina heads that are for my headcanon for Rem, as well as a pygmalion eita for Light Yagami and a simply meant to be dohwee for my Near! my gf also has a Soom Morga she plans on using for her own iteration of Rem.) so i don't really have to worry about those.

the others just kind of... come to me? my dolls ludo and liam are ocs who i had very different plans for, but had their own story in mind when they arrived. ludovica's name was supposed to be narfi, and she was going to be a boy. liam was going to be a sea goddess named healani kahale. (shrug) these things happen i guess.

 

Don't worry about having things figured out right away. Creating fleshed out characters is a process. Personally I can take years to flesh out my characters.

My characters always start off as a vague ideas at best and grow from there. One of the characters I’ve developed the most started out simply as “a pretty but vain girl with fire powers”. I guess I thought that a vain character would be funny and I happened to like fire. She now has a back story, motivations, and insecurities. I’m even developing her family history. This character was first created around 14 years ago and she is an ongoing WIP.

So a starting point could be:
What interests you or what do you like?
How can you make that into a character?

I also don’t think there's anything wrong with having bits of yourself or your experiences in the character. Sometimes it actually adds life to your characters and makes them more real/relatable. At this point its difficult to tell what parts of myself fell into this character because they have grown into their own person. Does that make it sorta like raising a child?!

 

Some quote about writers cutting off pieces of themselves and calling them characters.

 

edited to remove comment because I misunderstood the question

 

For me, every character has a piece of me in them. But it's just that, one piece. Usually what gets the self insert accusation is if they have the same exact voice as you, all the same opinions, and then that voice and opinion are almost always right. Let them be wrong, let them fail, and let them disagree with you. Do all of those things, and they probably won't be a self insert.

 

This isn't the answer you're looking for, probably, but it's not even a bad thing if it DOES turn out to be a self-insert. A huge chunk of lauded, respected classic western literature is just self-insert biblical fanfiction, e.g. Dante's Inferno, and yet nobody's out here calling the classics cringe or bad. Self-inserts became so heavily detested because early online fan communities didn't have the robust creative infrastructure we do, so people with very different expectations couldn't curate their online experiences nearly as neatly as we can - fans creating works that were 100% canon compliant and faithful to the source material really pushed the view that any sort of author insert or perspective character was a ridiculous and embarrassing hallmark of "bad writing," when it just boils down to "what's fun for me isn't the same fun for everybody." If it makes you happy, ESPECIALLY since it's your own original story, who cares if the character is super similar to you! Unchain yourself from the armchair literary criticism standards we've inherited from late 90s creative writing webrings and LJ groups and just let yourself do what makes you happy. I hope this perspective gives you a different angle to think about!

 

Creative writing is the bomb! I started in it (and then went English lit because I transferred schools and my next institution didn’t have a creative writing program, but had courses under the header of English!) so I’m right there with you.

the other thing I’ve been doing lately is reading something and going “what do I wish they did differently?” Which is how I’ve landed on yet another hamlet rewrite in Ophelia’s pov. Or how I’ve written 4 different variations on “girl who sees the future but no one’s listening” after taking a Greek and Roman elective and falling in love with Cassandra.

Also rereading embarrassing old bits of writing for things you want to reuse has given me so much cringe, but so much material.

 

A bit of time passing definitely helps with dolls, so does some one on one bonding.

If you cringe at something you made before that just means you've grown and developed better ___ skills.

I can't say if any of my writing characters have been self inserts, most of my life has been pretty lonely and missing out on a lot for health reasons, but I can say the protagonists have things happen to them I wish I could experience. Or it's playing a bit of a what if my life had gone this way game. My longest story has it's roots in several pieces of fan fiction that found their way in to one work with heavily inspired OCs. If something didn't work for one character it worked for another.

 

When he gets home, try asking him why he won't tell you who he is and explain to him that you're afraid he's a self-insert. He may have some interesting things to say about that.

 

This definitely sounds like a good idea to try. I have 3 dolls at them moment and 1 coming and I really want to make them personalities that's not just all the same character with a different look. I really get into different songs, so using the songs as a base for the characters personality sounds like such a fun idea.

 

When I saw the sculpt for my doll, I was instantly struck with inspiration and had a personality in mind already. She wasn't complete though and honestly there is probably more stuff I don't know about her but will discover in the future! I'd say start with the basics like someone else said earlier (name, age, etc.) and go from there. I usually start with one word that's the "vibe" my character gives off and develop their personality from there. For example I knew my doll was going to be sweet but I also learned that she's very naive and can be a little mischievous at times! I sometimes put her in scenarios in my head and think how she would act. Since it is your character, you'll always have a bit of yourself in them but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing! And sometimes characters that are self inserts eventually evolve into characters of their own over time! Ultimately, just do what feels right and what makes you happy!