How often do you read a novel and wonder how much of the characters, setting, or plot are drawn from the personal lives of the authors? When you read about a character who has a fetish for rubber, do you wonder if the author has a secret drawer full of latex underwear and a tire swing hanging from her bedroom ceiling?
I know I do. But then, my mind sometimes takes me to scary places. 
I also know that I tend to drop bits of my life into my novels. My characters are very different people from each other, and from me, but I still can’t help but give them pieces of me if the situation allows for it.
For example, I hate clowns. If I ever want to make certain my son needs therapy, I’ll throw him a birthday party and hire a clown. So…I have a hero who hates clowns.
I think coffee is the nectar of the gods. So I have a heroine who is sure she’d shrivel up and die without it.
I’m a vegetarian. One of my heroines is a vegetarian.
The type of “author insertion†(or author intrusion, as some would call it) I’m talking about here isn’t the type where someone reads your story and says that the character sounds like you. I’m talking about having fun with your books, your babies, and infusing them with some of your DNA while still creating unique individuals.
On the opposite side of the coin, do you ever have trouble writing characters—not villains, but heroes and heroines–who can’t be like you in some way, who have religious, political, or moral ideals that are in direct opposition to your own beliefs?
Back to the vegetarian thing.
I am a vegetarian for health and moral reasons. It kills me to write characters who eat meat because I feel as though I’m encouraging a carnivorous diet by mentioning that my hero ate a hamburger. However, I realize that making all my characters vegetarians is not only unrealistic, but the lifestyle doesn’t mesh with most of their personalities and backgrounds. To be true to the characters, most of mine have to eat *gasp* meat.
But to make up for it, they hate clowns or love coffee or avoid the dentist. *g*
Readers, when you read books, do you wonder what small details may actually be bits of the author left behind? Authors, do you ever leave your DNA scattered around your books for readers to wonder about?
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Larissa, from one coffee-loving clown-hater to another, you had me laughing!:razz: Actually, I can’t speak for other readers, but I don’t usually wonder if the author is drawing from her own life, because I assume that does happen in the creative process. But as to the details, no, I usually don’t speculate, except when I happen to know, or can guess, the age of the older authors (older being in my age group, 60ish)who still write steamy sex scenes –is good recall or is it last night?:lol:
“But as to the details, no, I usually don’t speculate, except when I happen to know, or can guess, the age of the older authors (older being in my age group, 60ish)who still write steamy sex scenes –is good recall or is it last night?”
ROFL! Anne, that made me spit out my nectar of the gods!
I have to admit I sometimes wonder about that. But it’s usually about the ‘big’ things, not small details. For instance a friend recommended an EC story that had BDSM. Well, I know next to nothing about that, so a part of me wondered if the author researched it all or if she was drawing on a small part of their life.
I’m totally with you on coffee!! I’m definitely guilty of giving a few coffee habits to my characters.
One author that seems to get a lot of flak about her writing and her personal life is Laurell K. Hamilton. The heroine, Anita, looks a lot like LKH. The book is written in first person. Some of the characters have names of people she refers to on her blog. I guess it’s natural that fans start making assumptions and drawing parallels. It’s pretty scary, though. For that reason alone, I try to reach beyond myself much more and not infuse as much of my own DNA into my characters. Plus I hope it makes the characters much more interesting, because in reality I am a very boring, safe person!!
When I read very specific details, I sometimes wonder if it isn’t something from the author’s life working its way into the story. For example, if the heroine has a fondness for white chocolate raspberry cheesecake, or if the hero’s music collection is crowded with Mile Davis CDs.
As for me, I do find it very hard to give my characters likes and dislikes that go against my own tastes. Every time I fill out one of those character traits worksheets while setting up a hero or heroine, I find myself answering the questions like “Favorite Movie” or “Favorite Food” with my own favs. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have “Friday the 13th” as my favorite movie, so I can’t make myself answer that way just to give my character some interest. I worry that they end up all too much alike because of this.
Shelly, I’d find myself wondering about the same thing!
Joely Sue, you are not boring!:roll: Interesting about LKH. I hadn’t heard any of that!
“When I read very specific details, I sometimes wonder if it isn’t something from the author’s life working its way into the story. For example, if the heroine has a fondness for white chocolate raspberry cheesecake, or if the hero’s music collection is crowded with Mile Davis CDs.”
That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Lynn!
I do the same thing. I don’t have a problem making my characters have minor likes and dislikes that are different from mine, though. For example, I have a hero whose favorite movie is Reservoir Dogs, which is a movie I detest with every cell in my body. But it fits him, so it works. 
My books aren’t autobiographical, but like you, I scatter in some real elements from life. For example, I love dolphins and am involved with a dolphin facility in the Florida Keys, so it was great fun to set my first book at a dolphin facility. (Unfortunately, the hero isn’t patterned after anyone that I know, although several male friends hoped.) I have this thing about the land crabs that dig underground condominium complexes on my property and once dueled with one in my backyard. When I told that story to friends, they insisted it belonged in a book, so in Key of Sea, the heroine has run-ins with the creatures in very funny ways.
Harlan Coben always has mentions of the music his characters listen to. A lot of the references are fairly obscure, some more contemporary, but living in a music infested *g* home, I always wonder if these are the cds *he* has on his player!
They way I once described the creation of a character who has a lot in common with me but who isn’t really all that much like me is that I took lots of little pieces of myself (but not all of myself), mixed them up in a different way, then added lots of other little pieces that aren’t like me and the result was the character.
I have no problems writing characters who do things I never would or who enjoy things I hate because they’re characters. They’re not extensions of me. For one thing, I don’t really like coffee. I’d much rather drink tea. But it would get kind of obvious and would be incredibly unrealistic for me to have all my characters drinking tea. I often write the kind of people who would have a serious coffee habit and who really enjoy the taste, and the fact that I can’t stand the taste of coffee without a lot of cream, sugar and vanilla in it doesn’t affect my writing of those characters. I seldom even consciously think of my own likes and dislikes when developing characters. My characters are so real to me as people who exist independently from me that I just know instinctively what they like and what they care about.
I hate clowns AND coffee, but I’m a carnivore
I imagine that a lot of what I read has to have the flavor of the author. On the other hand, I REALLY don’t want to know. I once had a CP who wrote VERY sexy love scenes. And then, we had a conversation about sex that made me realize that many of those scenes were about her.
After that, I just couldn’t read her stuff, because guess what I had in my mind. Eeeewww!! So I really prefer not to know, because since so many of my friends are authors who write steamy scenes, I’m not sure I can handle the mental images.
Other stuff, I think I’m okay with, but for some reason, I have a huge ick factor of picturing my friends having sex. I know they do it, and I’ve heard their stories of doing it, but reading it in vivid detail, um, no. So please, if you have a sex scene based on personal experience, never tell me that.
Yep, I leave loads of DNA littering the pages and probably even traces I don’t even realize.
As for clowns…they all made me sad, even the happy-faced ones. Don’t know why. Funny (?) thing is, they still do.
And mice make me, um, nervous! (Picture me *shivering* when I opened your recent blog post about your “secret project” – GAH!
(For some reason, I was imagining you renting space to some Adonis-like, ski-loving, hero-in-the-making person. Nope. Mice. You’ve got a sweet heart in you, girl!)
Mary Stella, your book sounds cool!
Alison, I wonder about music a lot, especially when it’s something obscure, like you said! *g*
Shanna, I know what you mean when you say that your characters are so real that you know instinctively what they like and don’t like. My characters that I know that well are so easy to write. I find that when I’m having trouble writing a story, it’s because I don’t know the character well enough.
At least you hate clowns, Sharon, so you aren’t all bad!:razz:
LOL, Danica! That totally cracks me up!
Thanks, Lindsay! I’m thinking that “sucker” sums me up more than sweet, though!
Sorry to make you nervous! 
Birds – I’m afraid of them, have a heroine afraid of them. Bad thing, she’s a zoologist
Love Diet Coke and Krispy Kremes – they always end up in my stories.
Interestingly, sometimes I’ll give a character a trait, and as I write about it, I take on that trait. (Why couldn’t it be some of the more exciting ones, I ask you?)
Let’s hear it for the Anti-Clown League! Does your dislike extend to those costumed “charaters” like at Disneyland??? Mine does.
I love to cook and most of my protags make their living cooking, but I’ve written one who can’t boil water.
I love Pepsi, and I don’t know if I could ever write a protag who preferred Coke. An antag, now…
My protags are all over the place physically, so some of them have some of my attributes, some have none.
It’s all about giving them life and identity, though, isn’t it?
I do write small pieces of myself into my characters. It’s the “write what you know” thing, all the way. I gave one character my dream car. If musical tastes are mentioned they’re usually similar to my own. Coffee and chocolate…’nuff said.
I don’t think I’ve ever wondered about other people’s characters, though. At least, I can’t think of a time I have.
There are sprinkles of me in every character, every setting, every description. It may be something I read, experienced or thought about once. Or it may be something someone described to me. It all depends.
Tanya
Mary F, that has happened ot me, and funnily enough, it was about birds. I had a character that was terrified of birds, and while I was writing that book and for a little while after, I developed the same phobia.
My problem is very different, in that I’m writing a book that a lot of people are going to be calling a Roman a Clef. It’s not. At all. But there’s no way to get that through people’s heads. Eventually, I just have to shrug and let it go. People will believe what they want to believe is true. Another reason, perhaps, not to get so personal on your blog, as LKH does?
I do occasionally give my characters a like or dislike, habit or trait that’s mine, but I ALSO sometimes give them a like/dislike/habit/trait that belongs to another person I know!
Mmmm, Krispy Kremes…
Mary F., that IS interesting about taking on characteristics of the characters!
LOL on the Coke, Zaza!
And no, my hatred of clowns doesn’t extend to any other costume. Just clowns. Clowns are scary. 
Lynn, I gave one of my characters my dream car, too! *g*
Interesting, Tanya!
Good point, Diana, about maybe not being so personal in a blog.
Natalie, I do the same thing! People have such strange habits and likes/dislikes and quirks that I just have to use those characteristics of people around me!