† everything i hate about creepypasta †

more on self-inserts (i did not change my mind)

As I'm starting to write this, I have just realized that my original chapter on self-inserts was unpublished in a fit of irritation at my former self. This is not an action I will undo, but it is to be kept in mind that there once existed a chapter on self-inserts already.

Recently, I finished "We Have Always Lived In The Castle" by Shirley Jackson after over a year of procrastinating said novel (and given that it's only about a hundred pages long it was finished within a day). The actual plot of the story had already once been told to me to the extent that none of the narrator's unreliable qualities worked on me, but because of that very reason, I could better focus on other parts of the story - like how the two main sisters could be interpreted to be two parts of one same person. Upon finishing the story and reading the interpretation of whichever person was assigned by Penguin Publishing  to write an essay, I realized that this was indeed their interpretation too; that the two main sisters were supposed to be two different sides to Shirley Jackson herself. It had me thinking of self-inserts and autobiographical writing once more and about the way the internet treats those so differently than academic spaces do.

A girl whom I dated for a few months uses her writing mostly in a therapeutic sense. She has many mental health issues (one of the reasons we got so close lol) and has been in treatment for those since she was about 13, and thus these stories have a lot of self exploration in them. Different characters are simply different fragments of herself that are conflicting. Separate illnesses and beliefs become personified. And I apologize for consistently bringing her up still in everything I ever post on here, but she's one of my closest friends, and also a good writer whom thus seems like a great example.

Back to therapeutically inserting oneself into your own stories: though I have very many ideas and not all of them are inspired by myself or my own life, I do this, too. Writing about my mindset helps me analyzing it and then later using that to understand certain issues and traumas I have. With any self-awareness at all this can be a great tool - even outside of deliberate self-analysis, so long you just write through characters with similar personalities (and perhaps even appearances and lives, like I do) to your own.

Writing and storytelling are an art form, and art is typically used to express oneself. People who only draw self-portraits aren't considered bad artists. Yet when we discuss "self-inserts" in fiction, there is a very different tone to it, and it's considered a symptom of bad writing. 

Now of course I understand that authors who are published by Penguin Classics are in a different category than amateur authors of Creepypasta horror shorts on Wattpad. I'm not saying that people are just being mean when criticizing creators who write self-inserts in fanfiction. I am however saying that people may be misidentifying the root cause for these stories being poor, because really, I fear that the issue lies not with self-insertion, but rather, self-indulgence and a general lack of skill. 

Why do we loathe self-inserts?

Well, because often times, they are poorly written, out of touch with reality, don't blend in with the rest of the story, and take up a lot of space for characters that have so little substance to them. Weirdly, most self-inserts seem all the same. Rather than adding authenticity, they seem completely removed from the sheer concept of this, and are nothing but bland canvases to project onto in thought while no actual work is done to convey the author's original mannerisms and traits. They just become merely a vessel to fantasize with.

So I'm going to say something awful...

So are many other original characters in fanfiction.

Even writers that are decent at writing characters canonical to that fandom tend to struggle with blending new aspects into that fandom. I'm not saying that everyone is bad at this, at all - but I am trying to say that the issue is less so with self-insertion and moreso with the fact that most of these authors are beginners, in the very least in the department of character creation.

Character creation on the internet is somehow treated as fully separate from writing itself. Many people are good at creating characters on paper, but never learn how to write from their perspective, so when they do, their "OC" is just as poorly presented and awkward as before they wrote out their file. Writing character files is only helpful to some degree when it regards creating a story. Some things you just need to learn through trial and error in the writing itself, such as character voice, and the expansion of a backstory and how it still affects them, and their opinions and way of talking. Sure, you can put some of these down in a file, but it'll only come to life once you learn to actually write. Endless planning is pointless, and it's very likely you resort to telling instead of showing in the story itself too if you have only ever created character files - which isn't awful, but is not the best habit to develop nevertheless.

One of the biggest problems I used to have with my writing was white room symdrome, which means that I rarely stopped to describe the environment that scenes took place in - so they could very well be happening anywhere at all, even a white room. I didn't know this, because I barely went to look at issues with my actual writing itself - I only looked at my character files. Focusing on those so much sincerely froze my process for a couple years. 

I am now better at all that, though - I'm a decent writer and both my stories and files will stand out if compared to the average work of a preteen on Wattpad (I may hope so, anyway, for I am twenty years old and have a lot more experience than said preteen). And because my writing isn't bad, a lot of the people who enjoy giving nasty advice to "OC creators" do not hurl terms at me that they equate with bad writing.

I'm never criticized by people on the internet for using self-inserts until they've explicitly been told I'm writing a self-insert, in which case they often haven't even seen the writing itself and just criticize me for the sheer idea of self-insertion.

It's paradoxical to them. I can't both be good at writing AND be writing autobiographically (even in something as inherently self-indulgent as fanfiction). Self-inserts are a marker for poor writing, so what I'm doing must be something else entirely - I must only have some overlap with my characters, and thus they're not self-inserts. All kinds of gymnastics tend to be done to excuse why they don't think my writing is bad. (Admittedly, as a teen - which includes only a year ago - I used to exaggerate to what extent some of my characters were autobiographical, so in some cases this may have been fair. However, I also have dissociative identity disorder and a very skewed sense of self at times, so I did sincerely feel like I shared that many similarities with many of my characters despite this not aligning with objective reality. Mental illness and idenity delusion are a ride. My DID is also the primary reason I fall back on self-insertion; it's a way to reflect who I am and to see the big picture that's difficult to see with all the fragmentation.)

The autobiographic element was never actually the issue in amateur works, though. Whether you do that or not is just dependent on whether you like doing as such, and nothing else - when you aim to write escapist fiction (like most fanfiction is) it is significantly harder to pull off, whereas fiction that analyzes problems often does much better when the author pulls from personal experience. Either way, it's not self-insertion that is the root problem. It can be a problem, when the self-insert is far too weakly portrayed to work as a character, but it isn't inherently. Amateur reviewers need to learn that you can't give good advice by only ticking boxes of things that other people have told you are bad, and that you need to actually comprehend why certain things do not work. 

Self-inserts can be bad. They often are. But it's not just because they're self-inserts. It's due to the demographic that tends to write them most (beginners) and their general lack of skill. 

Anyway, that's all I have, so I'm crawling back into the abyss.