Hi, Cordelia, this might be a bad question, so I want to apologize beforehand - sorry. How do you write your characters without making them into Mary Sues/Gary Stus? They’re pretty much all beautiful, likeable or like-ably dislikeable, have backstories of

I don’t think the question is offensive at all! Being told that your characters feel like real people is one of the best compliments an author can receive, IMO. And I actually think this question makes a lot of sense, because if you pare it down to the basics, it’s asking how a character can be “heroic” without crossing the dreaded line into being a Mary Sue/Gary Stu.

It occurs to me that not everyone reading this may be familiar with the terms Mary Sue/Gary Stu - if you Google them, you’ll find a ton of essays and things, but this one is particularly good.

It’s totally possible to have your protagonists be larger-than-life BAMFs without veering into MS/GS territory. Here’s a quick contrast between heroic characters and MS/GS characters:

Heroes excel at a few things, into which they’ve visibly invested serious time and effort, are average at most things, and suck pretty badly at a handful of things. A MS/GS is good at everything, inexplicably and without effort.Heroes have plausible relationships with the people around them. More importantly, their behavior in the story affects those relationships in ways that make sense. One of the defining characteristics of a MS/GS is that everybody adores them, regardless of how they actually treat people. Nothing the MS/GS does to another character ever causes that character to see them in a negative light.Heroes have major flaws that logically stem from the false internal beliefs created by painful events in their pasts. Their behavior is always consistent with these flaws, even when it causes them to make grave mistakes that directly impact them in a negative way. If a MS/GS has any flaws at all, they’re just window dressing, and never cause any negative consequences. Sometimes those “flaws” are actually advantages in a flimsy disguise.Related to the previous point, heroes make mistakes - and larger-than-life characters make larger-than-life mistakes. When heroic characters fuck up, they fuck up royally. Their mistakes cause significant problems that require genuine effort to fix. A MS/GS either never makes mistakes, or their mistakes are immediately solved without any effort, struggle, or negative impact.Heroes earn their rewards. They engage in real struggles and solve problems in ways that are authentic to their characterization and the situation. They fail, often terribly, but then they get back up and try again. When they finally achieve their goals, there’s a satisfying sense of them having earned it. Because a MS/GS never suffers or puts actual effort into anything, their success feels false and undeserved, and is therefore unsatisfying to the reader.

Some writers are afraid to make their protagonists too awesome for fear of ending up with a MS/GS. But protagonists should be awesome; in certain genres, such as thriller, fantasy, etc., they should be truly heroic as well. That’s part of what makes stories so much fun to read.

The key is that characters need to genuinely earn their awesomeness and their heroic stature through their actions - just like real people do.