Someone like me can't help but do it this way, and I suspect you're similar, so if you're having Gary Stu problems then I'd think the solution would be more exposure to those kinds of characterizations, rather than less, so that you can mature and refine your authorial control.
At least insofar as my own writing is concerned (and I suspect in other people's writing as well), every character is a surrogate. From the smallest bit character to the villain to the hero, every character I write has a little piece of me in them. It seems rather reasonable; mine is the only mind and behavior I know well enough to write. Even when I try to write a character totally different than myself, I still am doing so through my own perceptions.
The Gary Stu/Mary Sue character is such a travesty to me because it is actually the exception. Gary Stus tend to be the idealization of the author, which is to say, there is nothing of the author in them. To use an analogy, it is sort of like the difference between a costume and a puppet. Other characters are costumes; the author puts them on, pretends to be the person, dances around, then changes into a different one. But the Gary Stu is too apart from the author, there just isn't room in the idealized form for the author to fit. No matter how skillful the puppet-mastery is, the strings give it clearly away that the puppet is just a puppet and not a person.
And this relates to something you said earlier...
We should all be forced in school to write an extremely sexually explicit essay (fictional of course), and then we would all be able to get on with our lives.
I once heard a suggestion along those lines before. It was from a professional writer, I think (but don't remember, so who knows). Specifically, it went somewhere along the lines of: "every writer should be forced to write one noble-suicide story. That way they could get it out of their system and move on."
But anywho, sex in writing is always so hard to pull off well because it tends to attempt to simulate an act between two (or more) people, but the writing of the scene is inherently masturbatory. As I said above, the author tends to be in every character. As such, in sex scenes, the author is really just having sex with himself. Masturbating and sex are very different activities and experiences; trying to pass the former off as the later is beyond most authors. Yet at the same time, sex is such a driving passion in humans that many can't help but try.
I've never figured out why the noble-suicide comes up so often, however.
Off-topic and perhaps unfair, so feel free to decline to answer. But: If I remember correctly, you're married, right? And you're roughly my age. (I'm 26.) So, out of your proposed “inner need for romance,” would you say you have that to your satisfaction now? Or does it still dominate your writing? (Presumably “both” is also an answer, under special conditions...)
Well I can't righty say, as I haven't been writing much lately. But if I had to answer, I'd answer "both." A real person will never give you exactly what you can imagine, and your imagination will never give you exactly what you really need. There is always space that one or the other can't fill.
That being said, "yes" could also be a valid answer. Having seen what real romance is like, I look back at what I thought it was and kind of laugh at how low I had set my sights.
And with that being said, "no" could also be a valid answer. Having seen how low I had set my sights in the past, I realize I can set them higher still.
I have almost all of my electronic work, all the way back to our first family computer in the 1990s when I wrote in WordPerfect on a blue screen with white text.
Ah, that brings back memories. There is still something inherently nice about a blue screen. I learned to write on that version of WordPerfect. One of the reasons I lost some of my stories was I never updated them, both from WordPerfect format and from floppy disk (it’s getting hard to find computers with floppy drives now days).
In fact, my typing skills came entirely as a side gift from my writing. In middle school, I had almost no skills whatsoever. I used my index fingers on the keyboard. I thought I would never be able to type like those people who could just stare at the screen and type like cheetahs and never even look down at their hands. But that's exactly what I became...because I wrote so much. My fingers fell into the patterns. To this day I still don't type “correctly” (my left hand takes more keys than it's supposed to), but I can type faster and more accurately than almost everyone.
Heh, I learned the same way. I used the hunt and peck method probably up until freshmen year of High School. I got incredibly fast at it, so that it was never really a problem. Then one day I looked up from the keyboard and realized my fingers instinctually knew where the keys were. One advantage is that I can type entirely with my right or left hand, if need be, because both know where all the keys are.
Oh, that's harsh. This makes it easier to understand why you're as well put-together as you are. Most people our age are not, and, among the few who are, many have some traumatic event in their past which helped them to focus their lives. (Not me, though, if you're wondering...)
I don't really know if I'd call it traumatic, but aye, it was formative. Though I'd generally say writing has contributed far more to me being "well put-together" than that experience, which ranks around 3rd place (2nd place going to reading, if you are curious).
Actually, I've been writing extensively (though not as much as you, from the sound of it) for so much of my life that I actually think better when I write than otherwise. Writing is thinking, for me, and thinking is writing.
I'm curious; with so many writers of varying skill levels, might anyone be interesting in starting a writing group here on the compendium?
Since I mentioned it in my first post, let me follow up by saying that I still can't call myself a writing. But... I've taken very important steps in getting there once again. Time and workspace have been limiting factors in the past few years, and solutions to those two issues have been devised. I just need a free Saturday to implement them. Then I can try out my newest character idea (writing from a female perspective; something, I realized, I haven't ever done before).
