The Mary Sue Project

And now there was no mistaking it and all five children — Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy, and Mackenzie — stood blinking in the daylight of a winter day. Behind them were coats hanging on pegs, in front of them were snow-covered trees.

hen my class writes fiction, we almost always start with ourselves: not our own lives, necessarily, but our bodies, memories, dreams, desires. My students — fifth-grade girls — are just beginning to find the language for their sensations, and of course it’s easier to describe what you’re feeling right now than a feeling you remember, and easier to describe a feeling you remember than a feeling you imagine. They produce their very best sensory descriptions when I can get them to put pencil to paper while the marshmallows are still melting on their tongues. (Student: “The taste is changing in my mouth! Quick, write this down!”) Describing their own selves, or the story-selves they develop, proves their only reliable alternative to writing about the Planet of the Tall, Slender, Blonde, and Incidentally Also Graduated from Harvard at Sixteen. (More on this later.)

In the winter, our characters go visiting: each girl chooses a climactic moment from a favorite novel and writes herself into the story, in the third person, as one of the main characters. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline becomes Coraline and Caroline, in which twin sisters face off together against the “other mother”; the feral cat clans of Erin Hunter’s Warrior series flourish under the leadership of newcomer Snowfur, known in real life as Camille. (Student: “Should the same things still happen in the story?” Me: “I don’t know — will they be the same with you there?”)

The project starts while we’re nearing the end of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and many of my girls have lost patience with Meg’s jealousy, her stubbornness, her whining. (They don’t like adolescent Harry Potter, either. Maybe they will in a year or two.) Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace are wandering Camazotz in search of Meg’s father; on the whiteboard and in our notebooks, we keep a list of each character’s recent comments and actions, so that we can figure out his or her shifting agenda. The girls empathize with Meg, to some extent, but they want her to shut up.

Before we begin to write, I inform the class that we are undertaking a very special competition. I will place them in teams of three; I will read the instructions one time; they will have ten minutes to work. Are they ready? Are they ever. They grip their desks and giggle at a frequency inaudible to adult ears. (They never ask why we’re doing this, or what the prize is — either because they are fifth graders and cheerfully disposed or because by February they are used to a certain degree of eccentricity in their English classes.) The task is something quick and silly that I borrow from the math teacher: building the highest possible freestanding tower using a bag of party balloons and a roll of masking tape, for example. For ten minutes, though, it’s deadly serious. They scrawl blueprints, hiss instructions, hyperventilate.

Once time is up and the towers have been measured and set aside, I ask the girls to open their notebooks, add a fourth column alongside Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace — and write down everything they had said to their partners while they worked. Looking at the list of their comments, they analyze their role in the group, just as they’ve analyzed those of the fictional characters. They are remarkably keen readers of their own language: “I had a lot of good ideas, but I said them pretty quietly, so we did someone else’s idea, and then I was even more quiet because I wanted to do mine.” “I was always explaining why ideas wouldn’t work. Even my ideas. But I was right! I wasn’t just being difficult.” The balloon-tower exercise provides textual evidence that becomes the basis for each girl’s literary character in the episode she rewrites.

The students quickly discover that fitting a new character into the story means dismantling the original prose to see how it works. Those who use A Wrinkle in Time read the original trio’s interactions very differently when they imagine their own dialogue in the conversation. Though they’re thrilled that they can finally tell Meg directly to shut up, they begin to identify with her urgency and anger as well. They notice her subtle, desperate possessiveness toward both Charles Wallace and Calvin, and their story-selves resent it even as they compete with her for the boys’ attention. They see, also, how the tension between the three characters drags them toward resolution and toward failure. To the writers’ surprise, adding the fourth character seems to tip the narrative off-balance, so that the group almost never finds its way to the Man with Red Eyes. As they work, the girls become increasingly sensitive to the distinction between character in real life and as a literary construction. (Student: “I’m not really always like this, but it makes more sense in the story this way.”)

Most interesting to me as a teacher are the roles my students do — and don’t — feel comfortable assuming. Some girls immediately seize the hero’s spotlight: solving the mystery, leading the charge, saving the day. But a significant minority see themselves as a liability to the mission. (Student: “I’m just not as brave as these characters. I’ve never done anything like this.”) These girls cast themselves as bumbling comic sidekicks, annoying little sisters, and, occasionally, love interests for male protagonists. Their avoidance of the conventional heroic role produces the most intriguing endings, though — anticlimaxes, disappointments, and dead ends.

In class I’ve always called this assignment the Adventure Chapter, but privately I think of it as the Mary Sue Project. The term Mary Sue comes from the fanfiction community — people who, mostly on the Internet, rework characters from published texts into a huge and vibrant web of short stories, poetry cycles, group-writing ex-periments, role-playing games, novel-length serials, pornography, and every other literary or nearly literary form imaginable, for no profit other than their own enjoyment. The Harry Potter series seems to generate the greatest volume of material; quite often, though, the hero of the story is no longer Harry Potter or Hermione Granger but a beautiful, brilliant, beloved teenaged newcomer who bears an uncanny resemblance to the author. In the story she’s likely to be named Serena or Kaori or Artemis, but critics call her Mary Sue.

Fanfiction readers love to mock the Mary Sue stories, which often plunge past the niceties of plot or purpose in order to get to the wish fulfillment. But I confess that Mary Sue-ism represents one of my favorite ways of reading for pleasure. I want badly to imagine myself at Hogwarts, to Sort myself into a House and talk back to the protagonists and make up my own spells. I love that in the Mary Sue Project my girls involve themselves so intimately in stories, take them personally, inhabit them — and read more critically as a result.

But even when the girls readily find roles for their characters, they can’t always make space for themselves. More often than not, my students choose fantasy and magic and adventure for this project; there’s nothing exciting about pretending to live in a realistic story about regular kids. And more often than not, in this project, my black, Hispanic, and Asian students’ characters develop long blonde ringlets and sparkling violet eyes. They manage to leave those clichés behind when they write historical fiction and school stories, the genres in which we find more than a handful of nonwhite writers and nonwhite protagonists. But if they want to rescue their parents or travel through time or tame dragons or lead armies or quest for love or save the world, their only choice is to write themselves into stories that are exclusively, blindingly, obliviously white. My theory is that these novels are so white that racial difference becomes impossible within them; the girls are not persuaded that they, in their own skins, could ever be Coraline’s best friend or Hermione’s long-lost cousin.

The next step, then, is to make sure my girls can see themselves in the pages. I’m forever on the lookout for a wider range of well-told stories about nonwhite children. (Ask our fantastic school librarian, who’s probably tired of pulling possible candidates for me.) In the meantime, my Plan B is for this writing project itself to spark literary activism: to ask students explicitly who gets to be in the original story, who’s left out and why, and what we can do about it. I want next year’s fifth graders to see this project as an opportunity to claim space for themselves even where the books they read have not made it readily available. When they are the writers — or rewriters — then the power to question, subvert, and renovate their fiction is in their hands.

Lelac Almagor teaches English at the National Cathedral School for Girls in Washington, D.C.