Stuff, Story Fragment of Reality

Hello once again, my dubiously loyal readers.

I've finally caught up on my email obligations and managed to clean out my inbox…with almost six hundred messages, it was getting a trifle cluttered. Reorganized it all into the proper folders. (Ah, the joys of downloaded email…)

Also fulfilled review obligations for the moment, and am now getting to work on my writing obligations. Yes, that would mean that typing this is procrastination. I'd apologize but I'm obviously not sorry.

So, dear readers, a couple of possibly hypothetical questions for you –

Would you be disturbed by someone plugging your story in another person's reviews?

How about people who praise lavishly your old fanfics, the ones that make you cringe even to think about?

…not that I don't appreciate you all, but at times I wonder these sort of things.

Also, I think I've finally, finally figured out the one sole reason self-inserts suck while writing random fragments of Reality.

See, let's imagine you're the author of your own life. What are you going to make happen?

Good stuff. It's you, after all. History has shown what happens when people are just allowed to decide their own paychecks. Imagine if you could decide anything.

This is the exact same sort of thing that happens with sues, of course, but as far as this is concerned, sues and self-inserts are just two slightly different subspecies.

So anyway, we all know what happens then: the story sucks.

Now, the advice on fixing this is to try not to give your character everything and make them struggle and think about what's going on.

But they're you. How can you struggle against your own created obstacles? How can you think and figure out the stuff you made up to start? And how can you resist the urge to give them things you want?

You can do what I see a lot of self-inserters and sue authors doing and try to consciously tone down your plans – give the character fewer favorite pokemon or stretch the acquisition out over a longer time, make them play dumb for a while about something or try and quickly fail at a battle or such. But in the end it starts to look like a formula. Sometimes I can almost feel the author doing their little balancing act: Okay, I made him lose to a gym leader, so now I can have him kick TR/M/A/Whoever's butt, and I'll have him catch a common pokemon but it'll be a special color with cool abilities… It usually comes off forced and just as sueish in the end, even if the actual sue characteristics are toned down.

What's the alternative?

Well, separation between character and author. Ideally you should be able to kill the character off without a problem, but not caring if they win or lose is a good start.

But then it's not a self-insert. It winds up with me writing Reality about a character who has my basic knowledge about stuff, my pokemon, and a persian with my cat's name and general personality with the basic goal I might very well go after. But I don't identify with her at all.

(I don't really identify with my characters normally, at least, not the way I've heard some authors refer to it. So this may just be me. I wasn't even trying to un-sue my self-insert, it just sort of happened to me.)

So in the end, if I ever did post the story, it'd wind up being a character based on me, but it'd succeed or fail based on the story I wrote, not whether or not I managed to make a good self-insert.

…those of you who desire can feel free to chime in about now about how I'm just seduced by the incredible sueness of my self-insert and am now acting as a standard badfic writer in denying it, of course.

To help you guys (because what's an argument if you haven't even met her?) and to amuse other who've just sat through yet another pointless rambly post by me, here's a scene.

( A battle )

Those who can make a good argument on why she's a crappy self-insert get brownies. Also, yes, 'go' is meant to be that way.