how are ocs created?

Oh! I'm glad I could help.

 

I think for me, sketching is sort of a form of...pre-writing, maybe? It's partially figuring out how they actually look and how I'll describe them, but it's also for playing with their posture and how they emote, and maybe picturing some moments from their storyline if I have one for them already.

I do usually find it easier to hold an image of them in my head after I've drawn the character once, though. Before that it's just sort of an impression of their features and clothing color/style put together.

 

I don't do fanfiction (not being a fan of anything), but if characters made for original stories counts:
I start with "oh, I'd like to write about a person with X characteristic interacting with person of Y characteristic".
I put them in a situation (usually a fantasy setting since I'm a fantasy fanatic) and then - my brain starts in with the "well, what are they wearing? Why? Is it normal attire for the setting? If not, why are they being different? If so, why are they going along with the norm?" and I end up with defining them as people just to answer my very critical brain.

 

@Lissa Lysik'an thanks! :D

 

Another way is: I have this idea for a world. How would person of X characteristic fit? What about Y - Y wouldn't fit - how can they exist in the world anyway? Must define them with skills and motivations to keep them going / let them slip through the cracks. How did they get those skills and motivations? How would that effect them growing up before Chapter One even starts?

 

Promoting my own ideas (I am so shameless) you could look at my latest post in NSFW Writing Thread in Top Serket forum and see if you can build back stories for each of the people. A couple have a minimal backstory but most are introduced with nothing more than their actions and current thoughts. Even the world is minimal (since I stripped out the description to make it more usable for other people to write from).

 

@Lissa Lysik'an :D thanks!

when i read it, i ended up mostly wondering about why the thing happened to the women and how the people procreated if nobody apparently actually had sex with women.

 

Note the mention that the law about preventing the meetings was only 10 years old. People will find a way, until the punishment gets severe enough - but I don't want to tell anyone who wants to write the story how to resolve the leader's obvious lack of understanding of how things work with reality :)

 

@Lissa Lysik'an i noticed that. still, i was like, "surely they wouldn't make a law that would lead to the extinction of the species if it was perfectly followed?"
yeah... the leader definitely has trouble understanding reality.

 

I didn't even include what kind of world it was, fantasy or SF, etc - is it an enclave of religious nuts in a modern setting? Or a world where women are not respected and someone took it over the edge? ...

 

@Lissa Lysik'an i didn't even notice that you didn't include that. i just assumed automatically that it was sci-fi 'cause that's what that kind of story usually is.

 

I have my own ideas on it but I don't have time to write it so wanted to offer the setting as open as I could to anyone that wants to try.

 

There you have a challenge - justify each of the characters set out. Find reasons that each of them would behave/think the way described. Justify it in ways that make sense, though, not just labeling them "nuts" and leaving them on their own. :) The leader would be hardest for me - he has to get to be the leader and still have the attitudes he revealed - just "nuts" isn't going to cut it. People will notice he's around the bend unless you can wrap the world and his revelations together.

 

@Lissa Lysik'an that is indeed a challenge. :D

 

It will give you lots of OCs when you're done :D (since you will have to work through a lot of character concepts that won't work once you mix them with other facts you know of the world and have to remake them - a whole pile of "damn, this doesn't work").

 

@Lissa Lysik'an i bet. :D

 

That used to be a major issue for me too. I actually do have some characters who like their families. Just...not a lot.

 

Hmm … Anhelia's childhood was on the edge of abusive perhaps (raised by single dad married to his job who was authoritarian, extremely rigid, and emotionally distant) but she doesn't feel it was; she loved him and always has. Dead parents? Yes, never knew her mother, dad died when she was 20. So sorta? Feels responsible for the deaths of people she cared about? Absolutely.

This is progress, people. No sexual abuse, no physical neglect, no serious beatings, only a moderate amount of bullying. The first version of her was dealt the full house.

Mindala had the abusive childhood, sexual abuse, no parents thing but is not responsible for any regretted deaths and is not a bunch of issues now. She, in her words, "got over that shit long ago."

 

I don't actually have TOO much of a problem with Everyone Gets A Dark Backstory... I... think... ahem... but the ones that do tend to have it ALL HEAPED ON THEIR HEADS AT ONCE. Like avatar dude. Whose name is Merin, btw, so I don't keep having to call him Avatar Dude.
I actually think his Actual Childhood was all right, if you count being brought up as a servant's byblow off the master as all right- certainly his mother loved him to distraction. Everything just went downhill for him when he hit about nineteen, and he reacted to it in the worst possible way so he ensured it would continue to go downhill because it turns out that being a bitter, angry, actively anti-social asshole is not the best way to make friends.

 

~dances into dead thread because she physically can't restrain herself from talking about characters~

first off, my absolute favorite site for name/writing/whathaveyou reference is http://www.springhole.net/ they have pages pull of random generators of all kinds, which i find helpful to get my brain gears started. and some of the articles on character creation might be helpful to you?

also seconding what Dist said elsethread about role playing games being a good way to start making ocs- my most strongly developed characters were originally part of D&D/Pathfinder campagins i was doing with friends. using the mechanics of the games can sometimes spark interesting ideas for characters. one character i played, trini, was a gnome barbarian. i had the vague idea of a magical girl trope, because i liked the contrast between pink & sparkly & tiny & horribly, horribly violent. then when i was building the character i picked a character trait called impatient or something, which gave me a bonus to intiative, and also influenced how i chose to role play her- hyperactive, arrogant, rushes into things head-first without caring who follows, with very loose morals. through game play she also developed a Thing for hair accessories and was pretty greedy when it came to her Favorite Things.

but definitely the structure of roleplaying mechanics helps me when making ocs. plus role playing is fun!