Character turning into an unwanted author avatar

Well, I've created this main character as the annoying "friend that nobody likes" who constantly goes into slightly unrelated rants in my stories.

He was created to bug the heck out of the other characters, but the more dialogue I write for him the more he starts to seem like a less timid version of myself, straight down to a slight paranoia of cats.

How can I separate my personality from his without majorly changing the character's role as "the weird guy", or his overall character traits?

edited 26th Oct '11 7:02:42 PM by Gringoamericano

I don't really think you need to. As long as the guy doesn't turn into an Author Sue, and as long as his rants don't turn into Author Filibusters, I think it's perfectly alright for a supporting character to share certain traits with the writer whom created him. Speaking personally, I think all of the characters that I write are similar to myself in one way or another, and some of them more so than others.

It is a rather normal occurrence to have a character who bears a similarity to you. So long as you keep Author Filibusters out of your writing and treat this character the same as everyone else, you'll be fine.

I prefer to avoid having a character based off of myself - it's just so much easier to avoid the problems that way. Yes, you can easily base aspects of your characters' personalities off of yours, but having one single character be largely based off of you is something I view as best avoided.

All characters are author avatars lato sensu

To avoid it in an strict sense you must think

1. what is your character personality and how it differs from yours?
2. what does your character think? ( not what you think)
3. What would my character do ( not what you would )

Um... what?

Try dividing the said character into two, or even making one of them an opposite gender of the first one. Basically, merge certain traits of the said character into another if you find that character too much like you, but can't bear the thought of deleting the said traits completely.

Yeah, my (original fiction) characters kind of get Me Traits sprinkled around randomly. So far, there's the Protective bit, the Book-Obsessed bit, and the bit that Would So Totally Use Superpowers To Disconcert Random Strangers. (The latter is a villain.)

"I prefer to avoid having a character based off of myself -it's just so much easier to avoid the problems that way. Yes, you can easily base aspects of your characters' personalities off of yours, but having one single character be largely based off of you is something I view as best avoided."

I think it would help if you gave us an inkling of what these problems are.

As mentioned earlier, the typical problems of Author Avatars - becoming mouthpieces for the author, too much favoritism even if they aren't an outright Mary Sue, et cetera.

These are not inherent or unavoidable problems, but even the risk of them can be avoided completely by simply not basing a character off yourself in the first place. And while there are certainly benefits to letting some aspects of your personality into your characters, I can't see any real benefit that would come from basing a single character off of yourself. So I say it's just best to avoid the whole thing to begin with.

I have maybe three characters who all bear a very obvious similarity with me in terms of different aspects of my personality. I did not intentionally make them to be like that; it just kind of happened and I didn't notice it until far later, and had no problems with the issues that you hope to avoid.

My belief is that if you can handle it with no drop in quality to the story, go right ahead.

x6 It's latin for wide sense. Every character is an author avatar in a wide sense