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Litmus Test
Mar. 14th, 2008 04:50 am
A great tool for writers young and old - the Mary Sue Litmus Test! Now revised to make scoring as simple as clicky boxes.
I did a kind of "group" one, using all the major players in the trilogy I'm working on (basically, if it fit any of them I clicked it, whether it was just one, or more than one). They scored a 4. So then I went back through and added in all the ones I'd considered, but not selected (there were only a few). They scored an 8 that time. I went back and checked a few others, just for the hell of it, and hit a whopping 14. So I figure it's pretty Mary Sue/Gary Stu safe, for now.
There were some aspects of this that were a little bit difficult, because I was doing this purely as an assessment of the group's "in-story" characteristics. Since nearly all of them also exist in doll form, there are definitely areas of dissension in some places. Things that may be true for their "doll" characters (for whatever reason) are not always true for their "novel" characters.
I did a kind of "group" one, using all the major players in the trilogy I'm working on (basically, if it fit any of them I clicked it, whether it was just one, or more than one). They scored a 4. So then I went back through and added in all the ones I'd considered, but not selected (there were only a few). They scored an 8 that time. I went back and checked a few others, just for the hell of it, and hit a whopping 14. So I figure it's pretty Mary Sue/Gary Stu safe, for now.
There were some aspects of this that were a little bit difficult, because I was doing this purely as an assessment of the group's "in-story" characteristics. Since nearly all of them also exist in doll form, there are definitely areas of dissension in some places. Things that may be true for their "doll" characters (for whatever reason) are not always true for their "novel" characters.
