Writing Meme - Day 8
Questions are here.
8 - Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.
Short answer - yes, and poke them with a metaphorical stick though sometimes they poke back
Rambly answer behind the cut
Turn your minds back to question 1, and the first fanfic I wrote. Remember it involved an OFC, so right there you have the first part of your answer. Up until I got bitten by the idea of Williamson's Tunnels being the home of Torchwood 4 in Liverpool I didn't really have any other OCs apart from token k'immies, minor in-passing characters and some Voyager crew members. My vision of Torchwood 4 cried out for OCs, so it got them, don't know why especially as I didn't even know what one of them looked like - and he was one of the most important (Mitch, the de facto leader). That in turn led to an alien publican, a pink haired female barista with a thing for conspiracy theories and a goth nurse from Liverpool who wants to run a well alien clinic.
How to avoid a Mary Sue? Hmmm. Well for the Torchwood 4 character Helen Evans, I didn't - she's intentionally got a big dollop of me in her make up (literally, it's the eye liner) - in fact you could almost say she's kind of an idealised and fictionalised version of me, but she's not quite me. Honest, there are some differences. That takes care of one of the types of Mary Sue - the self insertion - but there's the other form, the super-duper-mega person who can't ever get things wrong and saves the day while being initially an unlikely candidate on the surface. In her purest form Mary Sue is drop dead gorgeous with unusually coloured hair and eyes that make her instantly unforgettable; she's intelligent, sexy, adaptable and just a bit sickening.
Remove the gorgeous, sexy and unforgettable looking and you have a perfect example of both types of Mary Sue in Star Trek, though in this case I should say Marty (or Gary) Stu. Yes, Wesley Crusher, I'm looking at you, the unlikely person who saves the day while being intelligent, adaptable and more than a bit sickening.
So how to avoid falling into the pit that Gene Rodenberry did with Wesley?
Simple - don't make your characters *too* anything; too intelligent, too gorgeous, too bloody perfect. If you're writing humans, then they need to *be* human, even if they're immortal. Siannon O'Niall has her flaws and I didn't want her to be too good looking or 'perfect' in the way that a Mary Sue was generally seen to be - there's a reason she's a brunette with freckles, green eyes (apart from the fact that I'm a brunette with freckles and sludgy green eyes) and a slightly 'odd' face that moves her a step away from 'pretty' instead of being a Titian haired beauty with milk white, alabaster pale skin without a flaw and *bright* blue or green eyes. Now I did have a red-haired character with amber eyes (same colour as my sisters tbh) but I killed him off pretty soon after his first appearance as a plot device.
Now I've already admitted that Helen Evans is in effect a self-insertion Mary Sue, but part of that was because I wanted a goth character in Torchwood because I adore Abby in NCIS and I know lots and lots of goths, starting with myself. So I suppose you could say she starts off as a Mary Sue (in that she's a goth nurse from Liverpool), but is influenced by pretty much every goth person I've ever met and likewise every nurse I've ever met, which for over 20 odd years of being both a goth and a nurse is quite a lot of people!
If you've got to the end of all this and you want to discover more about Helen Evans, the only intentional Mary Sue I've written, for some reason you can look under the Torchwood 4 tag.
This entry was originally posted at http://a-lanart.dreamwidth.org/226673.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
8 - Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.
Short answer - yes, and poke them with a metaphorical stick though sometimes they poke back
Rambly answer behind the cut
Turn your minds back to question 1, and the first fanfic I wrote. Remember it involved an OFC, so right there you have the first part of your answer. Up until I got bitten by the idea of Williamson's Tunnels being the home of Torchwood 4 in Liverpool I didn't really have any other OCs apart from token k'immies, minor in-passing characters and some Voyager crew members. My vision of Torchwood 4 cried out for OCs, so it got them, don't know why especially as I didn't even know what one of them looked like - and he was one of the most important (Mitch, the de facto leader). That in turn led to an alien publican, a pink haired female barista with a thing for conspiracy theories and a goth nurse from Liverpool who wants to run a well alien clinic.
How to avoid a Mary Sue? Hmmm. Well for the Torchwood 4 character Helen Evans, I didn't - she's intentionally got a big dollop of me in her make up (literally, it's the eye liner) - in fact you could almost say she's kind of an idealised and fictionalised version of me, but she's not quite me. Honest, there are some differences. That takes care of one of the types of Mary Sue - the self insertion - but there's the other form, the super-duper-mega person who can't ever get things wrong and saves the day while being initially an unlikely candidate on the surface. In her purest form Mary Sue is drop dead gorgeous with unusually coloured hair and eyes that make her instantly unforgettable; she's intelligent, sexy, adaptable and just a bit sickening.
Remove the gorgeous, sexy and unforgettable looking and you have a perfect example of both types of Mary Sue in Star Trek, though in this case I should say Marty (or Gary) Stu. Yes, Wesley Crusher, I'm looking at you, the unlikely person who saves the day while being intelligent, adaptable and more than a bit sickening.
So how to avoid falling into the pit that Gene Rodenberry did with Wesley?
Simple - don't make your characters *too* anything; too intelligent, too gorgeous, too bloody perfect. If you're writing humans, then they need to *be* human, even if they're immortal. Siannon O'Niall has her flaws and I didn't want her to be too good looking or 'perfect' in the way that a Mary Sue was generally seen to be - there's a reason she's a brunette with freckles, green eyes (apart from the fact that I'm a brunette with freckles and sludgy green eyes) and a slightly 'odd' face that moves her a step away from 'pretty' instead of being a Titian haired beauty with milk white, alabaster pale skin without a flaw and *bright* blue or green eyes. Now I did have a red-haired character with amber eyes (same colour as my sisters tbh) but I killed him off pretty soon after his first appearance as a plot device.
Now I've already admitted that Helen Evans is in effect a self-insertion Mary Sue, but part of that was because I wanted a goth character in Torchwood because I adore Abby in NCIS and I know lots and lots of goths, starting with myself. So I suppose you could say she starts off as a Mary Sue (in that she's a goth nurse from Liverpool), but is influenced by pretty much every goth person I've ever met and likewise every nurse I've ever met, which for over 20 odd years of being both a goth and a nurse is quite a lot of people!
If you've got to the end of all this and you want to discover more about Helen Evans, the only intentional Mary Sue I've written, for some reason you can look under the Torchwood 4 tag.
This entry was originally posted at http://a-lanart.dreamwidth.org/226673.html. Please comment there using OpenID.