Rooftop Sessions: What To Do With Mary Sue?

So you’re finally finished. You stayed up half the night and your fingers are all twisted up from hours of nonstop typing, but your masterpiece is complete: “The Adventures of Ashleigh Arabella Julia Jones-McCartney, the Prettiest Girl in the World.”

You can’t wait to post this baby on the web. After all, who wouldn’t want to read about a girl with cascading blonde hair who can speak three languages, fix cars, and bake a wicked crumb cake? This is the true, untold story of the Beatles—Ashleigh Arabella convinces Brian Epstein to go the Cavern Club, where he signs the boys on the spot and makes Ashie-Poo the fifth Beatle. She and Paul McCartney fall madly in love, get married the next day and have lots of babies. The end. Oh, the wonder of it all! This story is perfection itself...right?

Hold on there. Don’t even think about clicking that mouse button just yet. Houston, we have a problem—and that problem is your character. And I mean character in the loosest sense of the word.

What you’ve just written is called a “Mary Sue.” If you’ve never heard the term before, Mary-Sue is little more than an avatar, a product of wishes and daydreams. You don’t have a time machine, you can’t go back to the sixties and meet the Beatles yourself...so you dream up a character to live out your adventures for you.

Mary Sue is often described as a perfect person, but I’ll clarify that a little: Mary-Sue is the author’s version of a perfect person. She often has a glamorous name, sometimes just a fancier spelling of the author’s name. She takes many forms: Paul’s perky little sister, Cynthia’s best friend, cutest little redhead in the Cavern Club. Mary Sue is strikingly beautiful, has really nice hair, eyes of an unusual color, a fiery personality, many talents, and is either loved or envied by the main characters. Maybe something terrible happened to her in the past, which only makes the others love her even more. She can say or do no wrong. She saves the day, seduces the Beatle of her dreams, or dies a tragic death...or any combination of the three. And she’s universally despised in the world of fanfiction.

Wait a minute, you say. Despised? You never meant to write anything like that! It was just a harmless little fantasy you had about meeting the Beatles. All you ever did was wonder what it felt like when your favorite Beatle held you in his arms. You only gave your character that beautiful blond hair and that breathtaking singing voice because your own hair is drab and boring and...well, you’ve always wanted to be able to sing yourself. All you wanted to do was to make your character wonderful so people would like her.

Don’t panic. Your heroine isn’t necessarily doomed to your PC’s recycle bin. Keep reading to learn what makes Mary Sues so bad in the first place and how you can turn your Mary Sue into an interesting, well-rounded character.

Little Miss Perfect

It’s only natural that an author wants the audience to like his or her character. Writing about flawless people, however, isn’t going to accomplish this. You’ve heard the term “Little Miss Perfect” before, right? Well, it’s not meant to be a compliment.

Take a minute and think about the most perfect person in your life. Think about that girl at your school or job, the one who never has a hair out of place, the one who always has something clever to say in class or a meeting, the one who can get away with anything. She has a fabulous wardrobe, a cool set of friends, a drool-worthy boyfriend, an expensive car.

Do you want to be like her? Probably. But do you actually like her all that much? Probably not.

As a matter of fact, you might have heard others gossiping about her behind her back, or maybe you rolled your eyes when your boss praised her for yet another one of her brilliant ideas. Little Miss Perfect saves the day again.

See what I mean? Well, the rules don’t change much when it comes to writing fanfiction. We hate perfect people in our stories just as much as we hate them in real life...and for a couple different reasons.

First of all, there’s no such thing as a truly perfect person. Even that seemingly flawless girl you know has a bad habit or something she’d like to change about herself. See, the trick to writing a good story is to make it as true to life as possible. Even if you’re writing about the Beatles in the future or on a distant planet, there needs to be something your audience can recognize and identify with in order for them to stay interested. Most people already knows there’s no such thing as a perfect person, so when they start a story about someone who is perfect, nine times out of ten they’re going to think, “Yeah, right!” and stop reading. When you spend a lot of time and hard work on a story, “Yeah, right!” probably isn’t the reaction you want.

Second, and most important, perfect people are BORING. There’s no way your story will have any real problems or drama – after all, Mary Sue is so perfect, how could anything bad possibly happen to her? And besides, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of other stories on the web exactly like yours: beautiful, wonderful girl gets the Beatle of her dreams and rescues him/marries him/dies. Nobody wants to read yet another version of someone else’s perfect girl. Giving your character more talents or longer hair won’t make her a more interesting person; it’s still the same old Mary Sue we’ve read a hundred times before.

The Golden Rules

That said, not all Mary Sues are bad. It’s not easy, but a Beatle romance can be done...and done well, too. Here are a few simple tips that will help you make sure your heroine is a benefit to your Beatles’ story and not just your own personal self-esteem booster.

A couple other name notes. When you write, try to think of the time period in which your story is set. Is your fabulous name plausible for the time period, or will she be the only person in the Cavern Club named Kayla or Nikki? Keep in mind that if a name is en vogue today, it probably wasn’t forty years ago, so you’re going to have to do a little research. Look up lists of popular names for that time; also look back at public figures, like singers or movie stars. And unless you’re writing about the actual person, don’t use canon names. You might think it’s really clever that your heroine has the same name as John’s beloved, deceased mother. It’s not.

2) The more time you spend telling us how gorgeous your character is, the more likely your story will suffer for it. How long do you focus on her physical appearance? A paragraph? A page? A popular way to begin fanfiction is to introduce the heroine and then give her complete physical description and life history. But the trouble with this is, once the audience reads it, they can already figure out what kind of story you wrote and there’s no need for them to read any more. Besides, if you have a story driven entirely by how your character looks, it probably isn’t a very good story to begin with.

Think of it this way. Let’s say you’re at a party, and you’ve spent hours making yourself look as fabulous as you possibly can. Then, in walks your biggest rival, with her perfect hairstyle and her expensive new tube dress that just barely covers her long, sexy legs—and suddenly, you don’t feel so fabulous anymore. Which character do you think the audience will identify with more: Little Miss Perfect or the girl who worries she could never measure up? Now this doesn’t mean your character can’t be pretty. But remember, a person doesn’t have to be stunningly beautiful to be loved. If this were true, then 99.9% of the people in the world would spend their lives miserable and alone, and we can see that isn’t the case.

One last thing: try to stay away from flowery metaphors, as in don’t describe her eyes as “two pools of glistening sapphire” or anything else that’s more likely to make your reader gag than gush. “Blue” will work just as well...probably better.

3) Keep her amazing talents to a minimum. Now we all have our favorite hobbies, and everyone’s good at doing something. The problem comes when your character is a whiz at anything and everything she tries. Someone gives her a paintbrush, and even though’s she never held one before, she whips up a brilliant, Picasso-like abstract with her eyes closed...then takes her fluffy chocolate souffle out of the oven and sets a new world record in the hundred-meter dash. Sound like anybody you know? Didn’t think so.

Remember, you’re going for realism here. What happens when real people try something they’ve never tried before? Well, they might struggle with it at first, make a few mistakes, sometimes fall flat on their faces. Maybe your heroine is a brilliant artist...but reduces everything in the kitchen to charcoal. Or maybe she can whip up a mean Trout Amandine...but put a canvas in front of her and she can’t come up with anything more than a couple of wobbly stick figures. That’s real life, and that’s what keeps the audience reading.

* Ask yourself this question—what’s your story actually about? “Girl meets author’s favorite Beatle and falls in love with him.” Fair enough. There are plenty of stories, even published ones, that have a similar theme. “Girl meets author’s favorite Beatle, does amazing things to impress said Beatle, has pages and pages of hot sex, again with said Beatle, then marries him and lives happily ever after.” BORING!

What really makes a good story is conflict. Character gets into a jam, character needs to get herself out. If you can’t come up with anything better than, George and Paul both love her and she doesn’t know who to pick, then you’re going to turn off a lot of readers. Try to give your character a real problem, one where the solution might not come so easily at first. She has to give a big speech in order to pass a difficult class, but she has such bad stage fright that she freezes up every time she gets to the microphone. How will she ever pass that class? Or maybe she has to be able to ride a horse to get a great movie part, but she’s never done it before. So she goes out to take lessons—only she falls off on the first day and breaks her leg. Now how’s she going to get that great part?

Think about your own relationship with your husband or boyfriend, or study another couple like your parents or grandparents. Is it all love, flowers, and sex, 24-7? Of course not. Sometimes those couples fight, have misunderstandings, or burp and fart next to each other in bed. Even though the Beatles are arguably the most famous public figures who ever lived, all four of them were also human beings like the rest of us—so write them that way.

And remember, when you’re writing about real people, you have to write them the way they really were, not the way you want them to be. Paul McCartney went by Paul, not James; therefore he’d be unlikely to let any of his girlfriends call him James, no matter how amazing they were or how much you like the name. John Lennon was a man who hid his insecurities behind a biting, sometimes cruel sense of humor. So he probably wouldn’t open up to the first pretty face he saw, no matter how much you’ve dreamed of him doing it.

Basically, it all comes down to this. You want to fashion your character after yourself, fine. Just make sure it’s the real you—the one with hair that won’t hold a curl even after you showered it with two bottles of hairspray, who snores like a buzzsaw and wakes up with terrible bedhead, who’s afraid of spiders, and sometimes says the wrong thing, and always worries about your grades, or your boss from hell, or your spindly little bird legs. Your faults are what make you human.

Well, your audience is human too. We like reading about people who are imperfect, just like us, with hopes and fears and dreams and flaws. The best characters are the ones we can identify with, the ones where we can say, “Yeah, I’ve felt that way, too.” And we’ll identify a lot more with the real you, not you-only-taller-prettier-smarter-kinder-wittier-sweeter-perfect.

What To Do With Mary-Sue? How To Send Her Packing!