Tim wrote: <Most fiction has a degree of self-insertion, if I'm honest, even fan-fic. It's almost impossible to avoid it.>
Agreed. Even with characters that have been given to you by the series/film/whatever, you remake them at least partly by the actof writing.
<After all, you could write the piece, and then simply do a search/replace to swap your own name with a different character name before you show it to anyone.>
<grin> and that brings us to another point, names. How do people go about picking/creating names, and what do you think of the names used in the actual series? A lot of them are names that are in use now (Anna Grant, Hal Mallanby and Lauren, Bellfriar, Carnell, Travis, etc), or slightly changed (Roj, Del, maybe Deeta from Dieter?). Apart from a few flourishes like Servalan - a brilliant invention - and Egrorian, the names given to most of the characters are fairly plain ...
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