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?

This Post Isn't About Superheroes

"Batman" is not hyphenated. "Spider-Man" is. There is no rhyme or reason to it, but there you are.

Who cares? Readers care. And writers should care that their readers care. Because even a reader who doesn't care at all about the whole superhero genre can look at a sentence with Bat-Man in it and say, "That looks wrong." In fact, it will look just as wrong as mixing up to, too, and two.

I chose Batman and Spider-Man because they are invented words that follow arbitrary rules. They aren't the only ones. Taser is a brand name and therefore capitalized. On the other hand, eBay capitalizes its second letter but not its first. And there are weird exceptions to the weird rules. Scuba and laser are both acronyms and by rights ought to be in all caps. But they have fallen so deeply into common use that SCUBA and LASER would look odd.

I understand that mistakes happen. I have found typos in professionally published novels by quality authors (including, alas, some of my own books). But my point here is that certain types of words require a little more attention to get right. And where a given typo may appear once in a manuscript, this type of error will occur every time you use the word.

So when in doubt about a brand, company name, acronym, or other odd or recently invented word, take the time to look it up.

Oh, and for the record, both "superheroes" and "super-heroes" appear in common use, along with the less frequent two word version: "super heroes." I know because I looked. Sometimes the research just confuses things. Sorry about that.