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This week: Homages, Riffs, Archetypes and Mary Sues Edited by: Jay's debut novel is out now!  
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Homages, Riffs, Archetypes and Mary Sues
In fantasy fiction, character originality can be overrated. Here are some ways tried-and-true can work for you. How do you use stories and characters you've read and loved in order to catalyze your imagination? |
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So, I've been cramming for a workshop I'm attending very soon, just filling my head with as many stories as I can before I head out, and I'm starting to notice a lot of patterns and see a lot of things that recur in different places.
Characters are one particular element of this story where it seems to happen a lot. Characters are fairly portable, after all; we mover them from scene to scene normally. In genre fiction in particular, though, it seems like there are a lot of situations where characters are lifted whole-cloth from one place to the next, in varying states of "borrowed," "imitated," or even "filed off the serial numbers." 
I feel like most of these instances could be explained in a few different ways. Sometimes, a character from one story or series comes to be representative of a stylistic choice. These become what I think of as archetypes, in the same way as Carl Jung might have. Without further examining the source material, for example, what's the first thing that comes to mind when someone says "wizard?" Pointy hat? Beard? While there are many books wherein wizards don't necessarily fit that profile, the ones that do have defined that archetype for the time being. The defined roles of these characters can be inverted or altered, of course, and that is one way to keep them from being stale rip-offs of an existing character! If you're tempted to populate your fantasy realm with characters you've seen before a thousand times, try to invest them with something fresh and engaging even if they might otherwise have been a trope.
Homage, on the other hand, is where I like to think those folks filing off the serial numbers are trying to go, even if they ultimately fail. It can be rewarding, emotionally at least, to create characters which reference an earlier existing idea. It's important to come up with ways to differentiate your work to prevent seeming derivative-- and I don't mean changing the eye color. Even if your character is inspired by an existing favorite, come up with concrete ways that your character could not be mixed up with someone else.
I usually refer to characters which are meant to deeply subvert expectations as riffs on an homage or an archetype-- a way of punking the reader's preconceived character ideas and tweaking what the reader already knows from memory. Many of Terry Pratchett's characters were riffs on some older fantasy tropes, for example.
The derogatory Mary Sue (and her lesser-addressed cohort Gary Stu) is an old term which originated from the Star Trek fan culture back in the era when fanfiction was distributed via mimeographed fanzines, but Mary Sues as a writerly norm have existed long before then and have of course outlasted some of the paper fanzines! A character said to fit this type is often attributed to fanfiction, but I assure you they exist far and wide -- sometimes in combination with these other classes. Characters which fit this profile are often a little too perfect or a little too purely-invented; the reason readers are repelled by them is that they don't feel particularly real and often don't face enough challenges in the actual story, so their character growth is pretty stunted. The reader might also see this type of character as being an obvious author-avatar.
In the process of building characters for your fantasy story, take time to consider their originality-- but don't beat yourself up if you know where you got the idea. This is one of those times where there's nothing new under the sun; characters are like people, but magnified; it stands to reason that there is a lot of overlap in characters which are larger than life and appealing to readers.
Take care and Write on!
~jay |
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Fantasy: September 30, 2015 Issue [#7244]
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