Is It Smart To Make Yourself The Main Character in Your Fiction Novel?

When you are beginning to write your fiction novel, character development is key. As many authors know, lines often become blurry, and main characters can easily resemble yourself. However, how far should you take it, and is it effective to have yourself as the main character in your fiction novel?

This many times can stem from unresolved issues that you would like to express within your fictional story. This can be a good and a bad thing. If you have had a very emotional experience in your life, then you can use yourself as your fictional main character to give an outside point of view to specific events that have occurred. Many people would call a story about character based on themselves a memoir, but what if you wanted to put that main character within fictional events that weren't true to your life? That is the beauty of being a writer because you have the opportunity to blur truth with reality, and you can use yourself as your main character within the story that you are creating.

Many people may feel that it is more effective to make themselves the main character in their fiction novel because it gives them a better voice and tone to their writing. Again, since it is a fiction novel, many of the events will be fabricated within the storyline, but you will still be using yourself as the main character to tell the story. This can often give you the opportunity to express something in your life that you did not get the chance to express before. Now you are in control, and you can write your story however you would like with yourself as the main character.

This does have a good and a bad side because many people may do this with suppressed motives of anger or sadness regarding true events that have happened to them. They may want to write themselves as the main character to be able to rewrite the past and work through some of their issues.

Regardless, your choice in using yourself as the main character is up to you if you are still staying true to the theme of your novel. For some people, this may be an interesting avenue to provide first-hand insight of events that will make the story one-of-a-kind.

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Chuggin McCoffee is a coffee fanatic that has spent the entirety of his career cultivating and studying all of the best uses and brewing styles for optimal coffee and espresso flavor. His specialty site for all coffee needs, supplies, and Automatic Drip Coffee Makers can be found at The Coffee Bump.com.

Hats for Sale, by Nancy Hill

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Hats for Sale is a video written and created by Nancy Hill, a photographer and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. The video can be viewed at http://storyispromise.blip.tv/

Nancy is the photographer and writer of the The Dolltender, also available for viewing on Blip.tv.

To view more of Nancy's work, visit http://www.nancyhillphotography.com/default4.asp

Hats for Sale is a retelling of Slobodkina's Caps for Sale.

Self Awareness/Directed Awareness

I was thinking about awareness today. For people, self-awareness has many facets. People in general need brain power to filter out much of the information their senses collect. I think self-awareness for particular people can end up running in channels, so that we can quickly assign meaning and values to people and relationships in our lives and not get bogged down/drown in processing details. Relationships can also be symbolic, in the sense that a symbol can stand in for a relationship, a kind of short hand code.

The problem arises when a new writer doesn't realize their particular short hand code (a dark-haired woman with thick glasses could be a symbol for an abusive parent) doesn't evoke anything for a reader. The job of our brains to filter out details or shape our reality to a particular design can lead to a kind of neutered, thin writing that fails to ring true. Except for the person writing in their particular symbolic code.

Directed awareness, however, is a choice about where to focus awareness. Cynthia Whitcomb, the President of Willamette Writers, has had a long career as a successful screenwriter. When she began focusing more on writing plays, she read a play a day for a year. That was one way she assimilated a deeper understanding of what makes for a good play.

I find students in my screenwriting classes who don't like or watch movies. They simply want to imagine an idea of theirs turned into a Hollywood film, or imagine their life being turned into a major motion picture, with the money involved. I sometimes lose 50% to 70% of my students in a particular class. I suspect when I try and teach them directed awareness about storytelling -- consciously learning the craft -- they aren't ready for the work involved, or they come to realize the work involved.

About directed awareness versus intuition, recent brain scan studies have shown that once people have assimilated understanding (gained understanding about some facet of writing like plot, for example), when a problem arises, the subconscious can take that assimilated understanding of storytelling and find a solution to a particular plot problem. Then pop the answer in to the conscious mind.

Which some people interpret as intuition.

The catch is, the subconscious can only present that answer to the conscious mind when that mind is not preoccupied with a particular problem. Being pre-occupied with a problem blocks the subconscious mind from accessing the conscious mind and providing an answer.

I go over this more in the latest version of my book, and reference some of these new scientific studies. I find it fascinating that brain scans give a more accurate representation of how the brain works and functions.

Many years ago I was in a state of deep meditation where I could see the flow of my subconscious thoughts/feelings/awareness welling up into my conscious mind; be aware of thoughts before they became conscious thoughts. Odd, enchanting process to observe.

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A fourth edition of my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling, is now available for $2.99 from Amazon Kindle.

The Dolltender, by Nancy Hill

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Nancy Hill's The Dolltender is a video of a book written and photographed by Nancy. In the story, a young girl's parents disappear into a looking glass. She ends up hiding in a trunk stored in the back room of an antique store. The little girl begins to care for the dolls until she's found out and exiled...until the dolls help her come up with a plan to come back to the home she's created for them all.

The Dolltender is a heart warming story for all ages.

Nancy is a professional photographer and writer living in Portland, Oregon. To view other photos by Nancy, visit http://www.nancyhillphotography.com/

Copyright The Dolltender Nancy Hill, all rights reserved.