Oboe Byrd's Guide to Writing Formulaic Fanfiction

Chapter 1: The Mary-Sue

There are several factors one must have complete control over before one can write a successful story. They all may be thrown out while writing a Mary Sue.

There are, however, several important factors to writing a proper Mary Sue. You may follow these guidelines below to either improve your knowledge of Mary Sue writing, check your own story to see if it is, in fact, a Mary Sue, or use it as a guideline to write your own smashingly successful story.

Practice Self Insertion

No Mary-Sue would be complete unless you are in the story. Gross exaggerations of bravery, wisdom, intelligence, skill, and appearance are encouraged and recommended. Admittance of imperfections are only acceptable if they add some driving force to the plot, i.e. My daddy's Sauron- I'm running from him, I came to Mirkwood/Gondor/the Shire to escape his evil clutches.

Have a character fall madly in love with your character/self.

This is absolutely necessary in a Mary Sue. The act of actually falling in love can only happen one of two ways- Falling in love on sight, or hating your character in the beginning and warming up to her like an ice cube warms up to a hot sidewalk. Grossly anatomical love scenes are encouraged, anime references are strictly prohibited.

Have your character be a better fighter/archer/sorcerer than your Mary-Sue's love interest.

This is vital. Your character's love interest must fail miserably in some attempt to fight, and your character must come to his aid. If your character's love interest up to this point has been cold, this is the warming point.

Disregard set character moods and profiles: They are not important.

Pippin can be a soul-searching dreamer. Aragorn can be a hippy. As long as it suits your character's personality, it is all okay.

Make your character's name unpronounceable or incredibly simple.

Anglothielmatartza or Angel are both prime examples. By making character names such as these, it is easy to determine when someone else is stealing your Mary-Sue ideas.

Abnormalities in grammar and wordage is perfectly acceptable.

Of course, impenetrable spelling and grammar is not necessary. But the very best Mary-Sues embodies writing that considers 'u' alone to be an acceptable pronoun and uses '4', '2', or other single-shot numbers or letters where they would normally have a real English word. Such substitution is a work of art, and abolishes all problems one might have in sounding those particular long words out.

I hope you found the first chapter in what is likely to become a plethora of chapters in this essay helpful. If you want to flame me because I used examples from your story- goa head, because I didn't, and I'll ignore you. If you want to flame me for any other reason- coolness! Go ahead. If you have ideas for more rules, by all means, tell me!

Next week's lecture- The Properly Managed A/L Slash.

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Oboebyrd: The Space Turtle is chewing on the Warp Nacelle