"So, you can kill a man, and take a machete like a champ. A concrete block can do that! But you can't kick one out of a moving truck and call that a character arc!" — Zero Punctuation reviews Tomb Raider (2013)
OC are hard to make in fanfiction. Sure, completely original fiction is harder because you need to make lots of original things, but in fanfiction, the Original Character is probably one of the hardest things to do.
Alright. Sit down, shut up or prove me wrong, because I have only a vague idea of what I'm doing. This is a tutorial. A walkthrough. Half-lesson, half example, and probably dumb idea.
Let's make an OC.
#1: What Are You Writing?!
Start here. Not "who are you writing," What. Adventure? Drama? Shameless wish-fulfillment? Clop?
Where is your story going? Where is your story going to stop? What is the final, satisfying and powerful ending sentence of your story going to be before you center-justify and paste in that pretty end graphic?
Like that. But hopefully smaller and less ostentatious.
Last Straw sits down to start writing his novel. He knows he wants to tell an adventure story, and end with the hero rescuing his True Love Princess Starry Moon and flying away with her into the morning light.
Once you have a ending, you have a lot of what you need. now, big thing you probably already half-answered: who's ending is it?
Your hero. Not the one you introduce in the first chapter. The one who gets the ending. It can be a hard thing to wrap your head around, but once you get it you can really make amazing characters.
Straw thinks for a second and decides simply that he's telling a classic story. His hero, Steelwings, is going to be a skilled pegasus warrior with the scars of many battles. He dances around battlefields and ballrooms with equal ease. Simple. Awesome. Sure to get the colts for the cool and the mares for the sexy-looking cover. He's gonna be a bestseller.
Alright. You have an ending. It might change, but you have a solid goal to go for.
Now, I like to jump all the way back to the beginning. Introduce the new character, but this is where you make them flawed. Relatable.
Human.
Yes, I get that we're usually writing fanfics about ponies, but good characters are human in the literary sense of the word. They don't spring fully-formed from your skull onto the pages. Good characters live, breath, have had lives, have grown up and gotten older and laughed and cried. Then we meet them and watch them change more. They don't start in the same state they finish in. Introduce us to someone we want to meet, watch and follow.
After some consideration, Straw decides to make Steelwings fairly normal to his audience. Steelwings is, at the beginning of the story, an underpaid guard for the Monocle Society Clubhouse, a fancy fictional establishment and most certainly not The Tophat Circle of Gentlecolts with a thin coat of paint. He's a good employee, rather over-trained by his eccentric boss, but has gotten in trouble for reading cheap romance novels on-duty. He lives with his mother to deal with the costs of living in Canterlot, and he loves her but she drives him nuts.
Now, sometimes the character that walks into a story and the character that walks out is wildly different. Sometimes they're basically the same. The Luke Skywalker looking out at the sunset from the Beru Moisture Farm was a restless if responsible farmhand. The Luke Skywalker who flew away from the Second Death Star was a Jedi Knight and all-around idealistic badass known around the galaxy. Is that a huge, seemingly insurmountable change? Yes.
If you didn't know what was in between it.
Change is rarely sudden, and it always has a reason. Start with one character, give them the bare minimum they need to be able to make it through the story. They'll get there, you can make them. Luke is a good pilot, and possibly a competent shot since he owns a blaster rifle, and altruistic enough to make sure help can be sent to a stranger who's message he intercepts. Oh, and Force-sensitive, but can't use it. That's all he got! But he learns to use his space-magic, gets military training and experience, and develops until he deserves his reputation, all to fight the Empire. It takes three movies! It takes Harry Potter seven books and eight movies! Hell, remember this twat?
"I've got a dumb face and can't remember why!"
Remember who chopped off the head of a magical anaconda and brought a sword to a Killing-curse fight!? He didn't get there overnight.
"I've killed fifteen people today, and that was after they lit me on fire and I started counting."
Point is that the story will change the character in steps and jumps, but a story that leaves the character the same throughout is basically Twilight. There is no development there.
Plot makes goals, goals push characters, characters push plot and round it goes. Time to fill in the puzzle pieces.
Last Straw starts to think about his plot. He has a goal: rescuing the Princess, and a point A and point Z for his protagonist. Now he needs to get Steelwings from a bored bouncer to what he wants.
He decides a brazen kidnapping by a crime syndicate would kick things off nicely. From there, Steelwings takes it on himself to investigate, discovering the corrupt police and corruption throughout the city. His textbook training and weak sparring quickly gets honed by experience, and he discovers a talent for soldiering through injury. Layer by layer, his stubborn drive brings him closer to rescuing the damsel!
An important part of any story is keeping the hero challenged, and the most natural way to do that is themselves.
This will be frustrating to you, the author. It sucks to make your character fail.
Let it go.
Real people make bad decisions. You started writing fanfiction. I started drinking. Going to 4chan. Russia invading Simo Häyhä's backyard.
You, as the author of fictional characters, have the power to easily make any character utterly infallible. They can say and do the right thing, and bend every other character and the world to match it.
You are supposed to do that. That's storytelling. But you have to do it to create the illusion of realism. You have to trick the reader into thinking this is a breathing world where these events can happen and are not directed at the whims of your godlike pen.
This guy is smart, so I'm saying what he said so I'm smart too. Flawless logic.
You've probably built flaws into your character. But how many of these flaws actually effect them, in the context of the story? You can call your character shy all you want, but if they happily chat it up with pretty girls three lines after meeting them then that's not a flaw. It's especially not a flaw if this is during a zombie apocalypse and they're more concerned with retaining all their limbs and digits than picking up a date. Flaws aren't flaws unless it's hurting the character, and they need to overcome by eliminating or working around it. A messed-up, dark and sad backstory is nothing unless it is a serious point of the story, not necessarily the character.
By now Straw is realizing Steelwings is more than a little Sue-ish. He needs to be reigned in.
Straw gives Steelwings a handicap: he has a rather long, effeminate mane. This is constantly lampshaded, abused and used against him both comedically and in very serious situations. He's also not the best flyer: his wings are strong and he can keep up with others, but he's terrible at turns, thus preferring to keep all four hooves on the ground.
That being used to make fights more interesting, Last Straw tries to think of a more social issue to influence dialogue scenes. He decides that Steelwings has never really talked to mares, besides his mother and "yes, ma'am" on his job, and got all of his ideas for how to handle it out of bad romance novels. They influence his speech, making female interaction hilariously off-key and it very difficult for him to be taken seriously by mares, a problem when you need information. On top of that, he doesn't have many local friends to turn to and is very bad at convincing anyone to help him.
Steel jots this down on his notes, making sure his editor will get a copy to let him know if it slips his mind. With that, he starts writing.
There's all the little things that come together to make a story, but for a lead protagonist, this is probably covering most of it. Of course other and better authors have different methods, there are exceptions to everything, and it isn't perfect, requiring a good amount of common sense to use.
Remember, as much as you may detail a character, less is more. The less you say, the more you can change later. Just because you came up with it doesn't mean you have to use it, just knowing it's there can influence things in amazing ways. Sometimes you can be quiet with your details, and readers will figure them out if the character is deep and natural enough in their characterization for them to be analyzed, but there isn't anything to discover if you spell it out in immaculate detail.
And that's about that.
This alone will not make your brand-new OC totally-not-a-self-insert good. It's a piece of a greater whole to the art, and like any art the only way to get good is to learn, try and repeat.
Next time from Verbose being Verbose and Shit: research.
I'ma outtie. My people need me.
DISCUSSION: Make a brand new character. Fuck up. Laugh at everyone participating, including yourself.
150 People and a Heart-to-Heart
One-hundred and fifty people. That's more than my graduating class. Maybe it's not much in the big scheme of things, but...
Um...
Thank you.
I really mean it. This is really more important to me than you'd think. I know I act like a pretentious, self-absorbed asshat 90% of the time, but it's just that: and act. And I do it because I don't want to be forgotten, I don't want to be just a name passing by. I want to have a tale to be told.
I rely on outside reinforcement to know I'm good at things, and frankly it's hard to come by. In my life, the minimum expected level of performance has always been "above and beyond," to the point that "high expectations" doesn't begin to cover it. I know I'm good, but that is never good enough. I have to master everything I set my sights on. And I worry constantly that I'm not doing well.
So thank you. Every upvote, comment, follow, review, piece of fanart... every view on stories, forum threads or blog posts like this lets me know that I'm doing something right.
I don't get that anywhere else. This fandom is the only place where my achievements have ever been recognized in a way I can see. This is the only place where I've ever gotten a glowing review from strangers, complements from people who don't owe me anything, or kindness for the sake of it instead of because they want something from me.
It's been seven years in this fandom. Since then I've grown up, started a career, moved around the world, gotten married to a beautiful woman... and I would have never done it if I hadn't gotten a comment on a silly piece of art I gifted on a whim to a pony let's-play when it first was starting. It said;
"That looks good, are you going to do more?"
Yes.
Yes, then and now, yes. I promise to you I'm going to do more, I'm going to do better, I'm going to push the limit and strive harder than I ever have in my short life because people like you make it feel worthwhile. Thank you for making me want to push out of my room, to buckle down, to decide that I am good enough and that the life I have is worth the effort. Thank you for letting me become the confident, cocky, tryhard, happy ass I am today.
So thank you.
Thank you for making me. Stories I come up with, and the very real stories of friends and conventions and silliness and drama and heartbreak and true love and achievement and drunken Friday Night Skype Calls and feeling worth telling it.
You're one-hundred and fifty people random people that made me feel like I'm being something. I don't care that I don't know most of you, I don't care that it's horsewords on the internet, you never owed me a damn thing yet you decide I was worthwhile anyway.
Every one of you matters more to me than you can imagine.
...
Allright, enough sappy stuff. By the way, more Shooting For Friendship.
F*TP #15 - 5FEB2017 - AlicornRetry
F*TP #15 - 5FEB2017 - AlicornRetry
[CONTEST STATUS] -ACTIVE- [CONTEST STATUS]
It's that time again.
Been awhile, huh? Well over a year since I was doing anything worthwhile. Well over a year since I've gone to the bottle for relief, now that I think about it.
Have we really done fifteen of these damn things?
Time for a reboot, I think. Shake things up.
We've been doing this a while, but the core concept of F*** THIS PROMPT (that is correct, asterisks and all) remains the same. You get a shit prompt based on the worst clichés in the fandom, and you have to write a story about it.
The catch? Same as always.
Make it good.
You can do it in any way, but parodies historically make us laugh but don't do well. Lateral thinking and damn good writing win this. The rules are simple. Breaking them explicitly will get you pushed out of the running, but you can ask and debate all you want about them with your fellows to clarify and find ways around them. Meta-play in this contest is encouraged. The judges cannot answer questions about "does X work" but other users can, and taunting, heckling and salt is traditional. We have to season your pain somehow.
Oh.
I should mention...
You have one week.
Technically less, by the time you probably read this.
The Only Rules
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Fufill the prompt.
Cannot be started prior to the contest announcement. Pre-existing stories are not allowed.
Deadline is 12:00 PM Monday, February 13th, Eastern Standard Time (UTC/Zulu -5). The story must be readable on FiMFiction with a link in this thread.
-
Notice Rule Number One? That's changed. Stories need to technically fulfill the prompt to the letter, but it's up to you to make it happen. The final decision as to if it fulfills the prompt will be up to the guest judge, so write appropriately.
I would also like to note that since these must be linked directly in the forums, submissions still cannot be rated [Mature]. This is hard enough on my liver already.
So we have two very important things to cover before we reveal the prompt: the judge and the prize. The first one of them can reveal himself!
Greetings on this brisk winter day, you poor, poor masochistic bastards my good ladies and gentlemen.
I am A British Gentlemen, and I will be your guest judge for the duration of this contest. It is my fond, and possibly deluded, hope that I will read many fascinating, original and entertaining fics as a consequence of this endeavor. I wish you all the best of luck. I will let Verbose have the dubious privilege of informing you of your incentives and prompt.
Thank you, and thanks for coming aboard! Though I'm sure some of you want to just get started to prove you're awesome and can do anything. For the rest of you, though, we have prizes!
You want? Come and get it.
Steam Games. $40USD worth, your choice. The runner-up gets $20 of the same, and third place gets a free sketch from me.
Prizes are negotiable if you don't use Steam, but most of you don't have lives so I assume you do!
Are we ready?
Here it comes. A throwback, all the way back to the very beginning:
A red-and-black alicorn tries to woo Fluttershy.
AHAHAHAHAHAHA~!
Here we go!
F***
THIS
PROMPT!