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I'm interested what you writers think. Can you objectively write without real life bleeding into your stories? How much does your subconscious sway a story? Characters, how much of them are a part of you?

It may be possible to write something that is completely removed from your experience or personality, but I don't think it's possible to write something good without either direct experience or tangential experience about what you're writing. Not unless you just steal, I guess, or just relay what someone else described to you.

My characters all hold a piece of me, because writing and most other stuff is escapism and I need to project to properly escape, to detach and say it’s someone else. So no.

I feel like everything I write is me to some extent, but they're also what I aspire to be. What I may not be yet, but the qualities that I admire and put on a pedestal. I guess my characters can be the epitome of the things I value and hold dear, or in some cases, the antithesis of my ideals. Like if I'm writing an anti-hero, or a villain MC, I guess it only works if I can feel repelled or frustrated at some of their actions because of how "wrong" it feels. So I guess the characters I write are stretched out and amplified versions of my subconscious.

I agree with Fluxion 100%. It's possible to do so, but good writing should draw a little bit from your own experiences. If the story you're writing doesn't resonate with you, how do you know it's going to resonate with your audience? In my personal experience, I've had more characters than not that are a part of me, and they're much easier to write. It's a fun challenge to have those who don't, who are completely different, but then it just feels like a caricature. I can get plenty of variety without forcing myself to be completely objective, and my stories feel all the better for it. Just my personal opinion, though. Maybe my characters are bland because of this - I'd have to look into it.

You do have to have experience with a personality type or some kind of real life event to begin building a believable simulation off of some fictional variation of it. You can easily write a character that's nothing like "you", but they're still going to reflect your personal understanding of what makes someone that way and why--which might not mesh up with someone else's, or you might even end up telling on yourself in a hilarious fashion.

The most telling example of bleedover there though might not even be characters but the way the themes and universe itself is ordered to reflect the author's beliefs about life, the universe, and everything. (it's 42 btw) That's a core thing that's hard to shed at least in a more serious work.

But everyone starts out writing as a kid or whenever with that character that's basically just them, but cooler, and in a fictional world that is built from the ground up to center around them. Their personal inner world at that point only has room for them, there are so many things outside it that they can't even conceive of at that point.

Keep doing that when you're an adult of course and grody labels like "Mary Sue" and "power fantasy" might start entering in, if it's not an outright flag for mental illness. Somebody who has a habit of viewing the world as a material for stories though is going to be examining different aspects of human nature and experiencing stories of all kinds through different mediums as it is, you can't help but learn to appreciate nuance and opposition there and want to challenge your own comfort zone a little at some point I think.

I think the main thing is to avoid "author self-insertion" and "barely disguised fetish" especially in the same story.

Any story I write is very recognizably written by me, and real life bleeding in is a feature, not a bug.

I was going to comment on this before, but forgot about the post.

I personally feel that any creators (writers, artists, etc.) put a bit of themselves into everything they create. Sometimes it's more obvious than others. For instance, I have an rpg character who I'm fairly sure is autistic (a trait he shares with his creator, me). At the same time...I never set out with the intention for that to happen; it just became more and more apparent the more I wrote him.

I don't know if that helps at all. It's not as obvious with most of the characters I write, I think.

Are most of your characters attractive gay men, or was that just something that happened here?

I go through phases, it seems.

I used to write a lot of attractive straight women as main characters, but then a few years back, I got...sick to death of all of the really bad heterosexual romance shoe-horned into literally everything...always following the same kind of formula. I'm writing other types of characters (I have a few storygames I've started with female protagonists), but the bad writing of so many books, TV shows and movies had a major impact on my own writing.