Mary Sue Jumps a Shark

Nobody writes in a vacuum. Orson Scott Card wrote a short story, "Unaccompanied Sonata," about a musical prodigy intentionally raised with no exposure to music so his compositions would not be influenced by the entire history of musical development the rest of us take for granted. It's an interesting notion, but its purely speculative fiction.

These days, it is easy to be information saturated. A couple of weeks ago I was looking stuff up online while in the middle of a parking lot.

So we might as well learn from it all. There are fan communities out there for just about anything. And they overlap, Star Trek fans posting on Battlestar Galactica sites (blasphemy!), mystery readers complaining about romance novels. People naming genres and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres -- magical realism, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, dark urban fantasy... Half the web comics out there have wikis, live journals, forum groups and more. Did you know there were Girl Genius groups in Second Life, including a crew of Jaegers? Then again, how could there not be?

I'm not advocating the idea that you have to read everything, but I think there is a benefit to developing a sort of cultural awareness of modern fiction. We can argue all day about whether it would be better to work uninfluenced, like the hero of Orson Scott Card's story, but I don't believe it's possible. But before you get accused of being a Mary Sue, shouldn't you know what one is? Knowing is half the battle, right?

There's a flip side, though. Should your work really be accountable to the opinions of the Internet hordes? Maybe you are well aware that you are rehashing an idea so old that it has five pages on www.tvtropes.org. Maybe that's the story you want to tell. And maybe you can tell it so well that nobody cares.

I'm just saying that there's a potential learning curve here outside just the craft of writing. Right or wrong, there's a world of critical opinion and thought (some of it admittedly not worth the paper it isn't even printed on) out there. Shouldn't we at least be aware of it?