Shells for Ships, Dead Horses, La Mer

That's a good title for something.

The idea that characters must be mundane to be believable, and a sort of elevation of the ordinary, that I find undeniably repugnant.

And that there is something laughably self-indulgent about identifying with a character out of the ordinary.

I'm currently obsessed with NIN's "La Mer," from The Fragile (1999).

I love that song.

The whole Mary Sue thing reminds me peripherally of something I wrote on Fragments of Shadow a little while back:

Society frowns on the kind of earnest and thoughtful intensity that creates its most enduring, beautiful works. It’s interesting, because it’s almost like a kind of institutionalized discrimination. People who try are weird. Pretentious. Even when you make it, even when you earn society’s “acceptance” of your weirdness, you’re separate. Celebrity is, in a sense, another kind of segregation. It’s still a matter of us and them.

Pretension is such a dirty word. Except all writing is pretense. Everything worth doing is pretentious. You’re damn right I have aspirations “above my station.” You’re damn right I’m going to stretch and reach for things.

And I may miss. I may fall off the ladder I’ve built for myself. But that’s just an opportunity to stabilize the foundations and build it higher before I climb back up.

I’m done apologizing for that.

(from Coming to Terms)

The videos are wonderful - very soothing ocean sounds, foghorn and frogs. I'm enjoying them so much. Thank you for letting us have a peek at your explorations of the world.

May I ask what software you are using for the book trailer? I had a long discussion today with a friend over his efforts to find a software program that works.

iMovie HD 6. It seems adequate to the task, and I have it.

Thank you - don't think that's one he's tried.

It could also be said that there are a lot of poorly conceived characters with an unrealistic abundance of flattering attributes who are not Mary Sues. My hunch is that the whole Mary Sue thing began as a legitimate shorthand to call out fanfic writers who inserted themselves into, say, Star Trek slashfic, with Kirk and Spock falling in love with them, or some such thing. But then it spread to professional fiction, where the use of Mary Sue as a pejorative, even if accurate in some cases, carries a sexist whiff because it's almost always aimed at female authors: See, these dizzy broads can't resist making little cute versions of themselves in their little stories. (Of course, the pejorative is just as often wielded by female critics.) Why are male writers' idealized Tek Jansen heroes not also called Mary Sues? (Actually, they're called Gary Stu. Groan.)

Setting aside the legitimacy of the term, or lack thereof, the discussion interests me because it gets to deeper issues about what we want from fictional characters and what function they serve for their creators. Sometimes the two agendas, for want of a better word, dovetail nicely; other times, the writer might go a step too far and the reader gets that 'Oh, gimme a break' feeling. But to what extent does a writer go against idealization to the point where it becomes almost inverted idealization, i.e., this character is the worst, stupidest, most flawed character ever to appear in print? Like, how far can we go with this fucked-up character and still get you to care about what happens to her? Or, how far can we idealize her and still get you to identify? Is identification necessary to begin with? And so on.

I suspect that you're rejecting Mary Sue as a valid criticism on some level because you don't want to be thinking about it the next time you sit down to create a character; you don't want it, unbidden, anywhere on your radar, and you certainly don't want any possibility of some potential fanboy/fangirl snark to influence you one way or the other. So, okay: Mary Sue is a pretty weak criticism much of the time. The funny thing is, none of your characters have ever struck me as being remotely Mary Sue-ish, so why dignify it at all? It's not something that has anything to do with what you do. What would Harlan say? Probably 'What the fuck is a Mary Sue and why are you even thinking about it?' Interspersed with 'kiddo' and various uses of 'fuck.'

And it is true, they were all parts of me

And why is that a strike against the author, anyway? Does anyone call up John le Carré and tell him George Smiley and Alec Leamas are invalid characters because he wrote them out of his experiences of working for MI5 and MI6? I know this is not worth ranting about, but people have some very weird ideas about art.

Honestly, when I'm writing, these are not even questions I pause to consider. I do not believe the are valid, from the POV of the author.

It's obvious that — like any author who's actually been published — you haven't spent much time looking at dumb 'How to Create Characters We Care About' articles in Writer's Digest. I have to wonder if that rag has actually helped any aspiring writer.

Yeah, and "toots." He likes to call me toots.

*snerk* And yet you let him live.

I can cite an example of a meta-Mary Sue that you wouldn't necessarily consider a Mary Sue: Tyler Durden (book and film). He even comments on how much of a Mary Sue he is ('I look the way you want to look, I fuck the way you want to fuck,' said to the first-person narrator), which is what makes him meta, and the twist makes him a surprise Mary Sue. While I doubt Chuck Palahniuk sat down and said 'I think I'll satirize Mary Sues,' that's kind of what he ended up doing.

Why in hell's name did I have to go back and take that silly litmus test? Now I have cavities in my brain.

I'm not sure whether the test applies to the character as introduced or as the character ends up, or if

No. Full stop. Not wasting any more time on this. I suspect that the most common denominator of Suedom is "characters which irritate me," and that's as far as it gets for most people.

Off-topic observation: I may never read anything from the Twilight series, but the graphic design of those dust covers is first-rate.

A marketing tirade from your POV? I can only hope that I live long enough to see that day.

OHMAN it's not a NIN album without 'Nothing can stop me now', that and that piano chord progression....you know which one, the one at the end of Closer.

But dammit, now I can say it IN FRENCH.

I agree with much of what robyn_ma says above. "Mary Sue" is one of a number of ideas that seem to have leaked out of fan fiction and entered the general discourse about writing, at least in F/SF. I don't think this is an amateur vs. professional distinction, but a "writing unto itself" vs. "writing solely in relation to other creative worlds" distinction. Agree wholeheartedly with you that the questions asked to determine Mary Sue/Gary Stu-itude have almost no bearing on what is or isn't good fiction. The worlds inhabited by fan fiction authors, however, could not exist without the work of the original author, and perhaps in that context these kinds of rules are useful. As you hate it when Night Elves use LOLspeak, recognizing that something is dramatically out of place, I would assume fanfic readers likewise sense something out of place when Agent Maria Sue solves all the crimes in X-Files fanfic that couldn't be solved by Scully and Mulder, who stand around and go "ooh, aaah."

On a related note, I'm always jarred by authors who refer to stories or novels as "fics." As in, "Stephen King wrote this great fic about a rabid St. Bernard."