Heroes Insider Weekly

The Character Clinic - Suffering from Sue-itis

The Character Clinic-Suffering from Sue-itis

         Perfection…

         The word itself is slightly misleading. Sure, on paper perfection sounds good enough. Doesn’t perfection mean you’re the best after all? But in reality, perfection just simply doesn’t exist. And when it comes to writing novels, there are few things more annoying than a perfect character.

        Mary Sues, Gary Stus-call them what you want, they’re all bad. It’s hard to pin down what makes a character a Mary Sue exactly but you’ll know it if you meet one. They’re the people with the fancy unrealistic names, the amazing powers that no one else has ever possessed and their own personal fan base wherever they go. In short, they’re annoying and like the plague, they can kill a novel stone dead.

         So how do you know if your beloved protagonist has fallen ill to this dreaded disease? Well thankfully there are several sure symptoms which might give you a better idea of what to avoid doing.

1.     What’s in a name?

         Now let me be clear, not every character with an unusual name is a Mary Sue. But a high proportion of Mary Sues are likely to have overly poetic names attached to them. By this I mean names you rarely find in the real world, names like ‘Magenta’, ‘Raven’, ‘Alainagora’...the list goes on and on. A good way to test this is to ask yourself a few questions. Is your character’s name a flower, gemstone or abstract noun? Is it a name you made up from combining words/other names you liked? Are your other characters called things like ‘Bob’ or ‘Emma’? Then you could run the risk of having a Mary Sueish name.

         Thankfully, a character’s name is one of the easiest things to fix. It is also important to note that a fancy name alone does not make your character a Mary Sue. But if your protagonist’s name is unusual in the context of your story, it might be worth changing it anyway. After all, in a sea of Sophies, Sapphire Midnight Rosethorn sticks out like a sore thumb.

2.     The world quite literally revolves around me

       But Captain! I hear you cry My character is the main character! Isn’t the world supposed to revolve around them?

          No. Not even close. That isn’t to say they shouldn’t be the most important person in the story. It is their story after all, or it should be if you’ve chosen the right character to be your protagonist. But that’s not the same thing as having every single event revolve around them.

         Let me explain. Take Twilight for example. Now a good case could be made for Bella being a Mary Sue because (among other reasons) every event in the book is based around her and only her. Compare this to Harry Potter-sure, a lot of important things happen to Harry but there are also a lot of events happening to other characters. Aside from the additional bonus of creating a more realistic world, you also avoid the whole ‘I am the main character and therefore I am super special awesomesauce’ thing. Speaking of which…

3.     ALL the powers!

         Okay, so obviously there has to be a reason that you’re writing your story about this particular character instead of any other. They’re already deemed ‘special’ by the fact they’re supposedly worth writing a whole story about. However, this point is all about execution. The quickest way to a sure-fire Mary Sue is to give your character a bunch of special traits which automatically make them better/stronger/more powerful than everyone else around them. The best way to illustrate this is through examples.