lobelia321 | turning a tig into a post herewith and catching the sue on a wing

Or, how to cut'n'paste and find yourself rambling on ad even more infinitum than originally planned

I was tigging

thamiris on her interesting post, and then I thought, what the heck, I know I've rambled on at breadth about this topic, why not ramble on a bit more in yet another post.

So, here is some more of my mustard (as they say in German) on the lovely and never-losing-its-fascination subject ot:

The Sue.
By 'Sue', I don't mean Mary Sue, I mean Sue. The Sue (in my own arcane understanding of these matters authorial) is the character who is really you or me: the writer. For me, there is always one. Once I made the mistake of tormenting myself with a long, long fic and misidentifying my Sue. I thought I was Karl but, as both my betas pointed out with some surprise, no, I was Dom. I never posted that fic; I had written myself into a mire.

With the HP I'm writing at the moment, I was clearer much faster and it helped a lot. I'm Draco. The way I allow my Sue to help me is by realising that the Sue is the character I will be seeing most of the plot through (the focalisor, if you will, speaking in narratologese). Even when my actual pov shifts from Draco into someone else's head, the overall lens and focus is always Draco. I realised this because I found it difficult to visualise Draco; I was more obsessed with the physical look and gestures and bodily tics of the other two men in the equation. This is because I was inhabiting Draco; I wasn't really looking at him. So now, when I want to look at him from the outside, I switch povs to take myself more out of the formula.

I also don't really mean that Draco is me (although I said he was). But this is why I invented (or twisted to my own perverse ends, *g*) the term Sue, to describe that intense relationship an author (or me, at any rate) can have to one of their characters. My relationship to the others is also intense but there is a sense in which I love the other guys, just as Draco loves them, but I don't 'love' Draco in that way, it's a more intimately cathected relationship.

For me, the Sue is not the Mary Sue because my Sue is never megalomanic or all-powerful or phenomenally gorgeous or getting to shag all the pretty (er, well, actually, that's the one way my Sue is a Mary Sue, um). Mostly my Sue-character tends to be passive and introspective and tormented, a kind of alter ego of my depressed self. I have to work hard at making that character less passive and more worthy of being central protagonist (which is also why I find it important to identify the Sue: in order to notice the passivity and fix it).

Very little (as I no doubt have mentioned in these pages before) has been written on this topic by writers on narrative. In fact, nothing, that I can recall. Narratologists are endlessly interested in the 'text' and in the 'reader', but ever since Barthes declared the author 'dead', they haven't devoted nearly as much energy to what actually happens in the brain in the process of creating a narrative. And the authors who do write about that, the how-to-write-a-novel writing workshop kind of authors, don't mention the Sue, either. Perhaps because the Sue is taboo. (And that even rhymes!) Because it's a widely held consensus, among how-to authors as well as among the fandom communities of the online world that a Mary Sue is bad, bad, bad. So the poor old Sue gets browbeaten and flagellated in an un-nuanced way but never analysed.

So there are two poles here:

a) Mary Sue is bad because who is interested in the teen-mindset authoress's hubristic fantasies of self-power? (And reading HP canon and grinding my way through JKR's oh-so-blatant Harry-Sue, I can very much sympathise with this view!) But this is not how all Sues work, only the Mary Sues.

b) Every author puts something of herself into a fic. This comes up again and again, and loads of authors I know have seconded this, and the line between putting yourself into a fic and writing a Sue is very thin indeed.

My own line, and it's a quite thick one, is that the most important thing is to be self-reflective. It's no good (to me, at any rate) to deny the existence of Sue-ness: it will creep in willy-nilly (and especially willy). I need to face my Sue squarely, look him in the eye (my Sue is always male) and use that Sue to my ends and purposes to create a good fic. Knowing your Sue can energise your writing,and I find it enormously helpful to know mine.

Or is this not of any concern to others? Do others write in a Sue-less universe and let the story carry them away in a plot-pure state? Or do you find you want to suppress your Sue, or deliberately write against the grain? I've written fics that have no Sue in them but they are not of the same order as the fics I swooned over and got obsessed with for months on end. They're more like little throw-aways.

I won't go into setting here or this post will explode...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ithiliana.livejournal.com

*Bounces happily*

I don't think this issue can be easily resolved because I'm pretty sure writers approach it differently.

I know exactly what you mean although I do not use your term--and I may phrase it a little differently.

For me the single *most* important thing is my pov character. I don't write a lot of first person narratives any more, not fictional ones, though my earlier original fics were often first person, I got, well, bored, don't ask med how/why, I just did. Lots of first person speakers in poetry, but not in fiction any more. And I get extremely mystical and rhapsodize on at length about pov for my stories.

Because I so "inhabit" the characters, so immerse myself in them, and well, more of that sort of mysticism. I become them at times. Other times, they talk to me. They take over my head.

Original and fan stories, both.

But for many writers, it's not that big an issue. It's important in terms of craft, but not in terms of mysticism. Some writers never get mystical about their writing, as far as I can tell from listening to them talk.

Others get mystical about other elements. (Am remembering Tolkien's letter where he talked about not describing his characters, not caring about what they looked like, but loving to describe the land--and that's so true if you look at his novel and even his other work--short perfunctory descriptions of people and clothing, long detailed, loving descriptions of land and tree and flower and water).

So there's no universal rule.

And I'm not sure how much of this 'feeling' would show up in the text--i.e. how could an outside reader know from reading my fanfic how I feel about my Frodo, my Faramir, my David, as pov characters? Is there any textual evidence? There's my rantings and ramblings.

Can this be studied? I don't know, for the same reason. And especially since I've hung around so many writers in so many different forums and know that the only universal rule about writers/writing is that there is no universal rule (and no one thing that works for them all), I am even moe doubtful.

This experience/feeling I have about my pov characters is real, and I think similar to what you describe here. But I'd bet some people who write beautifully and incredibly and wonderfully might look at us both and say "huh, don't know what you're talking about."

Does any of that make sense?

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