#writind advice

The thing was, I’d been writing fanfiction in my head for as long as I could remember -- but I didn’t know that was the kind of thing that people actually wrote down. So I did, and my terrible story got an honorable mention, and I was hooked. I spent the next few years of my life living in fandom, creating OCs and spinning epic stories and making friends with other people who did the same. It was awesome.

But the one cloud that hung over it was this attitude I kept running into that all original Sailor Scout characters were Mary Sues -- especially if they were Sailor Earth characters (which, uh, mine was). And not one but several communities sprang up to mock those characters. The characters were written by earnest girls like me, who wanted to be part of the show we loved, to have fun imagining ourselves that way, and to share those stories with other people who were also having fun that way.

Those communities were... well, terrifying. Some mocked line by line, MST3K style; some linked to character profiles with mean commentary. Sometimes they were clever! But mostly they were just kind of nasty. And they all came with lists of rules about what did or didn’t make for Mary Sues. You were never allowed to have a character who was: too powerful, too confident, had a weird hair color (even though canon characters had blue and green hair?!), was named after you, used Earth powers, used star powers, was best friends with any characters on the show, was romantically linked to any characters from the show, could sing well or was otherwise talented, was too clumsy, was too smart, etc, etc, etc. And oh yeah, She Had To Be Flawed.

Viewed in a charitable light, I can understand it. The basic gist of “these are cliches, avoid them” is not a terrible thing. But I was 13, 14, 15 and just starting to share my writing, and that advice was not shared in empathetic ways, and there was not yet much backlash advice of “actually, most writing advice is bullshit, do what you want.” (Which I think we do see more of now, which is a good thing.) I took it seriously. So did my friends. So yes, we worried a lot about Doing It Wrong, which meant that instead of being able to go wild with our imaginations and write the stories that delighted us, we were shrinking into what was acceptable. Trying to write within parameters that other people had set for us, trying not to cross any boundaries into what was Bad and Mockable, treating someone’s kind of mean rules as gospel. (There were literal quizzes you could take, with ticky boxes, to test if your character was a Mary Sue -- score too high on it and you’d better Give Her Some Flaws!)

Okay, so, fast forward a couple of years. One of the best things fandom gave me was contact with other writers my own age, who, like me, were writing both fanfic and original fiction, who had daydreams of being published someday. We shared those stories, too. And because we were young and just learning (hey, did you know it’s okay to be just learning how to do something?!) a lot of them were pretty bad. But we supported each other, and that was the first taste I had of other people reading and enjoying my writing. It was awesome.

But the scourge of Mary Sue Mocking had spread. It wasn’t ever really just Sailor Moon fandom, but the who idea had expanded. Every fandom had its own variety of Mary Sue test, and yes, people began looking at original fiction as well. (And this was well before the days of “Batman is Mary Sue!” counter arguments. Is it clear yet that I am an Old?)

So I’d known for awhile that I felt kind of ooky about the Mary Sue mockery. I’d grown out of Sailor Moon fandom, and into and out of a few others, all of which had their own patterns of Mary Sues (and mockery there of). I was just... increasingly uncomfortable with it. And then one day I ran across another litmus test of the ticky box variety. It was for characters in original fiction.

I thought about my sprawling fantasy epic, the one I’d been sharing online for a few years, the one I had a few friends who’d drawn art for. The one with pretty half-angel boys and angry warrior girls. The one I’d been pouring my heart and soul into. 

Nervously, I took the quiz.

Hooooo boy, was my awesome female OC a Mary Sue. (I just did some googling; I’m not positive but I think this may have been the one I took.) Here are some examples of questions my character “failed” by answering yes:

5. Is your character a teenager?

6. Does your character have a tragic past?

17. Is your character the sole surviving member of some great tragedy, genocide, or the last of a house or species?

23. Was your character adopted, orphaned, a runaway, stolen at birth or in any other way raised by someone who is not the character's own parents.

31. Is your character any sort of nobility or royalty?

33. Does your character have strangely coloured hair, or hair that changes throughout the story? 

35. Are there prophesies about your character? And okay, I’m not going to claim my teenage fantasy epic was a brilliant feat of characterization. I wrote it from roughly ages 16-20; it was a mess. But it wasn’t a mess because my protagonist had survived a massacre of her home as a child and was raised by her grandfather, and also turned out to secretly be a long-lost princess. It was a mess because, you know, I was still learning to write.

And all of those things I ticked off on the quiz? They were staples of the fantasy genre. Because I was writing a fantasy story. And the character ticked off all those boxes because she was the protagonist. It was her story, so of course she was the character of legend; of course she was the survivor of tragedy; of course she was the long-lost princess. The story wasn’t warped around her to make her super special. The story was built around her, because protagonists are supposed to be super special. 

(Yes, even “everyman” protagonists. I mean, which is more reality warping -- the idea that a character who survived a tragedy and was raised to be a warrior ended up leading armies against the oppressors who’d murdered her parents, or the idea that a bland normal dude is going to suddenly fall in with a group where everyone else is super special and unlock his own super special powers that eventually let him save the day? H I N T: he can only do that because he’s also super special, no matter how bland he is. /tangent)

In short (ha, too late!), what it came down to was this: I realized that stories of all kinds revolve around their protagonists. That is, actually, good writing --  no one wants to read a story without decent characters. And if that makes the protagonist special, well, yeah. That’s kind of how stories work. And if the protagonist is a girl, people are going to call her a Mary Sue and hate her for some reason. (H I N T: misogyny.)

So at that point I decided, fuck it, if that’s a Mary Sue, then I’ll read and write Mary Sues to my heart’s content, and defend the rights of everyone else to do the same. Because while I was driven by spite to keep writing, it could easily have gone another way, and gotten me to stop all together. I saw that happen to a lot of my fannish friends back in the day, and that really sucks. Again: learning to write is a process. Being mean to people who are beginners doesn’t actually help most of them, it’s just discouraging.

Bad writing -- at least, when we’re talking about “bad because Amethyst Orbs” and not “bad because Racist Caricature” for example -- doesn’t hurt anyone. Writing is a skill; like any other, it takes practice to get better.

And you can get better if you keep working at it. How do I know?

*points to Bound by Blood and Sand, AKA the fulfillment of my teenage daydream, AKA a book about a teenage girl who is definitely the most special person in her world, AKA a book I freaking wrote that’s published by freaking Random House*

Just sayin’.