Gotta outgrow this!
You’d be insulted, wouldn’t you, if people dismissed you as “a minor character”? Well, fictional characters don’t like it any more than you do.
To this day I still cite Dick Francis and H.R.F. Keating as stellar examples of writers who brought their characters to life. You don’t need to load down the book with biographies that interest no one: but you do need a touch of color.
The biggest offense a fiction writer can commit is to write himself up as the larger-than-life hero of the story. Even publishers don’t like it! That sort of thing is very popular in high school among teens who think they’d someday like to be writers.
It’s a phase that must be passed through as quickly as possible.
It all seems to be a phase we have to go through, identifying with characters we like (my earliest favorite character was Buck Rogers, and thank God my parents had brains and let me be a tomboy instead of insisting on something more sinister). Then we create the stories and when we mature as storytellers, assuming that we don’t abandon the desire, we progress to writing characters as they are not as self-inserts, Mary Sues or Gary Stus.
Someone very savvy about writing gave me advice to write the heroes not as an insufferable self-insert but as someone I’d like to spend time with. And, in a way I do spend a whole lot of time getting to “know” them on the page.
Mary Sue, Gary Stu–I never heard that expression before, but I love it!
The internet can do a much more thorough explanation than I, and it’s worth a read. Unfortunately that type of character once written as parody has become the modern template, especially when it comes to female lead protagonists.
As a fantasy writer, I have to steer clear of several cliches. The worst: The Invincible Female Warrior, and the crusty but benign Wizard.
Good advice.