S. K. Dunstall

A fellow writing-workshop member introduced me to the Mary-Sue test.

A true Mary Sue is a surrogate for the author. But not just any surrogate… oh, no, far from it. MS is not merely a stand-in for the author. Instead, she is the embodiment of all that is true, good, and holy. She immediately wins the respect and affection of all the canonical characters, and, if the story is a romance, the undying love of whoever the writer has a crush on. She is brilliant. She is beautiful. Her hair is never out of place, even when she has a flowing mass of (fill in the blank) locks. Her career, interests, and personal beliefs are eerily similar to the author’s own. She always holds the key to the mystery. She knows how to work the computer. The slavering, vicious guard dogs curl up at her feet and gaze up affectionately. If she dies, she does so bravely and for the sake of others. In various science fiction fandoms, she occasionally saves the universe while she’s at it.

Eshva, Whatever Happened to Mary Sue, based on a definition by The Divine Adoratrice [whose link was broken when I tried to look up the original]

There’s a good entry on Mary-Sue’s in Wikipedia, and they even point you to some of the tests you can take to see whether your character is a Mary-Sue or not. My favourite is the Ponyland Express test.

One of the things about a Mary Sue is that no-one likes them.

I find it fascinating that a character the author loves so much is so intensely disliked by everyone else, particularly when these characters are based on the author him/herself.

Mary-Sues originated in fan fiction. Most of the reason no-one likes them is because they’re too perfect, and they take over the story to the detriment of other characters. Not a good thing when a fan goes in to read fiction about their favourite characters and this perfect (in every way) stranger takes over the story.

I took the Mary Sue test. My character was not a Mary-Sue, but I was warned that I had to care a little more for my character.

A lot of sites lately have talked about the Penguin and Amazon Breakthrough Novel and Authonomy. While I can’t speak for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel—there’s a good discussion about it on Nathan Bransford’s blog—I can talk about Authonomy, as both Sherylyn and I have been on Authonomy since the start of the year.

This is how we did it, and what we hoped to get out of it.

There are two of us. We generally write together. We weren’t sure how two authors would go, so we decided that Sherylyn would ‘own’ the book. We were in it not so much to get a book published by Harper Collins (although that would be a nice bonus, of course), but to garner feedback from readers. In particular, we wanted to see whether a story like Potion would still work, or whether it was so old hat (elves, a journey) that no-one wanted to read it.

We both registered as Authonomy users. I registered as myself, Karen, while Sherylyn registered under our pen name, Rowan Dai. It was an easy decision. She had a lot more time over January and February to devote to it. Plus, she’s more outgoing and enjoys the forum chats. (The author name doesn’t have to be the same as the users, but that’s the way we planned it. Even so, if we did it again she would use Sherylyn.)

The book we put up was Potion, only on the forum we called it Not So Simple After All. Potion has always been a working title. We’re trying out Not So Simple, but we’re still not sure it’s the final title.

Sherylyn has spent considerable time on the forums and reading other people’s novels. She probably won’t be able to do it for much longer, but for the moment she has been doing a lot of work. It has been a really interesting marketing exercise. I recommend that everyone try it, just to see how much difference it makes by having a visible (and non-negative) presence makes.

One thing the commenters on Nathan Bransford’s blog said about the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award was that they met a lot of really nice people. Other writers like themselves. It’s the same with Authonomy. There are a lot of really nice people out there, and they all have the same interest as you. They’re all writing novels. How good is that?

The feedback we have got to date on Potion (Not So Simple After All) has been fantastic. We have learned so much about where the problems are in the first few chapters. People have said the same sorts of things—in general—too many characters, certain spots are confusing, and so on. Not only have people said what doesn’t work for them, they have also offered suggestions as to how we might fix the problems.

In fact, it’s been so good we’re going to put Barrain up too. Just to see how we can improve it.

When I was a child what I knew of elves came from English books written for children—these tiny little creatures with green tunics and peaked green hats who sat under red and white toadstools and sewed. I was never sure what they were sewing. As a young child I adored these little creatures, but I got older and left all the ‘fairy’ stuff behind me. Elves were for kids.

I’m not sure where these images came from, because elves have been around in folklore for hundreds of years. In most tales they are human-sized and human-like, with some powers. It took Tolkien to breathe life back into the old-style elf with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Suddenly elves were fashionable, and Tolkien’s depiction of elves as more beautiful and longer-living than humans was the accepted elf-standard —or stereotype, as many people now say.

I loved these elves. Give me a stunningly beautiful elf with power and talent, and have him/her struggle with some truly human emotions like friendship and moral right, and I’m hooked. If I thought I could get away with it I’d write a lot more elf stories myself.

But anything that’s fashionable eventually goes out of fashion. Elves are out.

If you’ve even got a whiff of an elf in your story, then your story is doomed. Or so popular opinion has it. They’re old hat. No-one wants to read about them any more. But … but. I want to read about them. Am I the only person in the world who wants to?

I don’t think so, no.

But they’re stereotyped. They’re always beautiful. They’re always haughty. They’re always arrogant.

So. Tolkien’s definition of Elves is what we have come to know and expect. It is what we, the writers, bring to our books that makes our elves special. And it’s not the fact that they’re elves, per se, that makes the stereotype, it’s how we round out, or don’t round out, the characters to make them complex, multi-dimensional people.

I don’t mind starting with the stereotype. I’ll read a book about a long-lived elf who considers his race slightly superior to humans as much as I’ll read a book about a stiff-upper-lip Englishman, or a post-traumatic stress disorder war veteran, or a hairdresser who minces around the salon and talks in a high voice. (Incidentally, I have a hairdresser like this. He’s got an elegant, graphic artist wife whom he absolutely adores and they have a two-year old son called Benji he can talk about for hours.)

All I care about is where the author takes it from there and how they make the character someone I care about.

The mincing hairdresser and the stiff-upper-lip Englishman have gone the way of elves. Out of fashion. The ptsd veteran will go the same way. It’s fashion.

Fashions come and fashions go, but they usually come around again.

I want more books about elves. Maybe I’ll just have to wait until the next generation of readers comes up. The ones who haven’t read about elves before (because they were unfashionable and they were too busy reading about their own fashionable creatures—vampires and werewolves) and look on them as something new.

Maybe, because they’re so out right now I should start writing a novel about elves. It takes a long time to create a book. By the time I’m up to the fifth draft elves might be fashionable again.

I’ve got lots of ideas.

In Defence of Elves, part 1.

I have spent time on the Authonomy site lately.

When I first heard about Authonomy I wasn’t sure it would work. I’m still not convinced it will work long term, once the initial momentum dies down, but for the moment at least it’s doing a reasonable job of picking the better stories—sort of.

I imagine it would be somewhat like your average slush pile.

Authonomy is a Harper Collins site that allows writers to post part (minimum 10,000 words) or all of their novel and have other users vote on it. If the story garners enough votes it makes it into the top five for the month and someone at Harper Collins will pick it up, read it and, if they think it’s good enough, purchase it. I haven’t seen any purchases yet.

From my observations:

• Networking obviously helps. If you provide feedback on one person’s book they will usually reciprocate by looking at yours, so the more active you are, the more likely you are to garner votes.
• In the stories I have read and commented on to date, there appears to be a reasonable level of responsible voting. That is, readers won’t vote for the book unless they feel it warrants attention. Harper Collins encourages this by ranking responsible voters higher. If you consistently pick good books (and better still, pick them early), your book gets to the top of the list faster.
• As you would expect, there is an enormous range of quality in the books placed on the site.
• There are some brilliant stories out there, but a lot of them really need another rewrite (or two) before one could say they were finished.
• The general level of writing is above beginner. These people (and I include myself in these people) are serious about writing, but they’re not quite there yet. Some of them are very close.
• There is some good writing out there—a small number of books are very close to publishable.

I have found in reading stories that the blurb is important. This would effectively be the pitch in a query letter and it does make a difference. And I usually also have a good idea by the third page whether or not I want to keep reading.

I was channel surfing last night when I chanced on Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction.

This is a movie about a man who starts hearing a woman’s voice inside his head. This woman appears to be his author, and he is the character in a novel she is writing. (I haven’t watched it. I must do after this.)

In the scene I stopped at, Ferrell —a tax collector—is talking to a woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who has paid only part of her tax bill. There is no sexual tension between the two at all, but suddenly the author’s voice comes in over the top and talks about how Ferrell’s character couldn’t help noticing what attractive legs the woman has, and the way her body fits snugly into her skirt—or thoughts similar to that.

Because I was channel surfing and hadn’t expected the voice, it came totally out of the blue.

I had to laugh because I have read a lot of books where the physical attraction between protagonists is just like that.

I’m not talking about those stories which build up to events which culminate in a sudden physical attraction between two characters. When that’s well done it works, and it’s good.

Nor am I talking about relationships where the protagonists have been friends for a long time and then something happens that triggers an awareness of each other in a sexual way.

And of course, I’m not talking about the story where the attraction starts when the characters meet, and just keeps growing in looks and actions all the way through.

What I am talking about are those books where the characters are getting along just fine, without a hint of attraction between them and then, for no logical reason whatsover related to the story, they start thinking about each other sexually. It feels like the author has decided—all of a sudden—that they must be lovers. Almost as if the author is stuck for ideas, or doesn’t really know their characters. Or they need to change the direction of the story.

So, out of the blue, both characters start noticing things about each other that they hitherto hadn’t.

And it feels like an act of God. One minute the characters are friends or acquaintances, the next—by authorial decree—they’re embarking on an affair.