What is the literary term for an author making his protagonist like himself?
Self-insertion, or author insertion. Typically with bad authors the character is an idealised version of themself and always succeeds and does the right thing and is popular and always gets the guy/girl and so on, and where that is the case the character is known as a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu if male). Stories like this are basically like reading somebody else’s fantasy daydreams i.e. dull and boring for everyone except the author, and so the terms are perjorative. If you do searches for any of these terms you will find loads of articles and so on that describe the different ways in which author insertion can be done, along with dozens of quizzes along the lines of “Is your character a Mary Sue?”. I’m not sure whether anyone famous has written on it though. There is a word for the opposite of a Mary Sue – where the author has tried so hard not to create a Mary Sue character that he goes so far the other way and creates an unlikeable, inept character with no redeeming features. Can’t think
