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Q&A Can a first person protagonist be the writer's alter ego?

Autobiographical fantasy is not unheard of --Borges practiced it in many of his short stories, and the Baron Munchausen novel was based on a real life autobiographical fabulist. The frame story fo...

posted 8y ago by Chris Sunami‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

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#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T05:14:01Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23594
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Chris Sunami‭ · 2019-12-08T05:14:01Z (about 5 years ago)
Autobiographical fantasy is not unheard of --[Borges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges) practiced it in many of his short stories, and the [Baron Munchausen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Munchausen) novel was based on a real life autobiographical fabulist. The frame story for [The Princess Bride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_Bride) is fictional autobiography.

In practice, for the reader, there's no real difference from any other first person novel, except in as much as you want the reader to actually believe these events happened to you.

As a writer, the problem to avoid when writing an alter-ego is that it plays out as a shallow fantasy of who you would like to be, or what you would like your life to be --such narratives are generally uninteresting to other people.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2016-06-27T16:02:30Z (over 8 years ago)
Original score: 1