Tag: RulesofWriting

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One of the reasons John Scalzi has never been able to lift himself out of mediocrity except by coloring Robert Heinlein by the numbers is that he doesn’t understand the first thing about understand and creating characters. Or, apparently, self-contradiction.

“I created Bert,” says Frank Oz. “I know what and who he is.” And no, he isn’t gay.

John Scalzi
Frank Oz says that Bert’s not gay and he should know because he created him. I mean, Frank, a lot of parents feel the same, but then their kids come out anyway.

John Scalzi
To the folks who are asserting that fictional characters don’t have genders, or orientations, or have physical sex: I think you may be doing fiction wrong.

Mark Kern
Okay Scalzi, all your characters in all your novels are Trump loving, cis, Republicans. I demand you acknowledge that. You too, JK Rowling. I don’t care if you created them.

McRapey is so dumb that he doesn’t even understand the intrinsic self-contradiction of his expressed positions. First, Frank Oz is correct; the creator defines the character. If we can unilaterally declare, ex post facto, that Bert and Ernie are gay, then we can also declare that Darth Vader is not Luke’s father, but rather, Luke’s Sigma Chi fraternity brother, that Gimli is not a Dwarf, but a short, bearded Elf, and that Dumbledore is a pedophile who repeatedly abused Harry Potter.

Actually, it might not be long before JK Rowling, in her enthusiasm for all things LGBTP, self-righteously announces the latter. It would explain a lot about those tedious novels.

In any event, the idea that fictional characters have genders, orientations, and engage in sex, but that their characteristics and behaviors are not established by their creators is not only self-contradictory, it is as intrinsically nonsensical as claiming that a man is really a woman.

Of course, if Scalzi’s monovocal dialogue is any guide, all of his characters, male and female, human and alien, are actually himself. Which may explain his incompetence with regards to these matters.

While it gives me great pain to publicly take exception with the greatest living science fiction writer, I have no choice but to do so with regards to what these days is an unfortunately all-too-pertinent literary matter:

A reader named Bellomy had a comment of dazzling insight I wanted to reprint by way of applause and emphatic agreement.

I learned the secret to what makes a character a Mary Sue.

You see, being great everything doesn’t make one a Mary Sue. John Carter of Mars is that. Batman is that. Wonder Woman, for a female example, is that.

What makes one a Mary Sue is the fundamental dishonesty in how the character is treated.

No, no, no! A thousand times no! A Mary Sue may well be a fundamentally dishonest character. Certainly most of them are. But a Mary Sue may also be an entirely honest character. The reader named Bellomy is confusing the observable fact that most Mary Sues are fundamentally dishonest characters with the basic nature of the Mary Sue.

The correct definition of the Mary Sue is very straightforward: a Mary Sue is a literary character who is an idealized stand-in for the author.

For example, the commenter HMSLion is correct in identifying Owen Pitt, from the Monster Hunter International novels, as an exemplary Mary Sue. Owen Pitt, the oversized accountant highly skilled with guns, who successfully steals the tall, beautiful dark-haired girl from his wealthy, popular, better-educated and more handsome rival, is a wonderful character because Larry Correia is himself a wonderful character. But there can be no doubt that Owen Pitt began as an unmitigated Mary Sue.

Authors have a tendency to reveal more about themselves than they realize, and often, more than they would like, when they write themselves into their stories. Consider the subconscious confessions contained in the two following quotes:

ITEM #1: She was beautiful. In fact she was possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was tall, with dark black hair, light skin, and big brown eyes. Her face was beautiful, not fake beautiful like a model or an actress, because she was obviously a real person, but rather Helen of Troy, launch-a-thousand-ships kind of good-looking. She wore glasses, and I was a sucker for a girl in corrective eyewear. Since I was ugly it was probably some sort of subconscious reaction in the hope that I might have a chance with a cute girl who couldn’t see very well. She was dressed in a conservative business suit, but unlike most women I knew, she made it look good. If I were to guess I would have said that she was in her mid-twenties.

“Mr. Pitt?” she asked. Even her voice was pretty. She was a goddess.

I tried to answer, but no words would come out. Talk, idiot! “Um… Hi.” Smooth… So far so good, keep going, big guy.

“You can, um… my name is… Owen. My friends call me Z. Because of my middle name. It starts with a Z. Or whatever works for you. Come in. Please!”

Well, so much for smooth.

ITEM #2: I could not help but gloat a little as I smiled for my nemesis. Grant Jefferson. The smug bastard had only been able to do it in 2.5, which was still pretty respectable, but not even close to as fast as mine. And the best part was that he knew it. He was the one who said my first run had been a fluke. Grant was not used to being bested at anything. I enjoyed watching as he stomped off in frustration. He did not like me, and the feeling was mutual. I handed the shotgun over for the next shooter.

Grant was no Newbie. He was a full-fledged member of MHI, and also one of our instructors, though he was the junior man on Harbinger’s team. He had only come out to shoot in the hopes of showing us poor folks how it was done. Grant was totally my opposite. Lean and handsome, witty, charming, a product of the finest schools, and descended from the oldest established (as in super wealthy) New England families. He even had nice hair. He was the type of person everybody liked, and everybody wanted to be liked by.

I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I thought he was a pompous ass from the moment I had met him, and I felt the primal and instinctual need to beat him up and take his lunch money.

But the real reason that I hated his guts was that he was Julie Shackleford’s boyfriend.

Now, would you like to bet against the surmise that there are real-life analogues to Julie Shackleford and Grant Jefferson? I would not recommend it. The line about “fake beautiful like a model” is particularly informative. Of course, as Larry Correia has improved as a writer, he is no longer reliant upon his own experiences and emotions to create credible characters, which is why Owen Pitt has grown beyond his origins as a Mary Sue.

The reason that most Mary Sues are dishonest is because most authors are not interesting and accomplished individuals like Larry Correia. Therefore, in order to make their characters appear attractive, successful, and interesting, they have no choice but to present them in a dishonest fashion, winning every argument and succeeding in every challenge with the greatest of ease. But that does not make a dishonest character, like Rey from the latest Star Wars abominations, a Mary Sue. She is not a stand-in for the various authors, she is merely a dishonest feminist archetype.

I remember how disappointed I was when I learned that Harry Turtledove wasn’t a wonderfully imaginative writer, but was simply rewriting Byzantine history. I’m a little more relaxed about the fact that Frank Herbert found a fair amount of inspiration from a historical novel about an Islamic jihad in Russia:

Even a casual political observer will recognize the parallels between the universe of Dune and the Middle East of the late 20th century. Islamic theology, mysticism, and the history of the Arab world clearly influenced Dune, but part of Herbert’s genius lay in his willingness to reach for more idiosyncratic sources of inspiration. The Sabres of Paradise (1960) served as one of those sources, a half-forgotten masterpiece of narrative history recounting a mid-19th century Islamic holy war against Russian imperialism in the Caucasus.

Lesley Blanch, the book’s author, has a memorable biography. A British travel writer of some renown, she is perhaps best known for On the Wilder Shores of Love (1954), an account of the romantic adventures of four British women in the Middle East. She was also a seasoned traveler, a keen observer of Middle Eastern politics and culture, and a passionate Russophile. She called The Sabres of Paradise “the book I was meant to do in my life,” and the novel offers the magnificent, overstuffed account of Imam Shamyl, “The Lion of Dagestan,” and his decades-long struggle against Russian encroachment.

Anyone who has obsessed over the mythology of Dune will immediately recognize the language Herbert borrowed from Blanch’s work. Chakobsa, a Caucasian hunting language, becomes the language of a galactic diaspora in Herbert’s universe. Kanly, from a word for blood feud among the Islamic tribes of the Caucasus, signifies a vendetta between Dune’s great spacefaring dynasties. Kindjal, the personal weapon of the region’s Islamic warriors, becomes a knife favored by Herbert’s techno-aristocrats. As Blanch writes, “No Caucasian man was properly dressed without his kindjal.”
Herbert is ecumenical with his borrowing, lifting terminology and rituals from both sides of this obscure Central Asian conflict. When Paul Atreides, Dune’s youthful protagonist, is adopted by a desert tribe whose rituals and feuds bear a marked resemblance to the warrior culture of the Islamic Caucasus, he lives at the exotically named Sietch Tabr. Sietch and tabr are both words for camp borrowed from the Cossacks, the Czarist warrior caste who would become the great Christian antagonists of Shamyl’s Islamic holy warriors.

Herbert also lifted two of Dune’s most memorable lines directly from Blanch. While describing the Caucasians’ fondness for swordplay, Blanch writes, “To kill with the point lacked artistry.” In Dune, this becomes “[k]illing with the tip lacks artistry,” advice given to a young Paul Atreides by a loquacious weapons instructor. A Caucasian proverb recorded by Blanch transforms into a common desert aphorism. “Polish comes from the city, wisdom from the hills,” an apt saying for a mountain people, becomes “Polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert” in Dune.

Dune’s narrative, however, owes more to The Sabres of Paradise than just terminology and customs. The story of a fiercely independent, religiously inspired people resisting an outside power is certainly not unique to the Caucasus, but Blanch’s influence can be found here, too. The name of Herbert’s major villain, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, is redolent of Russian imperialism. Meanwhile, Imam Shamyl, the charismatic leader of Islamic resistance in the Caucasus, describes the Russian Czar as “Padishah” and his provincial governor as “Siridar,” titles that Herbert would later borrow for Dune’s galactic emperor and his military underlings.

This sort of thing is why I saw absolutely no point in playing superficial “hide the obvious” games and calling elves “snerks” and orcs “grablings” as so many mediocre fantasy writers do. I mean, they’re not fooling anyone, are they? Sure, we’d all like to be as wonderfully and comprehensively inventive as JRR Tolkien, but few of us have the depth of knowledge or the patience required to painstakingly construct an entire world from scratch.