Chapter One

Hello, fair citizens of ! I am here today to address something that has been bothering me for a while, and I'm sure it bothers you, too.

Original Characters. Commonly known as OCs.

There, see, even the words look ominous. There is just a certain deathly vibe that comes from those two words together that makes all fanfiction writers shiver in their seats. I feel sort of terrible about this sort of reaction that is induced by OCs made by us young writers a lot of the time. I feel like a lot of people on can probably make a wonderful OC. So, I will try to help people with that.

First of all, we need to discuss appearance.

I have read many OC fics in my day, and many of them include a character that is laughably and preposterously beautiful (seriously, it doesn't even happen in real life).

I'm sorry to say this, but it's generally not a good idea to go with using this beauty trope. Because that's exactly what it is: a trope. It's actually kind of sad, too. Since the OC inserts are generally heroes/heroines, it implies that only good-looking people can be heroes/heroines. And that's not true at all.

A lot of peoples' OC Fanfictions usually have an introduction to their OC like this:

"[Name]-san!" [Character from fandom] called loudly, running up to her. "I'm so glad I caught you!"

[Name] turned around, purple eyes practically glowing. Her long, silky black hair swished over her shoulders as she turned around to greet [character].

"Hello, [character]-san," [Name] purred, running a delicate hand through her shimmering ebony hair.

This is an example of something you should probably avoid doing in your fics, especially if it's an OC fic. Why? Because it's, frankly, annoying. It makes you seem like you're completely enamored with your own character. The character stops being a character: it becomes some sort of weird doll.

Also, if you're writing stories, you have to take note of the setting and context. If a person is from Japan and they're full Japanese, it is going to take some serious genetic work for them to be born with naturally purple eyes. It is important to make your character's appearance seem realistic, unless there is specific context for abnormalities, like having dyed hair, wearing colored contacts, or having a parent not be of the same genetic pool as the other (therefore opening more possibilities.)

Now, this next paragraph will try to encompass a character that I made, with the help of some friends. I'm not going to tell you how to write a character, but my friends and I believe that this is an improvement from the previous italicized paragraph.

"[Name]-san!" [Character] called loudly, running up to her. "I'm so glad I caught you!"

[Name] turned around, grinning widely and showing off all her rainbow braces. Her dark brown eyes were almost closed from the sheer force of her grin, making her look like the Cheshire cat.

"Hi, [character]-san!" [Name] lisped excitedly, brushing a strand of her dark hair behind her ear.

In this passage, I remarked upon this character's appearance, but I didn't make her overly beautiful as I did in the last passage. I gave her rainbow braces! And with braces, as I'm sure some of you have noticed, comes a bit of a lisp. I included that in my story because my character is a person, just like everyone else! She has the same issues with her braces and she doesn't have super awesome purple eyes. (Purple eyes are not necessary to make people awesome, dear readers.)

Because she's a person, not a doll; this means that she is not going to be perfect by any stretch of the means.

Another thing I've noticed about the OCs on this website are generally written or portrayed as geniuses. This is fine, except for the fact that their character, because of their high intelligence, somehow turns into a Vulcan and never makes mistakes. They always have some sort of intuition telling them which path to choose, and they always know what to do in every situation, simply because they're geniuses.

And while I feel like that's a common misconception about geniuses, it's just not true. A lot of the time, people who are qualified "geniuses" are people who are extremely intelligent in one specific subject, and this is because they focus solely on this subject. Bill Gates, for example, who is a computer whiz, completely flunked all his classes at school because he was too busy fiddling around with computers.

In order to make your character believable, they have to make mistakes at some point in their story arc. They can't just glide by on life, because that's impossible for the rest of us; why the hell should your character be any different, if they're a person as well?

I feel like people on websites such as these create characters, and forget that characters are supposed to be modeled after people. And since there are hardly any editors on this site that feel like they have the audacity to point out things like Mary Sue/Gary Stu-ness to fledgling writers, most of these OCs go unchecked, and the writers don't learn anything about how to properly create a character.

Just remember this: characters make mistakes, and characters are not dolls.