The Hopeful Emo Kid

don’t write Mary Sues!

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Mary Sues (or Gary Stu for the male version.) Is a character who is perfect.

Young and good looking but oh so humble to the point of a fault. They’re ordinary and unable to see why they’re special.

They’re wise beyond their years. also, so skilled in whatever fits in their story magic, fighting, driving, living etc.

they have no problem saving the day, and without even breaking a sweat. They even have time to solve their octagon shaped love life. But somehow, no one is upset or hurt with whoever they pick, because they’re so damn likable. and everyone rides off into the sunset together.

Meanwhile, us readers are not only bored to death but we came back as zombies just to roll our eyes.

Everyone has come across these kinds of characters whether it’s in fanfiction or even in Published books, movies and TV shows, even if you didn’t know that there was a term for it, either way you were probably so annoyed with the character it made you want to pull you hair out.

So today I’m going to show you how to make sure that your characters aren’t eye rolling worthy Mary Sues.

Give them real flaws.

We want them to be perfect, perfect means likable and awesome!

But Real people are very far from being perfect, people are so full of flaws and holes that they look like Swiss cheese.

I’m not saying to make them so flawed that they’re pathetic (unless that’s point of their arc and growth in which case Rock on.) but a couple of small flaws or even one big one can go a long way to making your characters feel real, likable and relatable.

Make then so prideful that they can’t admit when they’re wrong.

Make them so stubborn to the point that they think they can do anything.

Make them so detached from reality that they can’t see that their life is falling apart.

Have no fear and make your characters as flawed as you feel is necessarily.

The authors that write Mary Sues a lot of time give their Mary Sues ‘flaws.’ like clumsiness, -but only when not fighting and/or when it would be funny to be so ungraceful, –

A troubled childhood -didn’t know that was a character flaw but okay sure authors. –

And low ‘self-esteem.’ -well, a warped form of it where it’s closer to just normal humbleness. –

And sometimes they use all three so called flaws.

Characters like this are just flat, unoriginal and just plain boring making the readers end up feeling cheated. please for the love of God, don’t do this. You are much better at writing than to resort to this kind of awfulness.

So, spend some time figuring out who your characters are. all of the good, bad and the ugly part of who they are as a quote unquote person. This will go along to making your story as great as you know it can be.

Don’t make everyone like them.

We want everyone to like our characters, they’re our children, our babies and parents doesn’t like to hear when someone doesn’t like their kid.

But not everyone gets along with each other. Sometimes people rub us the wrong way, sometimes they clash with us and our ideals. Sometimes we don’t like a person for no reason other than the fact that we don’t.

It’s okay to have friends should a lot of affection towards the characters, or have the love interest think that they were a gift from the heavens.

but not every person that your character comes into contact with needs to like them and fall to their knees as they walk on by. and no, having the antagonist hate them doesn’t count.

authors that write this kind of characters, or even author that write well-rounded characters will add a scene (or even whole characters.) that are supposed to show off that not everyone like them and for me as a reader it has the opposite effect on me where I feel like the author is trying a little too hard to show us that people don’t always them.

So instead of making a big deal out of liking them, try making scenes that not only show off the likability (or unlikable in some cases.) of your characters, but have other driving point of your story in that scene as well.

Like In my current work in progress, the human endeavor, Isabel faces discrimination for being homeless.

but instead of that being the point of the scene, the point of the scenes is: we see the anger and sadness that Isabel feels at the world for how things ended up for her and the self-loathing that she feels toward herself for feeling anything at all and that she can’t control her emotions.

There’s also another scene where at this safe haven for homeless kids, everyone votes to kick Isabel out because of the looming threats from Gang kids all because of her.

And instead of it being a scene just showing that everyone has turned their backs and started hating her.

it’s about Isabel’s internal monologue about realizing that she can’t to runway from her problems anymore, because it was putting everyone she loved in danger. She either needed to grow up and face her fears or the people that she had grown to love was going to get hurt.

The result of this method is now having scenes that have a lot more depth to them, because we are moving forward with the plot but also showing how the characters interact with each other whether it’s a good or bad one.

Make them fail and fail a lot.

Your characters don’t have to be the end all be all. They don’t have to be one of a kind.

Yes, they are the hero. but that doesn’t mean that the world need to revolved around them and only them.

It’s easy to make the story feel like the main character is in the driver’s seat but it really shouldn’t be that way.

It should be that they’re behind the wheel of a burning car with no power steering. The story shouldn’t be led by the actions of the character but rather that your character’s actions should be led by the story. I feel like this is the number one mistake that new and old writers make.

Think about all that has happened in your life, now think about all the things that you were in control of it happening. Sure, your actions had consequences, life is made up of a snowball rolling down a hill.

But there probably was a lot of things that blindsided you, many things that I’m sure took you by surprise and you had to adapt to the new problems in front of you, which lead to you grow as a person and made you who you are now.

That being said. People fail all the time. We don’t always succeed in all of our endeavors. And book people should be no different. In fact, they should fail even more!

Their homework that makes it so they don’t fail the class should catch on fire for no reason.

they should bomb that big gig that was going to put them on the map.

They should throw up as they are giving that big speech.

A big trademark of Mary Sues is that they’re not challenged at all and it’s not exciting seeing someone breeze through without any conflict.

The point of a story is to watch as the characters grow into themselves and get to the point where they defend the dragon, win the duel against the evil wizard, pass the test, win the heart of the person they love, conquer their fears and the human doubt.

All of which, wouldn’t happen if they didn’t have anything stopping or tripping them along the way.

And your story end up being 300 or so pages of someone going three states over for a sandwich that was a room away.

People want to root for someone. They want to feel like when the character conquers something that it was a win for them too. They want to be left on the edge of their seat, they want to feel like they haven’t breathed out for pages.

And as a writer it is something that we want too. We want to write words that will make people jump for joy. Cry from sadness and sigh out of relief.

we want them to laugh at the character’s witty jokes. And squeal when our characters confess their love to one another.

It’s not only because it’s rewarding to see all the time, energy and sleepless nights pay off when we see people form fandoms over our little darlings. it’s also our duty to the readers to make sure that we use all our talent and hard work to write the best story we can.

So, go on lovable kiddos, Write the characters that I know you can and speak wonder in the hearts of people all over the world. And let your character’s shine and speak for themselves. Just make sure that you avoid traps and pitfalls that I listed for you.

and make sure to tell me via comments/Twitter/facebook/whatever you choose, who is the most Mary Sue character you can think of?

Until next time.

when the muses don’t want to speak.

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Writers are weird creatures, (sorry but it’s true.) we pull not only totally made up people out of thin air. but lands, worlds and monster. even now I’m pulling a whole blog out of nothing, out of my brain and out with my fingertips. It’s great and awesome. Writers are a cool group of people. Go us!

But that doesn’t mean that it’s all that easy, anyone that has ever had to do a paper for school understands the dreadful feeling of sitting down and staring at a blank page for hours and getting nothing done.

And no, it’s not because you are getting distracted from the internet (well mostly.) and it’s not because you’re not good at writing (not by a long shot.) no, It’s writers block. it happens to the best of us.

If anyone saw how I wrote anything, wither it’s a blog post, something from my WIP, or even a tweet would see that 90% of the time me working looks like this.

WHAT AM I DOING?

WHAT AM I TYPING?

WHAT ARE THESE WORDS?

WHY IS THIS SO AWFUL?  

WHY I AM DOING THIS?!?!

Pretty much over and over until I get my stuff together.

So for the times that the voices in your head don’t want to talk to you, or if the fog covering that new and wonderful place won’t show themselves to you, or the monsters are hiding in their dark caves. Well then maybe some of these tricks will help being them out in the opening.

 Change your writing space.

you know the ins and outs. You have seen that same spot on the floor, or that same chip on your desk (if you have one.) the cup that might have been sitting there for days. You have seen all that stuff a billion times now.

you spend hours in there, sometimes days at a time, you can close your eyes and picture it too vividly that you don’t even have to be in there. and that’s just boring to us creative people. It doesn’t make our minds run excited as much. So spacing out starts to happens, boredom sets in and if you a phone or a computer with you, the internet is calling for you to watch cute animal videos or taking quizzes about type of bread you are, based on your star sigh.

And if your writing space is at your home office, a working office, there’s even more to keep your mind off of writing,

Dishes and laundry are piling up, you should be trying to get that great deal for the office, make your boss proud. You’re at the office so you should be working, not staring at a blank page! The kids want you to play with them, the list goes on and on it’s hard to just only think about writing and nothing else.

Now as much as I think it is importation to find your space, if you find that any of this is happening to you then you should change it up a little.

go out to a coffee shop, go sit in a park, go somewhere you don’t normally write and just look around.

There’s probably a lot of people, a lot of stuff going on, let your mind try and posses all that information and get your mind running.

Or if you already write in that kind of setting to begin with then maybe there’s too much going on for you to settle your mind. It could be just overloading your senses too much, rather in stimulating it.

so try going to a very quiet place, try and clear your mind, let it breath and do its thing.

Like for me, I write in a space with a lot of noise going on, but I’m writing this blog, sitting on the floor of my best friends’ house at 2 in the morning with only the sound of my keyboard.

I always find that I get more work done here or when I’m at one of my sibling’s houses I find that the words come out easy because there’s less things that make my mind want to wander away.

Even changing small things, like what you drink, eat, use to light the space, what you use to jog down the words will also help this problem.

Go back through and edit what you already have.

Now, I know that a lot of writers are against doing this but bear with me here.

I’ll touch on this much, much further on a different blog, but for now I will state I am so far on the band wagon for this I’m pretty much driving it.

Editing when you have writers block is great way to stay productive while in the endless desert that is writers block. You stay well versed into the world of your project, and its lore and magic or any of the sort. Instead of spending more and more time away from the world, and then have to reintroduce yourself to the world that you had made.

You can also save time while editing bad grammar and awkward sentences while you can’t think of anything new to write. making a lot less work for yourself in the long run.

You can fix any plot holes that might have popped out now that you might not have noticed before.

showing all the feelings and in tenseness through well place setting rather than just telling your readers why we should feel anything towards your written baby.

and make sure that any foreshadowing that you put in, are hiding in plain sight. And get new ideas or develop other ones that might have only begin to bud.

Just write random stuff.

So, my little intro wasn’t just me being funny (well okay a little,) when writers block hits me, I just start randomly typing. Anything, any thought that pops in my head.

I writer my feelings, I write about the weather, sometimes I just put on a movie or TV show and write the words along as the speak.

Whatever to keep my hands moving and my mind thinking.

Also, a lot of times writers block is triggered or even a directly caused by self-doubt and writing any bad feelings or doubts you may have, helps get it out of your system, then going back to the kick ass writer that you are.

Not only that but if you just stop writing for days, weeks, months whenever you hit wall is more damaging then doing you any good. Writing is like a muscle, if you stop using it, then it will get weaker and weaker.

So, it’s a lot better to type or write ‘I suck.’ Over and over for five pages then to walk always and might never pick it back up.

I think that one of the worst things as a writer you can do is just stop and wait for inspiration to come to you, I’ve been guilt of this too, I think at some points all writers are. but that old saying goes that if you wait around for inspiration to hit you then you’ll never be able to write.

So even if you are tired, or can’t think of something. Or depressed or anything of the sort, just write. Not only will you most likely feel better but you might end up with something great. It keeps your mind forced on something other than self-doubt, pity, sadness or whatever wants to take away your voice.

And if it isn’t great the first time around well, that’s what editing is for.

Knowing when it’s just not working.

If writer’s block is happening every time you are sitting down to write in a current project, every time it makes you want to pull your hair out or you stare at blank pages for weeks on end, cry your eyes out or feeling less of your ability then it’s not you, it’s the project that you are working on.

sometimes it just doesn’t work, about the idea needs to be reworked,

maybe the theme or topic just isn’t as exciting as you thought it was.

Maybe the characters just plain blow.

You can’t find the rhyme that means what you want it too.

Or that post feel like meaninglessly words just to have something.

If deep down, you feel that it’s not working then there’s no shame in scrapping it, and moving onto something different. It doesn’t make you a failure to move on to something that you care a lot more about.

Because if you write (or make, do any of the sort.) something that you don’t care about, not only will everyone know that you don’t care. But it makes mockery of what you were trying to say in the first place.

So, there you have it lovable kiddos, hopefully these will help you out next time that the muses feel like calling in sick.

have a good way to get passed writer’s block? let me know! Via comments/Twitter/Facebook/whatnot

Until next time.