Hello My Name Is Mary Sue
May. 29th, 2003 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ciroccojBecause I'm journal-spamming today and because I'm apparently just not destined to do anything actually useful, but also because this falls under the category of TMI...
So I finally posted Promises ch 1. I also showed it to Chris, who had a lot of good fb, most of it having to do with the writing (eg. "use a different word here"). But...
It seems I've Mary Sued myself into a fic. At least according to Chris. And Mary Sued a lot of us into what I'm writing. Which feels uncomfortable as hell, since I was very consciously trying not to do that. Since the situation in my fic has almost absolutely nothing to do with our lives, beyond the fact that there's 'couple' issues.
But yeah... Chris was pointing out ways in which I act very much like one character, Deborah, in the fic ::cringe::. And this is the bizarre part, but when he asked why I was cringing and I said I've painted Deborah as a bit of a bitch, so, uh, Gee thanks, Hon, he said he didn't see her that way at all. I'm not sure if that's because I'm writing from her POV for part of it so of course her actions make sense to her, or because when I act in a Deborah-like way Chris genuinely doesn't interpret that as being bitchlike.
Anyway. Very, very uncomfortable conversation - for me, anyway. I think Chris found it interesting. And I didn't know whether I was more uncomfortable as a writer (gee, I just totally did something I try very hard not to do, bleed myself into characters that are nothing like me) or as a person (wow, is that what I'm really like?)
And there's the whole issue of "Is this actually there, or is this just what Chris sees because he's a shrink and he's used to overanalysing?" Particularly since a lot of what goes on is totally unlike us on the surface. The most obvious being The Marital Issue - in the fic, it's infidelity, which is a big deal to the fic-couple, but which Chris and I really could care less about. We've never cheated on each other, but I told him long ago that with his schedule, if he could manage to fit an affair in between his other commitments I would really have to be more impressed than appalled. So... how does the fic situation relate to ours?
Chris came up with a lot of stuff. Basically (cut out intricate Freudian reasoning) take away a lot of the surface details and the emotional dynamics were pretty similar, at least in his humble opinion.
::sigh::
So there you go. I've Mary Sued myself. And while in theory I'm always interested in human behaviour that ends up revealing more than it intended to... it's really fucking uncomfortable when the human whose behaviour has revealed way too much is me.
So I finally posted Promises ch 1. I also showed it to Chris, who had a lot of good fb, most of it having to do with the writing (eg. "use a different word here"). But...
It seems I've Mary Sued myself into a fic. At least according to Chris. And Mary Sued a lot of us into what I'm writing. Which feels uncomfortable as hell, since I was very consciously trying not to do that. Since the situation in my fic has almost absolutely nothing to do with our lives, beyond the fact that there's 'couple' issues.
But yeah... Chris was pointing out ways in which I act very much like one character, Deborah, in the fic ::cringe::. And this is the bizarre part, but when he asked why I was cringing and I said I've painted Deborah as a bit of a bitch, so, uh, Gee thanks, Hon, he said he didn't see her that way at all. I'm not sure if that's because I'm writing from her POV for part of it so of course her actions make sense to her, or because when I act in a Deborah-like way Chris genuinely doesn't interpret that as being bitchlike.
Anyway. Very, very uncomfortable conversation - for me, anyway. I think Chris found it interesting. And I didn't know whether I was more uncomfortable as a writer (gee, I just totally did something I try very hard not to do, bleed myself into characters that are nothing like me) or as a person (wow, is that what I'm really like?)
And there's the whole issue of "Is this actually there, or is this just what Chris sees because he's a shrink and he's used to overanalysing?" Particularly since a lot of what goes on is totally unlike us on the surface. The most obvious being The Marital Issue - in the fic, it's infidelity, which is a big deal to the fic-couple, but which Chris and I really could care less about. We've never cheated on each other, but I told him long ago that with his schedule, if he could manage to fit an affair in between his other commitments I would really have to be more impressed than appalled. So... how does the fic situation relate to ours?
Chris came up with a lot of stuff. Basically (cut out intricate Freudian reasoning) take away a lot of the surface details and the emotional dynamics were pretty similar, at least in his humble opinion.
::sigh::
So there you go. I've Mary Sued myself. And while in theory I'm always interested in human behaviour that ends up revealing more than it intended to... it's really fucking uncomfortable when the human whose behaviour has revealed way too much is me.
