#but also i need practice with writing fights & non-flighty anger

[pyrriax]

i love beinglike "oh i should write today" and then immediately watching sooooooo many videos instead. so much content....

[autumnslance]

I've got a writing question that's been on my mind for a while: how do you keep your OCs from becoming self inserts? Every time I think of developing an OC I realize that it's attributes that I

Oops, you got cut off! But in general: all your OCs are going to have traits of yours; it’s inevitable. Sometimes big things, sometimes small things. It’s how we relate to them, and also just natural, I promise. We write what we know, and we know how we interact with ourselves and the world.

But there is a difference between sharing some traits with a character and making them a self-insert. It’s letting their life, their community and culture, their experiences, also influence their traits and thinking, in ways that might be different from how you would respond in a similar situation. Even if you share those attributes.

This is me so let’s go behind a cut shall we?

Dark Autumn is as introverted and solitary by nature as I am; she can and does interact in professional and friendly ways with people (as I try to do), but needs alone time to recharge. However, Dark also has a very different outlook and relationship with her family than I, since her family is large and supportive, very close knit. If family is a lottery, I got the $50 scratch off prize while she hit the Mega-Millions. So I take that into account when thinking of her relationships not just with family, but with friends and potential romantic interests; Dark sees things through a lens of positive, low-drama familial relationships that I can barely fathom. This also means she has a support network and resources myself and other characters don’t, so gets some wish fulfillment of working through issues with care and grace instead of remaining in unhealthy places. She is my “comfort OC” so gets a lot of good things I wish I had—which shapes how she responds to others, like taking care of a FCmate and becoming something of a big sister figure for him, or the responsible older sister figure of my group of OCs. Which is me, really, idealizing my own older sister tendencies into this giant woman who’s better at it.

Aeryn was written to be on the ace scale; not my first character to be so, but the first written that way as I began to realize where my own orientations lie and wanting to examine that through fiction. That she fell for a certain rogue in the process of playing through MSQ again was not at all intentional. I like Thancred as a character—he hits a lot of tropes I enjoy—but in my own mindset, he’s a frustrating younger brother. I didn’t think I’d do NPC x WoL shipping. But there it is, because in determining Aeryn’s own experiences and how those shaped her, it ended up working out that way (and I spent the better part of 2 years writing the characters separately to figure that out and if it could work before writing them together because it’s not something that comes naturally to me).

Aeryn’s internal anger is something I have a difficult time with; it’s outside my own nature to carry things like that. I have my angers, certainly, but they are different from hers. I tend to need a lot to set me off and then it burns out hot and quick. Aeryn’s more of a long boil she keeps bottled up. I’ve gotten a few things through various fics, I think, but it’s why I do things like reference arguments but rarely depict them. Being non-confrontational myself (I’m meek and have hangups thanks to my own life) it’s a challenge. Aeryn responded to childhood traumas (that I never dealt with), bullying (that I did), losses (that I haven’t yet), and the responsibility she’s been given (thank goodness I don’t) far differently than I. Maybe I’d be more volatile, too, if I had her life. But I understand where her anger comes from sharing some of the reasons, I just shape it differently than my own.

There’s a lot of things about Dark and Aeryn that are accidentally similar, just due to the timing of their character generation and other RP OCs made for other games along the way; “Oh I haven’t done X or Y in a character in awhile” sort of thing, but how each approaches those similarities and why—their quietness, their issues with using magic, their tendency to “adopt” others as family—all come from different places and resolve differently, too.

C’oretta comes from a part of me that doesn’t quite want to grow up. That wishes I had been more of the peppy, active, cheerful, risk-taking, live it up stereotypical party kid, that “popular girl” archetype I felt so often on the outside looking in about. As my second character, I wanted her to be different from Dark Autumn—visually, emotionally, mentally. Where Dark is steady, C’oretta is flighty. While Dark is people oriented, C’oretta’s a bit selfish (like I often feel). Dark’s introverted, C’oretta’s extroverted. Much of C’oretta’s attitude is a deflection against the hurts in her life, a way to fight back against some terrible things. It’s a way I could never react. But I also can’t get away from a character who loves to learn and wants to try new things—but where other characters gain the ability to stick with and see them through, C’oretta gets my easy frustration and boredom, and then the “ooh shiny” of a new interest. There’s a history of ADHD (or whatever the acronyms are now) and even autism and learning issues in my family; it’s possible I have some undiagnosed ND stuff going on, and people have noted these things in C’oretta that I’ve based on my own experiences and those of people very close to me.

Many of my characters have traits I wish I had, or were better at; patience, kindness, consideration, convictions, courage, thoughtfulness, and so on and etc. They’re good at skills I haven’t the knowledge in, or the ability to do. They’re certainly more active than I am, or could be! Because I can take the time to think and plan and research and write those things out better, and just maybe along the way not only learn something myself, but try to practice it better myself. I can even sometimes let them teach me what I can possibly do or be, not just imagine it as an ideal that’s out of reach.

I try to let my characters make mistakes I wouldn’t—or in some cases, have in my past, and that’s OK. Especially if I learned from them, but maybe the character does not. Maybe they do but it takes awhile, or repeated instances until it sinks in. Maybe I let them make errors I still make, as a way to puzzle out better solutions I should probably entertain for myself.

Character voice is something I’ve felt I struggled with in keeping my OCs distinct. Do characters ‘sound’ alike, in dialogue and prose? Having distinct ways of speaking helps; C’oretta’s breathless chatty run-ons are certainly different from Dark and Aeryn’s quieter tendencies. I have to remember to trim down Aeryn’s dialogue more often, say less aloud, add more gestures and facial expressions. I tend to be a talker, an over-explainer (if you can’t tell), while the only times she gets like that are specific. Dark’s somewhere in the middle of those two, like I am. A lot of the reason I like writing NPCs and try to keep them close to my interpretation of canon is to practice distinct character voice to get better at it in my OCs, so they don’t sound like me!

And something I’ve never admitted to before is that I think for me, it helps that from the time I was a kid watching various series of Star Trek, I always have had an in-my-own-head-only self-insert. She’s always a support character (that’s what I’m best at). She has cool and unusual abilities to help the actual heroes, cuz heck it’s my internal fantasy and that’s fun. She has traits I want to be better at or wish I had, developed over time with more energy and focus than I can actually muster in reality. As time’s gone on, she’s become more of a mentor and Mom Friend as I’m now older and see a lot of protagonist characters as “my kids” now. She appears in nearly every story I’ve loved over time, in one iteration or another. And because I have a headspace character where I can say “this is what I, ideally, would say and do and be capable of in this situation…” My other characters that I actually write about can vary between doing something similar (if it suits them) to doing something completely different (cuz darn kids never listen) as I can compare them to the self-insert and decide where to diverge.

So it’s a mix of myself and my traits and knowledge, but taking into account how each character would respond and use those same attributes differently than I do or would. Write what you know, write who you are—and then add in some wish fulfillment, some what ifs, some bad choices, some good choices, and shake things up. Give the characters tics and tricks different from yourself and let that shape them, too, by remembering to take those things into account (even if you have to tape a note to your monitor).

And finally, don’t be ashamed of your self-inserts; I’ve known some great characters that started as self-inserts and grew, through their experiences, into wholly different people than their writers over time. Heck, the epic romance my original WoW priest was part of was with a character that started as a self-insert; his player began the game knowing nothing of the lore or roleplaying, but as he learned the story and how to RP, and determined how his character fit into the world and how that shaped him, the character diverged over time, while still sharing some key traits (some endearing, some frustrating, as people are and all part of that friend). It’s not a bad starting point at all. The rest can come over time and practice, especially if you make a lot of OCs and try to make them different from each other while also being aspects of yourself.