"I BASED THE MAIN CHARACTER ON MYSELF."

Yeah gotta agree there.

I think Solitayre hit the nail on the head. Very well articulated.

author=SnowOwl
I'm sure a skilled storyteller would be able to make it interesting, the problem is no skilled storyteller would actually put themselves in their own story.
Because doing that is something unskilled storytellers do.

just sayin

In general, some of the best writing advice you'll ever hear is "Write what you know." Good writers are great at taking elements or details of their own life and inserting it into the story without it being clear they're writing about themselves. Many writers give protagonists occupations that the writer has had, because the writer knows what it's like to do that job and can portray it realistically. This is a good thing and certainly not an indication of bad writing.

I have actually seen this old saw ("Write What You Know") chokeslammed and its back broken and it shattered into a million glittering pieces. There is the argument "Fuck that, write what you DON'T know, and get yourself well out of your comfort zone and see what happens". But I'm more interested in one of the coolest things I learned in college, and it came down to something like this:

If you write what you know, and all you know is how to be a writer, you will never write anything interesting because you DON'T FUCKING KNOW ANYTHING. So stop being a writer, go live life, and come back in 10-30 years when you know something worth writing. Without the fuel of interesting and challenging life experiences that have nothing to do with writing, you will never KNOW anything worth writing, and you will never WRITE anything worth reading. Donald Ray Pollock is my favorite living exemplar of this and probably discovering and reading him in senior year of college is where the ideas really crystallized, although honestly a lot of what a lot of different professors had said up to that point contributed to the revelation. Writing is predicated on possessing meaningful insight of the world. Garnering meaningful insight of the world is predicated on every part of being a living human except being a writer.

It is a very tough pill to swallow for young "careerist" writers like the bushel I went to school with, but it did help explain to me why most of my classmates' work was totally fucking uninteresting to me unless it included the kind of stuff that made my own work interesting to me because it included aliens, robots, vampire zombies, an angel-borne apocalypse, demons, cults, drugs and nonphysical intelligences that warp space and time, and so on, with one exception being the one guy who was 10 years older than everyone else and had been working in a gas station all that time. His prose wasn't as polished as the hollow eggs in the rest of the class but he fucking had something to say.

Quick Note: None of the above was meant to be disagreement, just adding on to what you said.

***

Anyway, I want to talk about Mary Sues. Honestly, I find the idea of a Mary Sue to be so, so overused nowadays that it's kind of annoying. The term obviously has its origins in fanworks--I say obviously, but with so many things that have been in use since forever, I don't think I'd ever heard of it before 2006--but whenever I see it used to describe a character in an original work, I tend to shake my head. Like...Sephiroth is not a Mary Sue. Cloud Strife is not a Mary Sue. They're just characters--protagonists and antagonists--doing what said characters do. Many of the 'defining traits' of "Mary Sues" are honestly just the defining traits of garden variety narrative protagonists and antagonists. So whenever anyone says 'X, Y, or Z' is a Mary Sue now, I'm skeptical.

author=unity
Actually, this wasn't about your game at all. I honestly really liked all of your characters XD You may have made them back in eighth grade, but they suited the story and gave it a charming feel.

In fact, I didn't even guess that your main character was a self-insert :D

I'm really glad to hear this :D I know I mentioned it in a blog post so I figured you had read that since I knew you had played the game recently.

author=Darken

author=SnowOwl
I'm sure a skilled storyteller would be able to make it interesting, the problem is no skilled storyteller would actually put themselves in their own story.
Because doing that is something unskilled storytellers do.

just sayin

I haven't watched Louie but I guess what you're getting at is that it's about himself and good? There are always exceptions to the rules, would be my answer.

I may have come on strongly in my post, but I think it makes for more interesting characters if people try to come up with someone interesting instead of just self-inserting. Some snippets of your own self is unavoidable and probably necessary to make a believable character. But let's be honest here, most people don't live interesting enough lives or have interesting enough personalities that other people would actually read (or play) their life stories. Another reason it fails is because the majority of people haven't looked at themselves hard enough to know their own personality. The hardest person to know really well is yourself, as some people say.

But let's be honest here, most people don't live interesting enough lives or have interesting enough personalities that other people would actually read (or play) their life stories.

This is a really coarse oversimplification of what's actually a really complex topic. So I guess here's another one?

Actually, broadly speaking, most PEOPLE are infinitely fascinating. But almost the entire apparatus of authorial technique lies in teasing that out onto the page, the screen, or whathaveyou.

The thing that makes a person interesting is the choices they make. You don't need anything particularly extraordinary to be interesting.