Avoiding Marys and Garys: Part 2

And, now that I have a bit of a breather for, hopefully, the next hour, I will continue my discussion on Mary Sues.

If you remember, I gave a short list of normal Mary Sue traits on my last post. As I said, some of these traits are not bad. In fact, many of these descriptions could describe any of our characters. But, the difference between a good character and a Mary Sue is execution, how the author carries it out.

If you decide to make your character extremely talented and beautiful, you still have to keep them realistic. To keep them from looking like demigods that should be loved and admired by all, you have to remember that they are only human; no one is that perfect, even in a fictional story. Say, for example, you decide to make a character an expert linguist or magician. At the same time, make them absolutely horrible in another area like mathematics, athletics, or even just having no everyday sense at all. Another example would be a character who is stunningly beautiful physically; you could give it a real nasty temper or bad attitude that makes people back off.

On a related note, no character can be perfectly loved by all the good guys. We all have our own serious personality/ attitude flaws as well as our own perspectives on life and various events that we watch unfold before our eyes. Just because your character may think that the military needs to be more aggressive against the enemy or that the school needs a new pop machine doesn't mean that's the right view and that everyone else who thinks otherwise is an enemy. I am currently trying to put this into practice with my own fantasy novel; it is set during a war, and you have various captains, lieutenants, and then the king all trying to protect the land, but they all have different views from each other; just because a lieutenant thinks that the king and his nephew (the protagonist) have idiotic ideas doesn't automatically make him a villain nor a rival.

This leads into another point. A common flaw with Mary Sues is that they don't make mistakes or, if they do, they end up fixing it and solving the problem entirely; they don't really learn anything or retain the lesson permanently. Don't be afraid to let your characters make major mistakes with no easy solution or with one that doesn't completely solve the problem. In real life, the older we grow, we look back over mistakes we make and regret being foolish, but it is ultimately those mistakes that teach us and mold us. It is how your characters react to their mistakes and learn from them that will give them greater maturity and cause them to change.

I may continue this discussion later when I have more time.