#I think if you make a lot of overpowered ocs the natural progression is that you learn to give your regular ocs more credit where it’s due

[writing-for-life]

Tell me more about your OC, Thalia! How did you get the idea for her? What’s your fav part about her? Any thoughts about her as a character that ended up on the cutting room floor?

I love those questions! My OCs are my babies, I love talking about them!

I’m super used to writing OCs since that’s usually all I write (The Light of Stars is actually my first fanfic, believe it or not, but I’ve written original stories for literal decades).

Funnily enough, Thalia started with… the name. I knew from the start there would be a lot of references to Greek mythology. Too much to mention here, people who read the fic will know, but I had this idea about Psyche’s journey to the underworld I wanted to reference at some point, and I also wanted a reference to a muse. Thalia had the nicest ring to it while being somewhat referential. Sometimes it’s really as simple as that 😂 I pronounce her Tah-lee-ya btw (it’s a less common pronunciation of that spelling, but it exists. I just didn’t want to spell her Talia for obvious reasons, but she totally sounds like it. And now I’ve destroyed the sound at least half of my readers had in their heads 🙈).

Thalia is the muse of comedy, and I wanted some of that in her. She has this intelligent sense of humour that is both genuine but also a coping mechanism, and it made for an interesting dynamic with Morpheus, who is always so serious. Her humour is, albeit observational, warm. She’s not a cynic although she has every reason to be, and I guess he knows that because he knows her story and what she’s been through, and it probably makes him think. He finds her challenging, but there is also an honesty and emotional openness to her, especially about her own hurt/darkness, that he finds intriguing. And that honesty also extends to how she relates to him—she is someone who actually sees him in the truest sense of the word, and it’s something he both needs so desperately but also finds impossible to trust and fully give in to for a very long time, and for a lot of reasons.

I guess the idea was to find someone who is in many ways like him (only in terms of shared human experience) but has a completely different way of dealing with it. It is, although a love story, at its core an exploration of trauma, loss and grief, of second or even third chances at life (however you might define the latter), and I’d long wondered what would happen if he met someone who is NOT trying to change him. They have their problems and conflicts, yes, but ultimately, this is about a deep mutual understanding that hinges on acceptance. And that acceptance is possible because it was there from the start, for reasons that I won’t give away here, but they are deeply rooted in how she always related to who and what he is on a conceptual level. And now I’m writing the sequel, and it becomes even more important.

My favourite part about her must be how she has the ability to make him laugh? Like, little by little, from something that barely makes him cock an eyebrow to a tug on the corners of his mouth to little smiles that get more frequent. And that moment when he sees the painting and actually realises he *is* like that around her was weirdly emotional to write because it wasn’t planned.

Plus, that she gets him to the stage where his laughs are actually audible, and they’re *not* weird. Well, at least not *that* weird. And from a writer’s point of view, it felt like a really natural, gradual progression that just happened, so it wasn’t something I had plotted. They just did their thing, and I wrote it down 😂

The stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor was mostly related to the no mortals rule. I explored a lot of different angles but ultimately didn’t want her to be a goddess or witch or somehow overpowered to circumvent that, it just didn’t sit right with me. So I spent a lot of time on setting up different beats that might look like one thing or another, but without giving too much away: The whole story hinges on her humanity and mortality, and it was ultimately the only thing that made sense.

Thanks again for the ask. It was a really good opportunity to talk about character creation/development, because so often, people seem to believe that all OCs are straightforward self-inserts, and nothing could be farther from the truth (OC fics aren’t reader fics). It’s impossible for characters not to have little bits of us because they come out of our brains, but they aren’t mirror images. I sometimes give characters little bits I’m confident in writing authentically without having to do a lot of research. For Thalia, it was drawing/painting. I had other female OCs that rode a motorcycle or did a martial art I’ve been familiar with since my childhood, others again were professional performers. I find I can write these things without overwriting them because I know what they feel like. Because sometimes, people will research these things and write them like an instruction manual. And while the detail is correct, someone who really *does* these things would never describe them that way. But that’s often really as far as it goes. It pains me to say that I’m far more like Morpheus than like Thalia, but I didn’t need to self-insert for that to be the case 😂

And now I want to know: What’s your favourite part about her and their dynamic? Other readers are welcome to chime in, too.