Thoughts on Mary Sueness

[valarltd]

I bounced this off jkb last night. I'm writing a post-societal breakdown story. My PoV character is indeed a self-insertion. I'm giving her the skills and reference books that I have in real life. My worry is that there are too many of them.

When planning to live off-grid, she took to ordering from places like Lehmans, Xantrex and solar cooking sites. So Solar oven, treadle sewing machine, composting toilet. Maybe even a couple other solar items.

She has The Reader's Digest book Back to Basics, a couple of Foxfire books, and The Family Creative Workshop, which is a 25 volume set of everything one could need to know about 1970's crafts.

The thing I worry about is the moving part. Is anyone going to believe 5 acres adjoining her mother's (the former nurse) 5 acre parcel, both on well-water with an apple orchard in between? (Basically I'm moving into the house that was right next door to my grandparents' when i was a kid) Pasturage, 3 ponds, established gooseberry bushes, elderberry bushes, asparagus bed and rhubarb bed?



I can do these things. Is it too much to ask that a fictional character could?

stoke a fire in a wood stove that's been banked all night
bank a fire
cook from scratch for a crowd
collect eggs
milk cows
curry and hitch horses
drive a horse team
ride a horse, saddle or bareback
feed the animals
spin
weave (inkle, backstrap and table looms only)
dye with natural dyes
draft patterns
sew
crochet
knit
quilt
teach my kids
make jam without store-bought pectin
weave baskets
churn butter
identify morel mushrooms and other wild edibles
light carpentry
haggle
first aid
churn butter


Would anyone buy such a character in this day and age? I can see this if it was 1930's America, but 2005? It's not like she's doing all this to show off, but rather to survive. Most of it comes from Girl Scouting and half-way living on my grandparents' farm. A lot more of it comes from living through the 1970s and the "Back to the land" and handcraft revivals.

I just wondered if this was all too Mary Sue. It's not like she's going to be good at most of this stuff the first time she tries it. Or even the twentieth. After all, while neglected skills come back, they don't always do so easily or gracefully.

Comments

[beeej.livejournal.com]

I think it depends a lot on your character's backstory. A person who grew up in a metropolitan area might not have most of these skills, or even know how to begin to learn them, unless family members or friends taught them, or they took an interest in one or two as a hobby. But where I grew up - in a small town in the midwest, farming communities are still abundant and many of these skills are more common. I live in a metropolitan city now, with a corporate job and a house in the burbs. But I can do at least a dozen of the things on that skills list. Your character may be more unique than others, but that's a good thing, right? :)

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

i'm a country girl too. I may live in the burbs and work at an urban university, but I grew up collecting eggs and cutting spinach.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

yup, i agree with previous commentor. if you give us enough back story to explain the more particular skills (heck, she could be working summer jobs in one of those colonial reconstruction villages to learn how to spin, weave, and churn butter :-)

or be a scary separationist who own books like _childbirth in the wilderness_ (i actually saw this book at my first gun show ever and am still traumatized :-)

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Actually, she's a librarian. And used to do historical re-enactment, which is where some of it comes from. And some more from having a seen a show by the local weavers' guild which put her in touch with the local fiber community.

No, no separationist stuff. Just access to some of the homesteading/Amish supply lit from hanging with homeschoolers.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

oh, i wasn't serious about the separationist :-) i just have very bad red dawn flashbacks every once in a while :-)

and the historical re-enactment is a great way to give her some skills...

[elke-tanzer.livejournal.com]

I clicked on this list, expecting to see Really Odd Obscure Skillz.

Oooh, Lehmans.

I or women I know personally can do all of those things, with the exception of making jam without store-bought pectin and the items involving horses, which I'm sure a couple people on my friendslist can do.

*sigh* I guess I live in a Really Odd Obscure world.

You might want to put into your story that your character has always been interested in things general society hasn't been, ever since reading My Side Of The Mountain or something...

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Spinning on a drop spindle isn't odd & Obscure?

I mean, OK, it's not spinning a herring on my nose while whistling the Liberty Bell March or standing on my head and singing "O Canada", but if you ask any 20 women on the street if they can spin, you'll be luck to find one who has done 3 inches of yarn at the spinning wheel demo at Silver Dollar City. If you handed 20 random women a drop spindle, most would have no idea what it was.

Clue on the jam: green apples have LOTS of pectin.

Actually, I can brush and curry a horse, and I could ride and drive a pony trap before I could read. I haven't been on a horse in 20 years tho'.

[elke-tanzer.livejournal.com]

It might be odd for the general population, but my friends are... different. LOL! I'm one of the few in my immediate social circle who doesn't own a wheel, and I'm kind of inept with my drop spindle.

[buggery.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's an unreasonable skills set given the character background you've laid out (and will doubtless fill in further) and I don't think the setting is pushing it too far, either. I can do, or know people who can do, almost everything on that list, and my great-grandparents' homestead, which remained in family hands until recent years, had 4 acres of stream, ponds, blueberry bushes and scattered fruit trees, in addition to a full acre of "garden" (half of it corn, the rest mainly beans, squashes, salad vegetables, raspberries and apple trees), and another 15 acres of surrounding forest.

In particular, with regard to skills lost to "modern" culture, I'm good enough with identifying wild foods to live off what I can gather, in the right environments, and hardly anybody really believes that's possible even when I take them on a short walk and point out a half-dozen or so food plants. (This works even in urban areas, at times -- there's some great tasty "weeds" that are very much at home in medians and the cracks of sidewalks, though pollution becomes an issue.) When apples aren't available, incidentally, wild greenbrier (and related species -- bullbrier, etc.) is a fantastic source of pectin for canning.

Oh, and speaking more generally of canning... she'd probably need to do this well enough to put up at least some food for the winter, both because the foods available fresh during the cold months are fewer and further between, and because through much of late summer she'll have more fresh ripe fruits and vegetables than she'll be able to use. This might be a good skill to have her be only minimally competent at -- i.e., she can do the canning correctly and not wind up with spoiled food that would make her sick, but maybe only the jams come out really tasty. Canning would also be an alternative to salt-curing, jerking or otherwise drying meats for long-term storage; I know a family (in West Virginia, yes, but the husband is a college professor) who can venison during hunting season and eat it throughout the remainder of the year.

She'll need to compost, too, with her kitchen and garden leavings. (Using human-waste compost to fertilise food is just inadvisable.) Knowing what should and shouldn't go in, and how to maintain a compost pile, are crucial skills for the lifestyle you're talking about.

Anyway, yeah, from an objective standpoint you're credible, and all you'll need to win over any dubious audiences is a confident authorial tone. If you write like you believe it, your readers will go along.