Why Do Writers Insert Themselves in Their Fiction?

Because their lives are boring.

From a piece in Publishers Weekly...

Our generation never invaded Normandy, didn't hobble through Spain with our army wounds still unhealed to sip absinthe, didn't fight in 'Nam or drop acid while burning our draft cards. We were a sissy bunch, armed with degrees from liberal arts colleges, M.F.A.s from well-regarded writers' programs. Our trench time was spent as office temps, secretaries in our parents' businesses, baristas, grant writers, teaching assistants. Say what you will about the talents of Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, and Jhumpa Lahiri versus those of Jack Kerouac, 50 years from now still only one will have been the subject of an 800-page biography. Yet here we were, writing in an era obsessed with celebrity and reality shows, where the first question readers and journalists nearly always threw at us was, "How much of this novel was based on your own personal experiences?" At which point we faced the contemporary writer's dilemma—we could be only one of two possible things: a liar or a bore. Could anyone blame us for choosing the former?

But then, even that became well-nigh impossible. In the instant-muckraking era of TMZ, the Smoking Gun, and Gawker, when the outing of any instance of plagiarism became only one Google Books search away, with journalists, editors, and publishers all on the lookout for the next Frey, lying became tougher and riskier than ever.

So we've taken the only reasonable option—taking back what's rightfully ours, casting ourselves in our fiction, allowing ourselves to explore the intense experiences missing from our monotonous existences, while getting to do it in novels, where we still have the right to lie in service of larger truths. Thus, in Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel introduces us to Henry L'Hote, a bestselling author having difficulty writing a follow-up to his book about animals, when he encounters a mysterious taxidermist, also named Henry; in Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis inserts the notorious author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho into a supernatural thriller worthy of Stephen King, who appears as a character near the completion of his own Dark Tower series; while researching a "crime in Calcutta," Jerry Delfont, Paul Theroux's narrator in A Dead Hand, yet another writer with writer's block, comes in contact with none other than Paul Theroux, a man who never suffered from that debilitating condition. Nobel Prize winners have been playing the game, too; J.M. Coetzee has written about a writer named "Senhor C"; José Saramago gave us his alter ego, "Señor José."