kelly: *blush*

With you on that last point. Actually, one of the most annoying traits I can think of in anybody, writer/blogger or otherwise, is self-unawareness. Leads to all kinds of trouble. (Although there’s such a thing as being TOO self-aware.)

Everyone jacks their family memebers, the guy with the thick black turtle-neck and dandruff trying too hard on a date at Starbucks of all places, their lovers, their exes, the neighbor who walks her dog with saggy panty-hose, into their stories. If forced everyone to shake out these stolen characters from their pockets, we would all be exposed.

The worst writing, and I see this a great deal on blogs, is when the writer writes themselves as fiction that has no capacity to reflect on real flaws.

(Good luck with the synopsis.)

Eileen: Using yourself as “filler” — bet that’s an experience familiar to a lot, I mean a lot of writers, writing about writers or not.

How do you feel about the notion of “composite [or representative] characters” in what is otherwise understood to be journalism? Haven’t heard much about it recently, but it used to be a controversial topic. I think a Washington Post reporter had won a Major Award (presumably not a giant leg lamp) for a series profiling the life of a drug addict, something like that, and it came out that there was no REAL person profiled — the addict was really (as you say) an amalgam, presumably reasonable, of several addicts the reported had followed and interviewed.

Jules: Personality tests. Meyers-Briggs and so on. (Thank you for not mentioning Facebook’s “Which Supreme Court justice are you?”-style quizzes.) You’re right: NO ONE would be nearly as interested in those things if they just told us about somebody else!

And maybe facebook and the like is not just being fascinated–it’s being fascinated and needing to share.

Yes, we do fascinate ourselves. There’s no more proof of that now than Facebook, right, with all those My Five Favorite Books/Shows/Etc. and the ever-popular (but waning?) 25-Things thing. Don’t all of us just love to take personality tests, too? Meyers-Brigg and such.

In non-fiction/memoir, it’s clearer for me. The “I” is me and everyone else is renamed, and mushed together unless they’re very very very important. Several people appear as the same “character” because the reader won’t tolerate on the page the same pantheon of friends, acquaintances, coworkers and assorted family members as they will gladly gossip about in real life.

Either way, it’s fun mushing people together like playdough.

I’m working on my synopsis now (on a real hard part which is why I’m over here commenting) or I’d read and say more. But I’ll be back later to procrastinate more and then I’ll try to work how much of you I find left in the corner.