Magpie Mary Sue

[sistermagpie]

Happy birthday ljash!!!

I've been meaning to update for several days and just keep....what? Oh, getting distracted. I've been writing a lot elsewhere, though, and this weekend it really made me wonder about something.



Warning: this whole discussion could demonstrate a total lack of self-awareness on my part, but here we go.

I've been writing this thing, and there's this one secondary character I know is the one that's "me" for what that's worth. Not completely, obviously, but he's just the character who would be me. So I've been thinking about all the characters and trying to, like, get to know them by asking them questions interview style (which sounds unbearably poseur-ish when I write it down). So it was cool because when I got to this character I saw things about other characters that I didn't know based on how he saw them. Suddenly I was like, "Hey, J is a lot like my friend J and P is a little like S...” But the main thing was, this would be my Mary Sue, if you define Mary Sue as just by author insertion. And Mary Sues are so often characterized by having super powers and everyone loves them and they have a tragic past and they are absolutely beautiful. So often when somebody is identifying with that character, they become right. They take over the story.

Okay, so I'm not 14 and being in the fandom I naturally know not to give my Mary Sue/Gary Stu eyes like sapphires, raven black hair with violet highlights, porcelain skin and sculpted muscles that making him the sexiest ten-year-old on the playground. But still, when I was asking this character questions it was more embarrassing than anything. Going in I'd assumed that being me he'd be the most reasonable character, and he does seem that way. But the poor kid just seems to have been saddled with all of my issues. And it made me think aback on another character, the first thing I gave to my agent, and I didn't even really think of her as a Mary Sue, but she was obviously the "me" character in that piece and being perfect was not her problem. Her problem was she seemed to have these really annoying faults--at least to the agent. It was kind of funny, actually. The agent was just like, "What's wrong with her? Why does she keep doing this?" and I thought what she was doing was being this very reasonable human being. That was a little humiliating. So there we go...I think I'm making her right and she seems wrong.

Do people go one way or the other? Because really when I think of the few characters I've written where I would say they were more "me" than another character they seemed to have a real problem in becoming non-entities--that was the problem with that problem too, in a way. She kept seeing everybody else's pov. This character has a totally different set of issues, and I don't know how apparent they will be, since he's not a main character. It's just struck me that perhaps I just have a personality that produces a very different Mary Sue than the one commonly seen. Originally there was this girl character that I thought was more like me, and then I realized she needed to be the complete opposite. It's kind of sad, really. Woe to the character that is my Mary Sue!

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the mark of a good/great writer is probably the ability to make those issues compelling for people who might not share them. If you can make people feel what it's like to be in that character's shoes and understand their thought processes then whether or not those issues are your own doesn't matter.

I don't know if any of these things would come out in the story with this character, since this would mostly be backstory, but hopefully it will make his interactions with other characters more interesting. Heh--I've been reading the Q&A's with the NA players recently and that really brings it home how important that is. Everything adds that little shade to the character, even if the audience never knows where it comes from.

[trobadora]

Well, I think most good writers work through their issues in their writing, but it’s not just making people understand those issues that makes it good writing. It's their place in the story.

The problems arise when those issues aren’t really part of the story you’re supposed to be telling, and they just take over and distract from everything else.

Um, I hope you don’t mind I’ve friended you. I’ve been lurking on your journal for quite a while now, and your essays and discussions are always very interesting.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Friend away!

And yes, I definitely think that's a good point. It's one of those things where just because it's interesting to you doesn't make it a story.

[trobadora]

Exactly - and just because something is out of place in this story, doesn't mean it couldn't make an interesting story elsewhere. The things that are there for no better reason than because the author thought it would be "cool" are the most dangerous to a story, the more so the more the author dwells on it.

[gillieweed.livejournal.com]

Write away. I think we're all very overly paranoid about writing Mary Sues. A Mary Sue is a very specific creature and unless your character is named something like "Starlight Nebula" and has anything other than normal features and talents (yes talents are allowed--super powers are where you get into trouble) chances are what you have is an Original Character rather than a Sue. I thought it was extremely interesting after JKR's last set of baffling comments no one picked up on the answer in which she discussed her own self insertion into her characters.

As to your Original Character's backstory:
Go ahead with it.

You never know what will come of it. My own Original Character turned out to have such a cool, interesting backstory that I'm in the process of taking her out of ficworld and writing her own, original story. I knew I had a story cooking somewhere, I just couldn't find it until I went back into my nearly forgotton fic and re-read a chapter in which she retells something that happened years prior to her being inserted into fanfic. And quite honestly it's more interesting than what happened to her after she arrived in weird-world.

Is she a Sue? Maybe but I don't think so. Self insertion? Maybe a bit but I'll tell you if I met her on the street she'd scare the crap out of me.