Writing Tips and Reviews

Playing a Character VS Being Too Real

What do I mean by this? Everyone has their dramas and many who are writers will put their dramas into their works to deal with it. Some people do it better than others.

In many cases, the writer will make themselves the one who comes on top, even if they didn't in real life. This can be done well if the writing isn't poor, meaning the characters are written well and the world doesn't bend over backwards for the character to come out on top. Good writing can make almost anything work. If you do it poorly, then you make yourself and the character representing you look like a complete asshole. Especially if the real story gets out and if you twisted it too much.

Personally speaking, I would rather the opinion of the situation be explored than the people involved. Instead of going into how terrible of a person one of the players is, I would rather explore the mental state the main character has afterwards. It's a fact that we will always see ourselves as the good guy in any situation, and it takes maturity to admit we were wrong. Let's take my Tales of Crestoria OC, Sylina Auvier, as an example. She was created so I could vent my frustrations and mentally cope with what happened. In her short stories I plan to make, the first part will be what happened to her, and the second part will be about the support she gets, or the backlash she gets. She can be wrong, and in many instances, she is wrong. She is not perfect; she can make mistakes. So, instead of focusing on how much of a victim she is, or how she beat up her enemy, it's about what she does afterwards.

When people write themselves as the super powered hero who saves the day from the bad guy, and that bad guy represents a person in their real life, there is a chance the writer will look more like a petty idiot than a hero. That's why I don't make it obvious who the bad guy is. In fact, according to Tales of Crestoria lore, Auvier is the bad guy. Life is all about perspective after all. There is no black or white, no pure good or evil, both sides may see themselves as the victim, and it takes an outsider to see what's right and wrong.

Now, let's get into playing a character. Instead of having a self-insert as the main character, let's create an entirely new person. The main characters of my original series, for example, are nothing like me. They're completely different from me and from each other, this is what differentiates them from my ocs, who are traits of me put into a character. These new characters can be whatever you want them to be and aren't a representation of you as a person, so if they do something shitty, it doesn't reflect to you. But how do you tell the difference between a self-insert and a character? Well, author's notes, the introduction, or knowing the person can tell you everything you need.

I think playing a character has less of a chance to make you look like a terrible human being. If they treat someone like shit, it's only on you for creating them, if the self-insert treats someone like shit, it's on you for thinking that was a good idea. A quick example would be when I used to role play, this kid's character would constantly beat on my character, and I was fine at first since I thought she was playing a character like I was. But after many interactions with the same character, getting the same story, and even trying to get the kid to use other characters, who were the same character with a name change, I found out the character represented them as a person. And everything just went downhill, I no longer respected them as a person, I stopped following them and I completely cut contact after a while. There's more, like finding out what they did to someone with depression, but that was the main reason I stopped talking to them.

Do you see how big of an impact that had on me? And I wasn't the only one, this person lost many friends because of this and had to tone down everything about the character to get people to talk to them again. I'm really going to stress this, if you make a self-insert, be careful of what you do. If you write them as the worst person to ever exist, the readers will start to hate you and the self-insert.

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I guess I want to make a note here, there are very few people I don't respect, and it's fully because of their behavior. Their work even looks like trash to me even if it's good quality. This does not mean I want them to get attacked, sure I don't forgive them for what they did to me and other people, it just means that I don't see their work in the same light as some others may. Take this whole thing as a message that is okay to vent about your feelings, you have every right to feel the way you do when someone hurts you, but don't be trying to hurt them back.