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Q&A Is it bad to project myself into my story?

After reading that a Mary-Sue often is a projection of the author, I realized most of my stories are. Is it a bad thing? My MC aren't Mary-sues (at least I hope so), they're the opposite of perf...

3 answers  ·  posted 5y ago by Teleporting Goat‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T10:31:42Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/41135
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Teleporting Goat‭ · 2019-12-08T10:31:42Z (over 4 years ago)
After reading that a Mary-Sue often is a projection of the author, I realized most of my stories are.

Is it a bad thing?

My MC aren't Mary-sues (at least I hope so), they're the opposite of perfect and always succeeding: I focus on flaws and illnesses, making some bad decisions, paying the price and regretting them, running away from their responsabilites, etc.

But most of the time, "how my MC would react to this" or is very close to "how would I react to this". However this is only true for the setting, and character development is quite different.

I've also found a bunch of questions [(1)](https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/40956/not-projecting-myself-onto-my-characters) [(2)](https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/29716/how-to-stop-projecting-yourself-into-your-writing) asking how **NOT** to do it, making me think it's something I should avoid even more.

Is there something inherently _wrong_ with it? Does it make my story less interesting to read?

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-01-09T10:27:06Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 12