For those who are unfamiliar with him, the Marty Stu (or the female version, the Mary Sue) is an unwelcome character trope in fiction. He’s flawless, fearless, is beloved by all the other characters, and has the answer to every problem.
Readers can’t stand him, for good reason.
When you’re writing a main character who is similar to you (or, let’s face it, some kind of self-insert), it’s easy to give him all the advantages he needs to succeed. After all, you’re the God of your world: you can make him gorgeous or make everyone else fall all over him.
I had this problem with Talio Rossa in an early draft of Talio’s Codex. Ten years before the story starts, Talio was a renowned magistrate in the Four Cities, and a bit of a maverick, dispensing justice as he saw fit. Everything came crashing down when his then-wife found him in bed with another man, and he lost his prized magistrate’s codex on the same night. Now, ten years later, he’s re-entering the legal profession hoping to atone for his sins…and hoping to figure out who set him up originally. He also has a scarred face from a childhood incident. He has to face his wife and a disapproving legal community in the process.
Sounds like a lot of obstacles, right?
Well once I got through the first draft, I realized I’d given dear Talio much too easy a ride in the story. He wins every case, he makes brilliant deductions (regarding the mysteries he’s faced with), and he’s never wrong. It killed the suspense, and it made him feel like a Boy Wonder who would never go wrong.
Back to the drawing board. The first third of the novel was Talio defending his stepmother, a noblewoman, from a charge of murder. Too easy. I changed the defendant to Pazli, member of the Incarnites, an oppressed religious minority. There was no way Talio would easy get Pazli found innocent, unless he pulled some tricks…tricks which turn certain people against him. Then I had Talio make a few critical wrong guesses solving the mysteries. I thought that would be enough.
From one of the beta readers: “Talio tends to have convenient eureka moments when he suddenly understands exactly what is going on.” Back to the draft to make him stumble a bit, act more human.
Then I realized I’d given him ‘moral armor.’ Plot armor is when you know nothing too bad will happen to the main character because they are the main character. I invented the term moral armor. Talio does things that are pretty ethically and morally shaky – but he gets away with them because he’s the main character! This would not do. Back to the draft yet again. This time, every clever trick he pulls has a major consequence. One character detests him, another no longer trusts him. Perfect.
There was only one more major change to make, and that was letting Talio share the spotlight. As I mentioned, as the main character he’d be the lead advocate in court hearings, and he was frequently making “Eureka” deductions. I split off some of the hearing work to his law office partner, and gave some of the deductions and findings to a clever prosecutor he works with.
All these changes had the effect of cracking Talio’s perfect infallibility and showing more human sides to his character. The result: Talio is a very flawed character who moves the plot forward, tries things that don’t work, and has to deal with the consequences of his actions. I thought I’d started out with a non-Marty-Stu character (not handsome, reviled, with a shady past), but that was a static definition of him at the start of the novel. I also needed to show him not winning every time. In fact, he loses most of the time…except where it counts most.