If you were ever a horrible writer at one point or a Suethor (or both), at what point did you realize you screwed up?

I am not a good writer: was not, am not, probably will not be for a while, and I admit it. Harsh truth is, now that Real Life is beginning to hit harder than ever, I'll probably spend next to nil time practicing, too.

But I still have approximately twenty different parts of storylines and characters knocking around in my head, trying to get out.

I was planning out a character for an RPG my friend was going to run. The short description is that it had obscenely high stats and powerful gear due to the min-maxing I was so fond of, when I realized that it would be obscenely boring to play with this character. I made the jump to mary-sues fairly quickly after that.. The long version is that in 3.5 ed. D&D, a half-demon mind-flayer vampire sorcerer with a base charisma of 18 can deal 400 points of unsavable damage instantly, then teleport away, also instantly. My min-maxing days are far behind me, thankfully.

My first fanfic was a riveting two-chapter (never completed, of course) tale about inexplicable time travel, people owning deities, failed revelations, one of my ost hated Fandom Stock Plotlines ever, severe canon OOCism (of a character I would later use correctly, no less!) and inexplicable cool names like Neos, Risen, and Raine. I lived with this fine beast for about a year, until - after improving considerably as a writer - I started work on another fic, including that OOC guy I was talking about earlier. Remembering the fic I wrote earlier, I fished it out of the depths of a forum and read through what I had.

My reaction: "I... stunk."

The characters who still had some hope for redemption were used later, but in typical old-character fashion, twisted and warped in various tragic and sadistic ways.

I think it came from reading a lot of fic MSTings, then I looked back at some my old fics and realized they were, well, crap.

I haven't put any new fics up for a while, but I'm still working on improving my works.

I'm not sure whether I was a Suethor or not. I think I think I actually went in the other direction as far as bad writing goes (too bland). I found out that Sue's were bad about 2 years ago from an article at an RPG site. I think I started to write betterly about 1 year or so ago, but by then I already knew not to make Sues.

I never read fanfic before I came to the PPC. I had no interest in it and, as such, had no idea that the Sues were out there. So I only found out that they were bad when I came here and found out that they existed.

I can't really look back at my past writing and see how bad I was because the earliest piece of writing I have (because it is the first thing I ever wrote) is only from November of 2009. I was not a writer up to that point; I was a reader.

So I guess I burst onto the writing scene full-formed and clad in armor (or at least a robe and purple hat).

Not really sure how I fit into this conversation anymore...oh well.

Probably through a combination of things over a few years. I can't recall one single defining incident.

Even in high school, I understood pretty well that anything I wrote at the time was going to be sub-par, simply because I lacked experience. I consciously decided not to attempt anything original, at least not seriously, until I'd gotten out of school. Fanfic seemed like the perfect way to practice writing without making a mockery of my own ideas by trying to write them before I felt ready.

Interestingly, I learned what a Mary Sue is before I learned that it's a bad thing, though a reviewer asking me very kindly if I thought certain traits (self-insertion with a make-over, particularly) applied to my OC and whether I thought that made her a Mary Sue, to which I replied "Yeah, those things apply, so you could definitely say she's a Mary Sue!" And I went on with my life.

Shortly thereafter, I discovered fanfiction.net, but since I tend not to go blindly looking for things to read--rather, I prefer to have a recommendation--I didn't encounter most of the badfic. If a summary was spelled horribly, I just ignored it.

Meanwhile, I was involved in several fandom-based role-plays, and that's a real hub for Sues. Having to interact with them is probably how I really learned to dislike them. The Pern fandom is especially prone to them, and I spent a lot of time in Pern RP guilds.

And then at some point, I discovered OFUM and through it the PPC, and came to understand that they were in my Tolkien! And THAT was just going too far. I had one LotR RP character at the time, and the PPC made me realize that even though I'd been careful making her, she was still pretty Sueish, and I gave her up. No way was I gonna go around like that anymore.

That would've been in 2003, right around when I graduated high school. So, I guess that was the last nail in the coffin of my Suethorish tendencies.

Good topic, by the way. Thanks for starting it. {= )

~Neshomeh

I know I hadn't been reading fanfiction yet (that started when I was 15) so I had no idea how bad things could get. But I did have my own few characters. Fortunately, I was shy and too unsure to share them with anyone but my best friend. I was a bad writer, too, and I knew it.

One night, I was having a sleepover with that friend, and she commented that she was very happy because she'd put one of her characters through a Mary Sue test, and she had passed "with flying colors". "A what?" I asked. So she gave me some explanation, and after breakfast the next morning, we looked up a Mary Sue litmus test.

That was the beginning of me amusing myself with litmus tests. I love them. I wasn't too upset that my characters were failing the tests (except that I felt like I'd lost to my friend and I didn't like to lose). Still, after that, I always put my characters through litmus tests, and then I started posting my stories, so this actually mattered.

Coincidentally, last night I went to look at my old fic on the Pit, written during high school, and discovered to my horror that the punctuation was...far below my standards, to say the least. I think reading PPC missions has helped me catch that kind of mistake better, since now I read the actual written words rather than converting them into proper English grammar mentally. I can understand now why my senior year English teacher liked to write personal notes with bad spelling; you catch mistakes more when you're thinking about them and recognize them.

(And yes, I'm going back to fix my errors in my fic.)

I'm a big fan of the series and the sue was stealing every single good moment from other character. Not just the main character but all the minor ones too. The point were I snaped was when the plot twisted off during Jak 2 cos the aouther hadn't been able to beat the game.

I think I was about twelve or thirteen, when I took a look at the main character of an original story I was working on and realised that she was so powerful and wonderful that I literally couldn't tell a story about her. Every time I tried to throw an obstacle in the party's way I would then think 'But Becka can deal with that because she can...' Thinking upon it, I realised that no girl her age should speak ten languages and be able to fly and maintain a Spitfire, among other things.
Yeah, I have studied LotR Sues up and down the internet. I have written articles about Sues, their identification and classification and how to avoid them. I'm hoping to publish a book. And that version of Becka is still the worst Sue I've ever seen.
I've since toned her down a lot, and still use her, but she still scores the highest whenever I run a selection of my characters through a litmus test.

...about the time I found the PPC, actually. I was in the midst of trying to write an "original fiction" fantasy novel, in which the main character was a girl rebelling against her unofficially "arranged" marriage, and she got sept up in a bettle between the world's gods. It was all very involved, blatantly obvious and as Suvian as it could possibly have got, and I look back on it now and cringe.

I found the PPC back in April 2008, looked at my writing, and went "...what am I doing? D:". I still have it somewhere, as a reminder to myself of how awful my writing used to be.

Came from a fellow author, Tirathon, giving me a whack over the head with a proverbial clue-by-four, about a year or so ago. The story I was writing was truly a godawful piece of shit, and I rewrote it. She still doesn't like the rewrite, but she said it was a vast improvement over the first one (which I still have in a notebook that I intend to burn at some point). The original version was way too far-fetched: I had three time-traveling soldiers, and dumped them into Hogan's Heroes. Too bad the story stunk and had no plot; along with not one, but THREE Mary-Sues (that I had no valid reason to put in there).
All I can say is: Thank God for Tirathon's extended reviews (and boy are they funny!).

Honu_Wahine

...was when I reaslised my ten year old character who was smarter than any canon, the best on her entire planet at fighting who looks like a pretty version of me and has my name, is a Mary Sue. Then I started reading goodfics and PPC missions, and got better. Not infinately better (yet), but a bit better.

I can clearly remember reading and enjoying some pretty nasty Sues. The one I can pin as my first encounter with Sues was posted on an FFVII site called The Nibel Mansion back in the day; it was Meet Cute Sue with a tragic past, natch, who fell in love with Vincent Valentine. I remember enjoying it, but the site was deleted before I got to finish it. I still wonder what happened to that thing.

It was more of a gradual realization, I guess. Once I realized that there were ten billion X-meets-OC fics out there, and that I wasn't the only person in the world writing little stories about my favorite canons, I got pickier. It was a winnowing process, I suppose. And somehow I wound up here. :D

Hello again :)

I never actually wrote a Suefic, but when I was about eleven I had a character all planned out, right down to her speshul silver jewellery - I still shudder to think of it. At that time I didn't realise how awful the Sue problem was, but I never wrote her story because I did feel that she might, possibly, have been too good. Looking back, I'm thankful to have realised that much.

I did write and post some truly horrid fanfics when I was fouteen; they were under a different penname, which has since been deleted along with all the dreadful fics. Mine was a Star Wars/Star Trek crossover fic, twenty chapters long and ridiculously Happy-Ever-After-ish. I posted it and got a few reviews, mostly the fawning type that demand updates but are all written by equally young readers. Of course, I was flattered. It took another few years (and a lot more exposure to fanfic communitues) before I realised just how badly out-of-character I had driven all the main characters. And that my plot was beyond implausible. I erased everything and didn't write again for years, but when I did, I'd grown up, and the stories were worthwhile.

How are things over at ACMSES?