In one sense, every character you create will be yourself. You’ve never murdered, but your murderer’s rage will be drawn from memories of your own extreme anger. Your love scenes will contain hints of your own past kisses and sweet moments. That scene in which your octogenarian feels humiliated will draw on your experience of humiliation in the eighth grade, even though the circumstances are totally different and you’re not even consciously thinking about your middle-school years. Our characters’ emotions, after all, draw on our own emotions. Sometimes, however, you will want to use your life more directly in your fiction, dramatizing actual incidents. Charles Dickens used his desperate experience as a child laborer in Victorian England to write David Copperfield. Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this ─ and it is a very large problem ─ is that almost no one can view himself _____________ on the page. As the writer, you’re too close to your own complicated makeup. It can thus be easier and more effective to use a situation or incident from your life but make it happen to a character who is not you. In fact, that’s what authors largely have done. You can still, of course, incorporate aspects of yourself: your love of Beethoven, your quick temper, your soccer injuries. But by applying your own experience to a different protagonist, you can take advantage of your insider knowledge of the situation, and yet gain an objectivity and control that the original intense situation, by definition, did not have.

* octogenarian: 80대의 사람 ** protagonist : 주인공