How to Un-Mary Your Sue: A Few Basic Tips

Before I begin: for those of you that don’t know, the definition of “Mary Sue” I will be using throughout this blog post is that of a character who is insufficiently flawed or complex to be relatable for readers.  I use the term to refer to characters of both genders, because it doesn’t actually matter that it’s a woman’s name, considering the concept refers to a hypothetical construct and no one is actually named “Mary Sue” anymore these days.

I was recently reading through the famous and thoroughly praised (with good reason) Mary Sue Litmus Test, the original online measurement of whether or not one’s character was a dreaded Mary Sue.  I realized that while that particular test was both groundbreaking and eye-opening at the time when it came out a whopping seven years ago, it is already somewhat dated simply because people are so aware of it in online writing communities these days.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s still a great way for beginning writers to avoid some of the most common mistakes.  (For instance, it never even occurred to me the ways in which I would sometimes go out of my way to prove my one borderline-Sue character right until I saw them staring me in the face on that test.)  However, there is a lot more to a Mary Sue than just perfect beauty and infinite talent in everything and color-changing eyes as a mark of her half-vampire status. 

Frankly, the Mary Sue Litmus Test got too famous for its own good; nowadays the dreaded Mary Sue label is bandied around in writers’ forums and fan-fiction sites the way that Adolph Hitler comes up in vitriol-filled discussion boards.  Any character who has an unusual name, hair or eye color, or degree of talent in any area is branded with this (extremely hurtful) moniker by readers and dismissed to rot in the scrap heap.  On the flip side, amateur writers often think that so long as they take their otherwise unflawed character and give her an unflattering mole or an awkward phobia they somehow magically dodged that bullet and they are completely free of any sort of Mary Sue-dom.  All of this, whether people realize it or not, tends to come from relying on the Mary Sue Litmus Test as the be-all end-all authority on depth of character, when the creators themselves warn all over the test that it is at best a somewhat flawed starting point.

To give a somewhat amusing example, I recently ran real-life actor Jensen Ackles through the Mary Sue Litmus Test and it informed me that the actor/singer/director/model/amateur pilot with the startlingly green eyes and the creative intelligence balanced by devotion to his family and to helping charitable causes was a highly unrealistic flight of fancy that could not possibly exist in real life.  Similarly, people slap the Mary Sue label on Edward Cullen all the time and accuse him of being an unrealistic, underdeveloped character—and yet he squeaks by the Litmus Test with a passing grade.  I think that the problem is that people have started too often defining Mary Sues by the presence of certain traits (such as extreme beauty) when the original definition of the term referred to the absence of other traits (such as serious character failings).  And frankly the original definition is more useful for writers as a whole; readers the world over tend to be more concerned with whether a character is sufficiently complex than with whether a character doesn’t have more than three talents.  This is my own highly inexperienced, deeply biased, thoroughly self-congratulatory attempt to offer a little advice about how to get away from Mary Sue-dom.

Don’t mistake quirks for traits.  This one is an enormous pet-peeve of mine, most especially because it’s becoming a huge, whopping, deeply unfortunate trend throughout much of modern fiction.  For instance, a character who memorizes trivia about U.S. presidents has a quirk, not a trait.  A character who memorizes trivia about U.S. presidents because she tends to be socially awkward and spouts these facts as a way to fill gaps in conversation has a trait.  Dying one’s hair a different color every week is a quirk.  Doing it specifically as a way to test the boundaries of authority out of a desire to risk punishment is a trait.  It’s perfectly fine to give a character quirks (so long as you don’t go overboard), but you have to make those quirks say something about the person, or have a very clear origin somewhere in that person’s psyche, or else they’re just window-dressing for hollow dolls.

Similarly, don’t mistake demographic information for traits. Whereas I find the quirks-as-traits problem annoying, this one I find downright offensive.  Mental illness is not a character trait.  Homosexuality is not a character trait.  Judaism is not a character trait.  You can make your character a mildly depressed Jewish lesbian, but that won’t tell the reader anything about her personality unless you show her responding to her depression with strength or with humor or with bitterness, or have a moment where she struggles to reconcile her beliefs if her community doesn’t approve of homosexuality, or something like that.  No character can just be The Gay Friend or The Crazy Woman; it’s an insult to anyone who happens to be from that demographic characteristic to classify people just on their outward social labels.  One other one that drives me nuts: wealth is not a character trait.  How people use wealth can say a lot about them, but “wealthy successful straight Christian white male” can be just as much of a gross stereotype as anything else.

Put life on every planet; don’t just let space-junk satellites circle the sun. Okay, what I mean by that is the fact that (as someone who I can’t seem to find to credit once said), we are all the heroes of our own stories.  This is a bigger problem in fan fiction than original fiction—too often the characters and settings of someone else’s story are hijacked to exist as worshipful slaves for a single divine Mary Sue who descends from above to solve all their problems.  Even if you’re telling a story that takes place with an extremely tight first-person point of view or even entirely inside a character’s head (and I’ll save my feelings on that one for an angry blog post on offensive clichés that just won’t die), even the minor characters have to have their own lives.  It’s not enough just to get inside your protagonist’s head; you have to get inside the heads of all the characters that appear in your story.  Why is your villain acting the way she is?  How does your character’s father feel about her actions?  What is the best friend’s motivation for helping out the main character?  Often authors make the mistake of pouring all their love and devotion into the creation of a single brilliant character and then let everyone else circle around vaguely, having no life and no motivation outside of either helping or hindering the hero of the story.

Self-inserts, when done correctly, are actually okay.  One bit of inadvertent harm I think the Litmus Test has done the art of characterization is creating a somewhat unnecessary fear of basing characters too closely on oneself.  I’m more a fan of the “write what you know” school of thought, mostly because if I find a writer writing about something I know but that writer clearly doesn’t (being a girl dressed as a boy and growing up on the road are the two that I see most often), I tend to waver between being amused and being exasperated, but either way I don’t appreciate the story.  Obviously a word-for-word rendering of your own life story isn’t fiction at all, and a self-portrait with all the flaws omitted is worse still, but don’t be afraid of yourself.  Something Janet Burroway said (see, I remembered that source!) is that the best way to balance the familiar and the unfamiliar is to start with something totally foreign to yourself and then to fill in all the details with what you already know.  For instance, I was writing about an immortal traveler living in Belfast during the Irish Civil War, which was pretty damn distant for me, but when I needed to give him a job I had him work in the same type of industry I’m in, and when it came to interests I had him listen to my favorite music.  That way I could write with authority about at least some aspects of his life.  There’s really no need to make every single aspect of your character completely different from yourself; start with something different but don’t be afraid to plumb your own experiences for information when it comes to filling in all the gritty details.

Don’t try this at home: creating the Westley is not for the faint of heart (but worth a shot nonetheless). For those of you not familiar with TV tropes (the greatest website of all time), the term “Westley” comes from the main love interest of the book (and movie) The Princess Bride.  Westley has all the trappings of a Mary Sue: he’s unusually beautiful, incredibly smart, very strong, and has dozens of skills in everything from sword-fighting to storming castles.  And yet, whether or not he’s a Mary Sue, he is beloved.  No one accuses him of being a poorly developed or too-perfect character because the author successfully makes him well-rounded and relatable despite his infinite virtues.  The reader clearly understands his noble motivations, and he runs around as this larger-than-life tongue-in-cheek hero.  I would encourage everyone to strive for the Westley.  Not necessarily by giving their characters a million and one talents and making them the best at everything like he is, but by showing those talents in a ridiculous, self-mocking way that acknowledges the silliness of certain tropes, and by always giving the character concrete, clear reasons for possessing those traits or talents.  Westley has heart, soul, and character, and we can therefore forgive him for being too perfect to be real.  I encourage you to see if you can’t get the reader to forgive your character his virtues through making him intensely relatable and very logically formed. 

Every virtue—and every flaw—is almost always a double-edged sword. It’s very important to show how your character’s virtues can be flaws in the wrong situation.  To illustrate this, I refer to J.K. Rowling, who must have done something right considering an estimated 45% of the population of the planet found her characters at least tolerable enough to sit through over 5,000 pages’ worth of her writing.  Luna Lovegood has the potential to be the dreaded Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a subset of the Mary Sue that primarily consists of a girl who is aggressively quirky and perfect, and yet Luna is not, mostly because there are distinct, measurable drawbacks to her quirkiness.  Luna is unique to a fault—and as a result is so off-putting that she is often bullied by her classmates.  Though bullying is never okay, the reader understands why people would pick on her; her quirkiness makes her bizarre and hard to talk to.  Albus Dumbledore also has the potential to be a Mary Sue because of his vast wisdom, and yet Rowling easily dodges that bullet by showing that wisdom has made Dumbledore arrogant and often even manipulative because he tends to think so little of the people who are less experienced than he is.  The characters’ virtues—quirkiness, intelligence—lead logically to their flaws—social awkwardness, vanity.  Similarly, Ron’s biggest flaw—his ambition—becomes a virtue when he directs it toward helping Harry take down Voldemort, and Harry’s biggest flaw—his impulsiveness—continuously fluctuates between being a hindrance when dealing with difficult school situations and a help when battling Death Eaters.  There is no such thing as an absolute good quality; even imbuing your character with an excess one of the Cardinal Virtues can potentially be a downfall if, for instance, his great patience for others means he won’t confront people even when they are doing wrong. 

Make sure your traits make sense together. This one is sort of an addendum to the double-edged sword principle.  Your character’s virtues don’t have to be flaws and his flaws don’t have to be virtues, but having a character who is careless about her appearance and naturally very beautiful and insecure about her looks just doesn’t make sense.  Obviously most people are just born with some abilities, but let those abilities create your traits.  A character who is naturally very talented at sports might be chronically lazy because she never has to work hard to do well.  A socially awkward person might devote all her time to saving the world anyway.  Create balance through extrapolating naturally from the things your character does well to the things this very ability might cause her to fail at. 

Everyone has to laugh sometime.  Too often Mary Sues are absolutely dead serious about everything.  This is often because of a Terrible Past or else because of such Infinite Wisdom that the character doesn’t have time for trivial pursuits, and is often extremely off-putting.  Adding just a tiny bit of humor can go a very long way in emphasizing the core aspects of your character.  For instance, in the film of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when talking about the coming war with Peter, Aslan makes a veiled poke at his own omniscience.  Considering the quip is coming from freaking Aslan—he is God, after all—it’s surprising and delightful and makes a great contrast to everything else he says, which is generally dead serious.  Sometimes people do take themselves far too seriously, but that can be a character trait as well.  Don’t let even terrible sadness, when it must occur, prevent your character from smiling every so often as well.

Everyone has to cry sometime.  This is obviously the flip side of the same coin: no one has a perfect life, and in fact many people who are outwardly happy and composed are struggling with problems that would overwhelm many others.  A great way to make a lighthearted, witty character seem even more so is to show her breaking down and crying over a past relationship that ended badly, maybe, or a painful family situation, and then only a few hours later (or a few scenes later) once again bringing back that cheerful temperament.  I don’t mean that you have to have every single character in your entire book series spout witticisms left and right except when bursting into tears, but allowing a person’s mood to change will strengthen the readers’ impression of her core traits, not weaken it.  Let your characters reveal things about themselves they don’t want to. Let them get angry sometimes and be patient at others—find out what pushes their buttons.  In short, people often change a great deal from situation to situation, and a character will seem just as stock and cliché if she always reacts to both good news and bad with a single mood state as if she varies wildly in her temperament and intentions. 

That said, there’s a difference between character development and Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. Now, admittedly this is more of a problem in fan fiction than in original fiction, but it happens in original fiction as well.  This is the opposite of the everyone laughs/everyone cries problem: this is when a character, due to circumstance or time or plot developments, suffers from such extreme alterations of personality she is unrecognizable by the end.  Mary Sues too often start out irredeemably evil and suddenly suffer changes of heart that make them puppy-saving saints overnight.  It’s okay to have your character develop, to discover she was wrong about certain things, and to make an effort to change who she is.  But all of this should happen gradually, for clear-cut reasons, and in realistically small increments.  One great example of this is Eustace Scrubb from Voyage of the Dawn-Treader.  (The book, this time, not the movie.) Eustace dramatically changes over the course of the book, at least partially because he has the extraordinary experience of being turned into a dragon.  Before he’s moody, arrogant, and both unwilling and unable to adapt… And afterward he’s moody, tries to take other people’s opinions into question but often just goes with what he thinks is best anyway, and has adapted enough to Narnia that he then fails to adapt back to England once he returns.  Even though his behavior changes radically, his core traits do not.  He realizes his flaws and tries to account for them, but his flaws are still present, and though his virtues become more prominent they were there all along once you look for them; he learns to use his same traits in different ways without actually changing who he is. 

Know the canon. Again, this is obviously more relevant to fan fiction than to original fiction, but this can refer to knowing your own canon as well.  It may feel like you know your character very well—after all, you are her creator and her god—but inconsistencies are insidious, and they pop up even with characters you’ve been writing for years.  As Cates put it, learn to fear the Canon Sue, the character that ostensibly exists in the canon but has been altered in fan fiction to gain extra powers, be impossibly beautiful, or simply not have flaws.  As far as fan fiction goes, I’d recommend reading a few other people’s analyses of the characters you’re going to use—for instance, I had trouble putting into words how exactly Zuko changed over the course of Avatar the Last Airbender until I read of all things a Wikipedia article that phrased the process beautifully.  For original fiction, re-read yourself.  Just whatever you do, don’t try to force your characters to be a different way against their will, even if doing so would work better for the plot.  Such is the way to tears and cardboard-ness. 

There is such a thing as being too flawed.  Way too many of the just-starting-out writers I know try to get away from the horror of Mary Sue-dom by instead choosing to write about main characters who are so disgusting and irredeemable that they aren’t remotely appealing to read about.  Although there is plenty of space for the anti-hero in fiction—or even the anti-anti­-hero á la Dexter Morgan—the reader has to want to know more of this person’s story for some reason, and having a gross morally depraved character running around being gross and morally depraved without any sort of redeeming complexity is a major turn-off.  If your character is, say, a crime boss who kills puppies in his spare time, either give him a very good couple reasons for being the way he is—maybe he was pressured into the life by his parents, and he’s always hated puppies ever since one killed his hamster as a child—or else give him contrasting traits that make him ambiguous and complex.  Maybe he’s a clumsy but protective father, or he gives all the money he earns toward his ailing mother, or he is tortured at night by the fear he’s not a good person.  Maybe he’s an evil bastard through and through but he has a wicked sense of humor or is so delightfully clever in his schemes we love to watch him work anyway.  But the narration has to give the reader something to cling to about the character, or else there is really no point in continuing to read. 

Don’t lie. Most importantly, don’t lie to yourself.  The Mary Sue Litmus Test has a big warning up at the top that there is no point in taking the test if you’re going to fudge results or justify not clicking “yes” to traits you suspect your character might have, because you’re not going to get correct results if you do that.  Try and sit down with yourself and have a good, long talk about whether you’re being true to your gut about whether or not you have Mary Sues.  (I would, however, recommend against doing this out loud in public.)  If you do, it’s not the end of the world.  I happen to know of a whole list of things to try that will hopefully add some wrinkles to that cardboard perfection, written by this wonderful blogger Bug.  But this also means that you shouldn’t lie to your reader.  Don’t try to fix a Mary Sue by adding in a line in the narration about how she is temperamental, or whiny, or a bit of an airhead, and then never actually showing that trait.  And don’t try to edit your work selectively so that you only see how your character works well and not how she doesn’t.  Again, you’re lying. 

Have fun. I should clarify at this point that there is nothing morally wrong with Mary Sues.  They are just grossly unappealing, not crimes against humanity.  I think sometimes people agonize too much over creating absolutely flawlessly flawed characters in stories they never intend to publish.  Writing fiction serves no real practical purpose in the world, so if you want to have fun writing about an absolutely perfect person who goes around being perfect and never makes any mistakes, then by god go for it.  Just don’t expect anyone to read it or like it, which no one has to.  Conversely, if you find yourself slogging through the chore of finishing a story that has gotten out of hand or trying to reign in a character that you find yourself unable to relate to or like even though you created her, kill that sucker.  Considering the fact that making up stories exists purely for the purpose of being a combination of art and entertainment and should be the most entertainment of all for the creator, if you don’t like writing then don’t write.  Go out and be a doctor or a firefighter or a superhero instead.  Or go be a Mary Sue like Jensen Ackles.   

-Bug