The Un-Self-Insert

I think one of my greatest strengths as a writer is character building. I like digging deep into why they are the way they are, how they act, feel, interact with their world.

And all my characters are self-inserts.

…And they’re not.

Let me explain.

Oftentimes, when you get into the writing community, you’ll hear the whisperings of a theory war about “writing what you know”. Some people vehemently agree with the statement at hand: write stories about what you know. Nothing else. Other people don’t love that perspective. After all, fantasy and science fiction aren’t “real”. You can’t possibly know them know them, but you can still make them vivid. There’s also a reason there are many writers who do a lot of research. They don’t know the thing they want to know about, not yet, so they have to experience and learn. But its really hard to go from novice to expert. Should writers have to completely know every inch of the Hungarian countryside to write about it? Head to Middle Earth, Narnia, etc. to know impossible worlds?

So, I’m not really in either camp. But I’m also part of both of them. Let’s call it a little in the middle. And that’s how we get to my characters and character-building. If we want to dig into the process, I think the best character to explore both sides is my secondary character Eszti, from Daughter of Or.

Eszti is the daughter of African traders, who settled down in a Hungarian village to practice her love of herbalism and apothecary. While in Dracula’s castle, she acts as a healer and spends her time providing patching services and powders for Dracula and the brides. Most of her time is spent with the plants or with her beloved, Nuray. She’s scientific and logical, but also nurturing and passionate.

Let’s start with the obvious. Eszti is a black woman, and I’m not. So this is where I leaned into that “don’t tell stories that aren’t yours”. I cannot properly express what it means or feels like to be black, so she’s not a POV character, and I don’t try to make deep personal statements about the complex nuances of that perspective. I think I toss in a line about people calling women healers witches, especially if they are people of color, and that’s exactly what I’m open to. Honestly recognizing her situation, but not fooling myself into thinking I can write her complete complex narrative. I’d need a secondary or third writer to really properly flesh that out.

However, I do know what it’s like to be a woman. A science-lover. A gardener. A queer person.

When I was building out my cast of vampires, I knew that I wanted one of them to be an herbalist/gardener. I wanted her to have that nurturing side, but not so motherly—more a scientist with a softness. And that origin point is something I could relate to. It is a piece of my own soul that I could take and use to be the core of this character. Using that love of plants and science, we extrapolated romance and scholarly books and meticulous shelves and a motivation to write letters to colleagues and a willingness to fall in love and try to connect and grow something out of even the worst of nightmares. My main character, Benca, is a woman of the wilds, and that’s why they connect. But Eszti is a version of nature and flora that is more organized and well-defined. Sometimes wise, sometimes far-too-focused on the science to realize other things going on. But she’s smart and thoughtful once she notices. And also, I’m not clueless, I did double check and dot my I’s to give her nuance because no sane person just wants to write some magically wise black person trope. That’s such a boring and offensive way to write any POC character. So, Eszti is helpful, but she’s also reluctant. While kind, wants to take care of her peace first. When Benca starts pulling people into her murder schemes, Eszti isn’t her first support. She’s gentle with Benca, but she’s the third addition to the scheming, after some convincing from the others. That’s where her logic comes in.

And creating Eszti, finding Eszti, that took some research, too. I learned words in Ethiopian, as well as some Ethiopian animals and lore. I studied European and African herbalism and what different wild plants were used for in the 1600s. I explored the logistics of a greenhouse and the time it would take wormwood to reach Hungary. All the little nuances that Eszti would 100% care about.

So, Eszti is a testament to things I know and things I don’t. To parts of myself and parts of a completely different person with a life of their own. A self-insert and also not. But I think its a beautiful way to build characters, because you’re taking a seed of your soul that you cherish and love and then putting in the work to help it grow into someone completely new.

The trick to good character building isn’t just knowing people or knowing yourself. It’s about learning to love a character—and use your own traits to be those touchstones to understand and love them—which lets that help motivate you into making the character as authentically *them* as possible.