That and "Scientists greatest gripes about Trek Technobabble" - Reversing the polarity always tops the chart... You should hear Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the topic - and he loves Star Trek.
Several FanFic Questions
- Thread starter Bynar0110
- Start date
What she is doesn't matter. What matters is what you do with her.
If everything she does works and there's no sense at any time that she is in danger of losing something important to her, she's going to be boring. Worse if she has to be rescued regularly.
On the other hand, she could be as strong and brilliant as she can be and if it's still never quite enough - she'll be interesting. Thanks!! rbs
If everything she does works and there's no sense at any time that she is in danger of losing something important to her, she's going to be boring. Worse if she has to be rescued regularly.
On the other hand, she could be as strong and brilliant as she can be and if it's still never quite enough - she'll be interesting. Thanks!! rbs
Not for TNG-era Trek. There was an episode where a genius teen turned out to be a Q. "Mary Sue" is relative.
Besides, even if she could be considered a Mary Sue, she wouldn't be the first one to appear in a Trek fanfic. (A trek fanfic character is the source of the concept, remember.)
RBS is right. It's all about what the character does. My advice would have been to refrain from posting a character bio at all. Nobody but you needs to know the characters' backgrounds before the story is written. Of course, now that the bio's posted, the best indicator of Mary Sue-dom will be how the character speaks and acts and how other characters react to her.
I generally don't. I like you to discover my characters as the story goes.
I knew, for instance, from the beginning that my primary character, Captain Minerva Irons is, Chinese, part vulcan, 158 years old, has retired 4 times from Star Fleet as a captain only to come out of retirement each time there's a disaster and SF needs experienced captains, her 80-year-old son is a leader on the Federation Council, and that beneath her unflappable appearance, she's suffering from osteoporosis that makes her bones brittle, made worse by chronic alcoholism.
As a reader, you discover each of those things about her as they become important to the story. And that's just what you learn about her by Episode 17 - which I'm currently publishing here. There's a WHOLE lot more... including her status as a Section 31 operative and a strong sadistic streak...
Is she a hero or a villain? Well - that's up to the reader to decide...
Thanks!! rbs
I knew, for instance, from the beginning that my primary character, Captain Minerva Irons is, Chinese, part vulcan, 158 years old, has retired 4 times from Star Fleet as a captain only to come out of retirement each time there's a disaster and SF needs experienced captains, her 80-year-old son is a leader on the Federation Council, and that beneath her unflappable appearance, she's suffering from osteoporosis that makes her bones brittle, made worse by chronic alcoholism.
As a reader, you discover each of those things about her as they become important to the story. And that's just what you learn about her by Episode 17 - which I'm currently publishing here. There's a WHOLE lot more... including her status as a Section 31 operative and a strong sadistic streak...
Is she a hero or a villain? Well - that's up to the reader to decide...
Thanks!! rbs
No harm done - Entirely your choice. And this isn't your story thread, so, no worries. Thanks!! rbs
Look, it's not a rule. Think of it as avoiding spoilers. As RBS indicated above, keeping the character bios to yourself lets you include the details in the story when the revelations will best enhance the narrative. It means you can have surprises on hand to keep the readers interested. Making the bios public gives readers advance warning of what to expect of the characters in the story, so the surprises have to come from somewhere else. That said, neither approach is strictly right or wrong. You choose to disclose or not to disclose and deal with the consequences of that decision when you start writing.
I generally advise people not to post any kind of preliminary material before writing the story because I have a problem with "focus grouping" a prose fanfic. Too many authors start threads where they lay out plots, ships and character bios in exhausting detail just to get everyone's approval first. I've done it myself a couple of times. I won't to do it again because it defies the logic of the situation. Think about it: If you had asked the direct question "How do you write a good trek fanfic?" I guarantee the majority of responses will contain the dogmatic phrase "Make it about the characters." If you take that phrase as gospel, but you dump all.the best character details in an outline and post that, what do you have left to craft your tale?
You haven't messed up. It's just advice, and you can take it or leave it as you like, and I can only advise you based on my own experience posting stories here. You'll eventually find your own path.
You have asked for a lot of writing advice. I'm by far not the most experienced writer here. But I was, long ago (and very briefly), an English teacher. So let me give some general advice that will hopefully get you on your way...
Experiment. I generally recommend that you start with a scene from the middle of the story - something that you already have pictured. Trying to start at the beginning of your story can often subject you to writer's block so you're stopped before you get started. Just sketch out some of the scenes from various parts of the story - the parts you're really wanting to tell. You can link them together later.
Form follows function. So POV, verb tense and other stylistic choices (I've read superb stories written exclusively as captain's logs) are choices you can make after you've experimented a little. Once you've made those choices - stick with them. Changes in voice, verb tense, etc. are jarring to the reader and interrupt the story by bringing attention to the words. The most important thing is clarity - transparency - so the words and writing style vanish and just become vehicles for telling the story. That doesn't happen in the writing process. It happens in editing.
So before you post - make several editing passes. And trust your ear. Read your story aloud as often as possible. Your ear will catch awkward phrasing that your eye will just skip right over. Your ear will catch grammar errors, usage problems and even problems with capitalization and punctuation.
The other general advice is to avoid the curse of knowledge. As the writer, you know all kinds of things your reader won't - or you'd end up writing an encyclopedia instead of a story. But make sure you give the reader enough information that they aren't lost wondering about plot-holes - (how did Lt. X know about that?)
With all that, I'm going to step away and emphasize A2's advice to not crowd-source your fanfic.
Thanks!! rbs
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No, not as a stand-alone character.
As I understand it, a Mary-Sue is a (typically female) character written into a story with canon characters (Kirk/Spock/McCoy) and she becomes the center/hero of the story, relegating said canon characters to the background.
Google tells me that a Mary Sue is one who is depicted as unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses; one who is too perfect, always taking the right/best course of action and never makes a mistake.
The thing is, readers want stories about smart heroes ... how often do you see Kirk make a mistake?? ... so it's a balancing act to make the character interesting without being "too perfect". Honor Harrington started out great, but over time she became "too perfect" and got boring.
RE: Character biographies ... I have an Excel list of 120 names/race.gender & ranks/duty titles for the entire crew of the ship that will be the setting of my stories. From that, I have some bios written for most of the officers and some of the enlisted crew. I did that so I can keep the thirty or so characters that will typically show up in my stories straight in my head. That already saved me from mixing up characters (almost wrote about someone being a "Lady's Man" when that honor goes to a different guy).
I have a secondary character that might (probably will) become a major character in a snip-off story, but I haven't thought up her background, thus don't have a bio written. Do I need a bio to write the fiction story? No, obviously not. In this case, it wouldn't help me much. I might do a bio after writing the spin-off story just in case I want to use that character in another story down the road.
So, do you NEED to write bios?? Up to you. I like them. Some authors don't bother.
RE: Posting bios ... Most authors don't. They want you to learn about the cast as you read the story. I have seen some who will list the main cast before the story, or perhaps after posting a chapter, as a handy reference for the reader as to who's who. That's cool, but you don't want to include any spoilers. For example, if I were to post the bios, I would edit out the part that one officer (now a Lieutenant Commander) was blamed for someone else's screw-up and this almost kicked out of the service as an Ensign. The reader will learn that whole backstory soon after the character is introduced.
I have a secondary character that might (probably will) become a major character in a snip-off story, but I haven't thought up her background, thus don't have a bio written. Do I need a bio to write the fiction story? No, obviously not. In this case, it wouldn't help me much. I might do a bio after writing the spin-off story just in case I want to use that character in another story down the road.
So, do you NEED to write bios?? Up to you. I like them. Some authors don't bother.
RE: Posting bios ... Most authors don't. They want you to learn about the cast as you read the story. I have seen some who will list the main cast before the story, or perhaps after posting a chapter, as a handy reference for the reader as to who's who. That's cool, but you don't want to include any spoilers. For example, if I were to post the bios, I would edit out the part that one officer (now a Lieutenant Commander) was blamed for someone else's screw-up and this almost kicked out of the service as an Ensign. The reader will learn that whole backstory soon after the character is introduced.
Star Trek Hunter features a natural phenomenon that uses waves of warp packets (the Davis-May Prediction) to deliver deadly gamma radiation from a galaxy a billion light years away in defiance of Coulomb's Law - which is the major plot driver. Then there's the Crusher/Crumar/Carrera Effect, which allows the U.S.S. Hunter to side-step the Warp 10 barrier, a race of space-whales, new communicator badges now sewn into the uniform that use AI to know when to activate, a number of modifications that Wesley Crusher makes to The Doctor (Voyager) that effectively turn him into a time lord... And a fair amount of technobabble explanations behind what otherwise appear to be supernatural events...
So, in my book, yeah...
Well, please do some basic research to make sure what you "make up" doesn't conflict with real scientific knowledge from our late-20th / early-21st century. If you want to put a new take on that, and if it makes sense, have at it. Shameless self-plug here, but see my story TIMELINES (link below) for an example how I put a different spin on Chaos Theory.
Counterpoint: There is nothing in the realm of the science of this or last century that says an amoeba can be the size of a solar system (TOS:"The Immunity Syndrome"), A spaceship can have a baby (TNG: "A Fistful of Datas"), explosive devices can reproduce like cells (DS9's "self-replicating mines"), or two human beings can travel so fast they mutate into horny pink monitor lizards (VOY: "Threshold.") All that nonsense is canon, and if professional writers got paid to write it, there's no way we should hold a fanfic writer to that standard. It's a matter of taste. Grounded sci-fi may be to your taste, and most of the time it's to my taste, but we always have to keep two things in mind: One, none of these stories work without some level of bullshit inserted into them, and Two, there's an audience for everything.
So, Bynar, what I'd say to you is that there's no way to know for sure how readers will react to what you make up until you actually make it up and present it to them. I can tell you that acceptance of made-up stuff is inversely proportional to the quality of the overall story. The more compelling your narrative, the less anyone will notice anything silly that it contains.
And now I'll say what I always say: Just write the story.
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Fair point. I did have a good example in mind, but the thought escaped out my left ear and ran out of the room before I finished typing my first sentence.
