On Sues and Such; or, First-Time OC Writing

[sigune]

a_t_rain wrote, in a comment to my previous entry (this one), that “it's funny how so many first-time OC writers DO make a beeline for all the things Thou Shalt Not Do without even knowing what those things are.”
She raises what I think is a very interesting point. I gave some thought to it, and this is how I think it went with me and Bromelia/Brynhild – but by all means post your own experiences, I’m very curious to hear about them!

I think (but this is a very personal supposition) that many fanfic authors wander into the world of fan fiction because they have a soft spot for a specific (set of) character(s). They fantasise about said character(s), and somehow it seems appealing to create one all of your own to interact with them – it is your own, not-so-very-secret infiltration in a universe you like. It is very appealing to use all kinds of special powers/devices/backgrounds (preferably all at once) specific to the universe you have made your playground. These are the things that drew the author there in the first place. But the dangerous part is the one where they become so wrapped up in the game that they lose perspective and don’t notice that their new character is an irritating, quaint distortion that thrusts itself unbidden upon the poor, unsuspecting canon characters. If canon doesn’t mention your OC (and it never does), that means they can’t be very important to the main plot or, for that matter, to those characters you have been so eager to align them with. Consequently, it is unlikely they will beat Harry at Quidditch, outsmart Dumbledore, improve on Snape’s potions, unite the Hogwarts houses and/or defeat Voldemort.

Concretely, this is what happened to me:
I was drawn into Potter fan fiction through a sudden fascination with Severus Snape. I began to draw him in December 2003. Almost at once, I was drawing Bromelia too. I didn’t have a Snape story (I wrote my first in March 2004). If I had no story, then what was that OC doing there? Well, I just cooked her up to befriend Snape. That was all. She did not suggest any real, rounded plots, only small incidents and fragments of no consequence.
By comparison, when I created Septimia and then Stephen, I started from canon and Snape, and thought up the two OCs because they were necessary to the plot I had in mind. I wanted to tell the story of Severus’ defection from Voldemort, and I needed to figure out for myself what might have driven him into the Death Eaters’ ranks in the first place. He needed a background, a father and a mother – the arguing people we saw in the Occlumency lesson. The story - The Return of the Prodigal Son - necessitated Stephen and Septimia, and I think that made a lot of difference. The characteristics I gave them were determined by the story’s needs, not the other way around.
The proof of the pudding is that I wrote some six stories in which Bromelia did not figure at all, not because I struggled to keep her out but because there was really no way for her to get in – whereas Stephen and/or Septimia got at least a passing mention in every single one, and were at the very core of others.

Apart from the fact that my first OC was a kind of toy with no place in canon, as opposed to Stephen and Septimia, there was something else in play. At the time of Bromelia’s creation – it seems hard to believe by now – I had no idea what fan fiction was. I read my first fan stories and became a member of FA in February 2004, about three months after Bromelia saw the light of paper life. Stephen and Septimia made their first, very shy, fictional appearance nearly two months after that, and by that time I had read quite a few stories by other people. It made a great difference.
The thing is, I am not interested in writing the same things other people have written. I like subverting stock ideas – though it is up to you to judge whether or not I succeed. If I had been reading fan fiction before creating Bromelia, I would not have made the mistake (?) of endowing her with all those typical OFSue characteristics – characteristics that appear as ‘bad’ or ‘not done’ because they have been done so often and by so many people, which marks them as self-evident, fun to think up but not very interesting to read.
Example: when I first conceived Stephen, I went by the Occlumency lesson memory of the man shouting at his wife, as all of us must who want to write Snape père. I have a draft of the beginning of a prose story in which Stephen is a drunk, a violent man, a pure-blood and a Dark wizard. Although I was anxious not to allow other people’s versions of Snape’s parentage to influence me, I read around a bit, only to find that just almost every author I read had concluded that a man who shouts at his cowering wife is a) a drunk; b) an abuser; c) a Dark wizard, obviously, in view of a) and b); and d) a pure-blood, because of a), b) and c) and the fact that Snape fils became a Death Eater.
So far for my originality.

Now, I am a very contrary person, so if everybody read the scene that way, I made it a point of honour to try and come up with an equally plausible explanation that went in an entirely different direction. That is when I decided Papa Snape was a half-blood shouting at his wife because he’d discovered she was teaching his son Dark magic and he really didn’t like the idea. Severus came to hate his father not because the man beat him up but because he was so forbidding and never cared to explain his reasons for being so, and his turning towards the Death Eaters became a rather drastic form of teenage rebellion. To date, it’s still an unusual take on the Snape family of which I am consequently a little proud, but I wouldn’t have arrived at it if I hadn’t read my first idea done to death in other people’s stories.

I guess that what I am saying is that the “first-time” in After the Rain’s comment has its importance. You have to be well-versed in a genre and acquainted with its rules and stock characters/situations in order to be able to distinguish between ‘done’ and ‘not done’. At least, that’s how it is with me. I am less likely to produce something that I can consider ‘good’ when I have to do it from scratch; I need to read things that I find fault with, and start from there to make a version that is more to my personal liking.

The best thing to do for any (fan) writer, I would suggest, is to read what others do, see how they tackle characters and plots and make up your mind as to whether you like their solutions or not. Things like Mary Sue Litmus Tests only mean so much, and sometimes I think they have a lot to answer for. We may very well wonder which characters, canon or otherwise, would come out of these tests scot-free, and the tools may cause an author who is less than confident in their own abilities to discard characters which are actually perfectly alright. Also, an OFC who makes it safely out of such a Litmus test is, let us face the facts, likely to be a total bore. Who would want to read about her, a person without oddities, without talents, without a personality? (Er. It just occurs to me that a Modernist author might like to deal with her. I guess I should confess it’s not my preferred reading; you may beg to differ of course.)

The term ‘Mary Sue’ is much abused and is liable to send people unnecessarily into a panic. A Sue is defined as, among other things, a projection of the author; but there are excellent stories around with OFCs who are remarkably much like their creators and yet make for a great read. Personally I’m much more annoyed with authors who write about things and people they obviously don’t know anything about. Likewise, the Potterverse happens to display a lot of weird features and powers and ancestries; it would be ridiculous to forbid authors to use them in creating OCs. Tonks is a Metamorphmagus. That means there will be others. We know of several Animagi, and canon says it is a skill that can be acquired through training. That means it’s not unacceptably far-fetched that your OC should learn how to do it. The same goes for Occlumency and Legilimency. The thing is that you need to make sure these special features are never an aim in itself or an easy way out of plot holes, and they must be consistent with the Potterverse. Everything is in the writing. A good author can pull off just about everything; a bad writer can ruin the greatest plot and the best characters. Just look at all those little monsters who go by canon names but aren’t even remotely recognisable as JKR’s originals. I mean, I am all for fan authors letting their personality shine through their writings rather than trying to copy Rowling – but if they pretend to write a canon character, I think it is reasonable to ask for at least a little verisimilitude :-)… Fan fiction is by definition based on a pre-existing universe. It is a genre in itself. It has rules. It is nice to stick to them from time to time (without becoming dogmatic, of course).

There, those are my reflections on the subject :-).

Comments

[jen-deben.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting.

I remember when I was younger, the characters that ran around in my head as the centre of their own stories tended to be very Sue-like. They had everyone wrapped around their little fingers. I may be guilty of ageism here, but I wonder if the general powerlessness (and longing for power and autonomy) that goes with being a young teen tends to breed Sueish fantasy characters, so that when younger writers start writing, they tend to create Sues. To not do so requires them to be very aware of what a Sue is, and to consciously avoid it.

Now that I'm older, Sueish characters annoy me. I find flawed characters so much more interesting. I wonder if that is due to the fact that as you get older, and start having aches, pains and crappy coworkers, and just generally come to the realisation that you will never be omnipotent and perfect, that you start to really crave stories that address what it is like to be ordinary. After all, being ordinary is still complex and interesting, and you want the world to recognise that, so your fiction tries to address flawed, believable characters.

I started writing fanfiction because I had designs on writing a novel, but didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to plot. I was obsessed with Snape at the time, which made it easy to come up with storylines for him, so I regarded fanfiction as a fun way to practice my writing and plotting skills. The reviews proved to be great too, in that they gave me that shot of confidence I needed. I recognise that having someone say your fanfiction is good is not at all equivalent to a professional editor saying so, but it still was good to be told that I could write something that people enjoyed reading.

And my first story, which involved Snape aging backward to childhood, was a total cliche. I was thoroughly embarrassed when I found an entire community on ff.net devoted to those kinds of storylines. However, when I read through a few of them, I decided that my story was still good, and that I had nothing to be embarrassed about. So I don't worry about whether my ideas are fresh or not as much, these days - only about whether or not I'm writing well. After all, plots get recycled in literature also, and no one bats an eye at it. It's the execution of an idea that counts (although you do have to execute things much more skillfully, if what you're writing is something that people have seen a hundred times before).