Last week I blogged about embedding contradictory character traits into your protagonists to keep them fresh. At the very same time, Elena Greene over at Risky Regencies was blogging about the opposite kind of character, one with no compelling traits at all. She called it something I’d never heard of before: the Mary Sue.

What is this thing of which she writes? I was intrigued.

Allow Elena to explain:

“According to Wikipedia, Mary Sue “is a pejorative term for a fictional character who is portrayed in an overly idealized way and lacks noteworthy flaws, or has unreasonably romanticized flaws. Characters labeled Mary Sues, as well as the stories they appear in, are generally seen as wish-fulfillment fantasies of the author.”’

Ahh. I didn’t know they had a name for that.

How do you know if you have a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu) for a protagonist? Take the Original Fiction Mary Sue Litmus Test and find out!

The OFMSLT is also a humorous look at some of the worst offenses writers make when creating their characters. Though the test is tongue-in-cheek, if you get a high score the result is anything but. For example:

Does the character have a name you really, really like?

Is it Raven?

Is it a variation of Raven?

Is it Hunter?

Uh, I read a suspense novel a few months back with a character named Hunter. He was hardbitten but still ruggedly handsome despite the scar he received from a knife-fight against some baddies. He’d had some hard knocks in the romance department that made it impossible for him to trust a women, let alone drop his defenses long enough to fall in love with one….

You see now, don’t you. Hunter was a Gary Stu.


Does the character have an unusual eye color, or otherwise exceptional eyes?

And are these eyes a color that does not occur in nature?

And will they have something to do with the plot?

Hunter had blue eyes the color of a Montana sky at dusk. His love interest had jade-green eyes with hair the color of a raven’s wing. Not that this had anything to do with the plot, so they saved themselves a point.

I took the test (warning, it’s pretty long) and my character got a score of 23, which is borderline Mary Sue. So a few tweaks should save it from being insufferably sweet.

Are you brave enough to take the Mary Sue litmus test? Can you afford not to?

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
Kathleen Bolton
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