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Writing meta: Writing OCs, part one
I'm working on my novel, can you tell? *g* Ah, procrastination.
It seems like I've written something like this before, but I can't remember when or where. Maybe it was just in comments and I never really made it into a coherent essay.
Anyway, I write a lot of OCs in my fanfic, and I like reading well-written OCs, but there are an awful lot that aren't well-written. So, here is:
Friendshipper's Guide to Writing Compelling Original Characters in Fanfic (part one)
(All strictly my humble opinions, of course, and based in my own experience and personal reading tastes. All my examples are drawn from SGA because that's mainly what I've been reading and writing lately, but these principles apply cross-fandom, I think.)
Obviously, creating a fanfic OC is not fundamentally different from creating any original character in a non-fanfic piece of writing: they should have a compelling and interesting personality, a unique voice, a history, and so forth. Here is a good page of links on tips for creating original characters. You want your OC to come alive on the page as an interesting person, just like with any original character.
But in fanfic, as opposed to original fiction, there are also unique challenges to creating an OC that won't overshadow the story and/or annoy your readers. The dreaded Mary Sue is, of course, the bane of fanfic readers everywhere. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you may be deliberately trying to create a Mary Sue, but you really don't need my help for that.
You have to accept that most readers of fanfic have a knee-jerk, anti-OC reaction, especially if your OC has a leading role in the story. Unlike readers of original fiction, who are predisposed to like and sympathize with the characters in the story (until given a reason not to, anyway), fanfic readers are predisposed NOT to like OCs. Your mission, as a writer, is not to bludgeon your readers with your own overwhelming love for your OCs; it's to take them gently by the hand and lead them along, until they love your OCs (almost) as much as you do ... or at least acknowledge their necessity to the story!
Here are my personal guidelines for creating interesting, likeable, and, most importantly, non-annoying OCs. (Note: Your OCs may be annoying to the characters, if you intend them to be; I don't mean that they all need to be pleasant people. In fact, it's probably better if they're not. But they should not annoy your readers.)
PART ONE: Your OC's role in the story.
1. The story is about the canon characters, not the OCs. This is my guiding principle when I write OCs, and is also true of every good fanfic I've ever read that featured one or more OCs in a leading role. The importance of the OCs is in how they relate to the main characters; they are not important in and of themselves.
This doesn't mean that your OCs should be tabula-rasas with no personality of their own -- of course not. But they should serve a purpose in the story that relates to the main characters in some way, and you need to keep this purpose in mind as you write the story. Some of the possible purposes for having an OC in a large role in the story are:
- Provides a 3rd-party viewpoint on the main characters.
- Acts as an antagonist to the main characters, e.g. a gang of bandits on a trading world.
- Helps the main characters, e.g. the farmer who hides them from the bandits.
- Supplies a cast of suspects in a murder mystery.
In SGA, most longer stories will have at least a few background OCs; in fact, in stories that take place offworld, it's virtually inevitable. And some of them will simply be the fanfic equivalent of extras: villagers wandering around on the trading planet, unnamed Marines who get eaten by the giant water lizard on M34-whatever, nurses helping out Sheppard in the infirmary. You really needn't feel as if every background character who passes through your story must have a name and personality and history; in fact, if you end up burying your reader under a ton of details on OCs that we're only going to see once, they'll probably go find a less tiring and slow-moving story to read. On the other hand, if you can use your background OCs to add a bit of color, then go for it! Case in point: Ingrid the terrifying nurse in Candle in the Dark. She's never actually shown in the story, and all we get are a few lines of dialogue between John, Rodney and Carson, in which we learn that she's built like a tank and has jail tattoos, and Rodney is terrified of her. Sure, it's not exactly pertinent to the story, but more interesting and colorful than just referencing a random nurse, no?
2. As a corollary to the above, if your OC does not have a specific role in the story, consider not using them. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, of course, because some of the most interesting scenes in fanfic or canon are the little side trips. But it's also fairly obvious to the reader if your OC is only present because you're fond of the character and want to use her everywhere, not because she needs to be there for the plot. With a canon character, it's one thing, because fans of Zelenka or Cadman or Ford will be happy to see that character no matter if they're important to the story or not. But with OCs, keep firmly in mind that the only person who likes this character is you, at least until you've given your readers a solid, compelling reason to care.
I can cite a fantastic example from published fiction: James Alan Gardner's Expendable and sequels. Expendable is a good book -- or at least I remember finding it so, when I read it ten or so years ago -- and the rest of the books in that universe are reasonably good, but are marred by Gardner's tendency to re-use Festina Ramos, his main character from Expendable, in every other book he writes, regardless of whether she has any role in the plot or not. Usually she shows up in the nick of time to rescue the characters from whatever situation they've gotten themselves into, so they can be impressed by how wonderful she is. It got to where I was just waiting with gritted teeth for friggin' Admiral Ramos to show up and save the day, and then bam! there she'd be.
You do not want to do this. Trust me.
If your OC's role can be performed by a canon character, it's probably better to use the canon character instead. You don't need to create an OC physicist to snipe with McKay when Zelenka will do. Why is an OC Marine leading your backup offworld team when Lorne could do it? And so forth...
If you can eliminate an OC from the story without hurting the plot, it's almost always better to cut them out.
PART TWO: Avoiding the Mary Sue label.
Remember: when you write OCs, you are laboring under the weight of 30+ years of fanfic history, rife with Mary Sues. It isn't fair, but your OC will have the Mary Sue label immediately slapped on her by most of your readership the minute she (or he) walks onstage. You have to prove to your reader that she's not.
3. When you create your OC, try to avoid giving your character classic Mary Sue trappings. Mary Sues are usually attractive, young (teenage/early twenties), middle-class to upper-middle-class, Caucasian women from an American or Western European background (or one which suspiciously resembles it ... like, say, a female teenager from a suspiciously English-looking, unrealistically clean, "medieval" village). This is, absolutely, without a doubt, the hardest kind of OC to write, because of all that historical Mary Sue baggage. If you really want to make things difficult for yourself -- or if your plot absolutely requires it -- you can write your OC as a pretty 17-year-old American teenager, but why not make life easier?
Rather than having your characters saved from bandits by the attractive teenage daughter of the local innkeeper, have a crotchety old farmer save them instead. Rather than having the 19-year-old beautiful new Marine flirting with Sheppard, have it be the unexpectedly sexy, 60-year-old leader of the steampunk people they're trading with. And so forth. Not only do you avoid having the nearly impossible-to-remove insta-Sue label affixed to your character's forehead, but you open yourself up to a wide range of story possibilities by writing about characters who are a little bit different than the ones everyone else is writing about. How does Sheppard respond to finding himself attracted to a woman 20 years older than he is? How does everyone else respond?
Young, female and Caucasian, or some combination of the three, are usually the default for OCs, so the more you deviate from this, the more memorable (and interesting to write) your OCs will tend to be. (Of course, I'm slightly biased here, because as a reader I really LIKE diverse casts of OCs and would like to see more of them!)
Okay, I really MUST work on my novel now, or at least go take the clothes out of the dryer and make myself another cup of tea while I pretend to work, so I'll resume this in a later post. Let me leave you with a link to what I believe is one of the best, if not THE best OC-centered stories in SGA fandom,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kodiak_bear's The Last Survivor. It's ... research!
Very belated ETA: If you're expecting a "part two" to this ... I think, from the reaction that this got, that I screwed up somewhere either in my concept or delivery -- so I need to figure out what I screwed up and fix it before I write more of this, if that makes any sense.
It seems like I've written something like this before, but I can't remember when or where. Maybe it was just in comments and I never really made it into a coherent essay.
Anyway, I write a lot of OCs in my fanfic, and I like reading well-written OCs, but there are an awful lot that aren't well-written. So, here is:
Friendshipper's Guide to Writing Compelling Original Characters in Fanfic (part one)
(All strictly my humble opinions, of course, and based in my own experience and personal reading tastes. All my examples are drawn from SGA because that's mainly what I've been reading and writing lately, but these principles apply cross-fandom, I think.)
Obviously, creating a fanfic OC is not fundamentally different from creating any original character in a non-fanfic piece of writing: they should have a compelling and interesting personality, a unique voice, a history, and so forth. Here is a good page of links on tips for creating original characters. You want your OC to come alive on the page as an interesting person, just like with any original character.
But in fanfic, as opposed to original fiction, there are also unique challenges to creating an OC that won't overshadow the story and/or annoy your readers. The dreaded Mary Sue is, of course, the bane of fanfic readers everywhere. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you may be deliberately trying to create a Mary Sue, but you really don't need my help for that.
You have to accept that most readers of fanfic have a knee-jerk, anti-OC reaction, especially if your OC has a leading role in the story. Unlike readers of original fiction, who are predisposed to like and sympathize with the characters in the story (until given a reason not to, anyway), fanfic readers are predisposed NOT to like OCs. Your mission, as a writer, is not to bludgeon your readers with your own overwhelming love for your OCs; it's to take them gently by the hand and lead them along, until they love your OCs (almost) as much as you do ... or at least acknowledge their necessity to the story!
Here are my personal guidelines for creating interesting, likeable, and, most importantly, non-annoying OCs. (Note: Your OCs may be annoying to the characters, if you intend them to be; I don't mean that they all need to be pleasant people. In fact, it's probably better if they're not. But they should not annoy your readers.)
PART ONE: Your OC's role in the story.
1. The story is about the canon characters, not the OCs. This is my guiding principle when I write OCs, and is also true of every good fanfic I've ever read that featured one or more OCs in a leading role. The importance of the OCs is in how they relate to the main characters; they are not important in and of themselves.
This doesn't mean that your OCs should be tabula-rasas with no personality of their own -- of course not. But they should serve a purpose in the story that relates to the main characters in some way, and you need to keep this purpose in mind as you write the story. Some of the possible purposes for having an OC in a large role in the story are:
- Provides a 3rd-party viewpoint on the main characters.
- Acts as an antagonist to the main characters, e.g. a gang of bandits on a trading world.
- Helps the main characters, e.g. the farmer who hides them from the bandits.
- Supplies a cast of suspects in a murder mystery.
In SGA, most longer stories will have at least a few background OCs; in fact, in stories that take place offworld, it's virtually inevitable. And some of them will simply be the fanfic equivalent of extras: villagers wandering around on the trading planet, unnamed Marines who get eaten by the giant water lizard on M34-whatever, nurses helping out Sheppard in the infirmary. You really needn't feel as if every background character who passes through your story must have a name and personality and history; in fact, if you end up burying your reader under a ton of details on OCs that we're only going to see once, they'll probably go find a less tiring and slow-moving story to read. On the other hand, if you can use your background OCs to add a bit of color, then go for it! Case in point: Ingrid the terrifying nurse in Candle in the Dark. She's never actually shown in the story, and all we get are a few lines of dialogue between John, Rodney and Carson, in which we learn that she's built like a tank and has jail tattoos, and Rodney is terrified of her. Sure, it's not exactly pertinent to the story, but more interesting and colorful than just referencing a random nurse, no?
2. As a corollary to the above, if your OC does not have a specific role in the story, consider not using them. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, of course, because some of the most interesting scenes in fanfic or canon are the little side trips. But it's also fairly obvious to the reader if your OC is only present because you're fond of the character and want to use her everywhere, not because she needs to be there for the plot. With a canon character, it's one thing, because fans of Zelenka or Cadman or Ford will be happy to see that character no matter if they're important to the story or not. But with OCs, keep firmly in mind that the only person who likes this character is you, at least until you've given your readers a solid, compelling reason to care.
I can cite a fantastic example from published fiction: James Alan Gardner's Expendable and sequels. Expendable is a good book -- or at least I remember finding it so, when I read it ten or so years ago -- and the rest of the books in that universe are reasonably good, but are marred by Gardner's tendency to re-use Festina Ramos, his main character from Expendable, in every other book he writes, regardless of whether she has any role in the plot or not. Usually she shows up in the nick of time to rescue the characters from whatever situation they've gotten themselves into, so they can be impressed by how wonderful she is. It got to where I was just waiting with gritted teeth for friggin' Admiral Ramos to show up and save the day, and then bam! there she'd be.
You do not want to do this. Trust me.
If your OC's role can be performed by a canon character, it's probably better to use the canon character instead. You don't need to create an OC physicist to snipe with McKay when Zelenka will do. Why is an OC Marine leading your backup offworld team when Lorne could do it? And so forth...
If you can eliminate an OC from the story without hurting the plot, it's almost always better to cut them out.
PART TWO: Avoiding the Mary Sue label.
Remember: when you write OCs, you are laboring under the weight of 30+ years of fanfic history, rife with Mary Sues. It isn't fair, but your OC will have the Mary Sue label immediately slapped on her by most of your readership the minute she (or he) walks onstage. You have to prove to your reader that she's not.
3. When you create your OC, try to avoid giving your character classic Mary Sue trappings. Mary Sues are usually attractive, young (teenage/early twenties), middle-class to upper-middle-class, Caucasian women from an American or Western European background (or one which suspiciously resembles it ... like, say, a female teenager from a suspiciously English-looking, unrealistically clean, "medieval" village). This is, absolutely, without a doubt, the hardest kind of OC to write, because of all that historical Mary Sue baggage. If you really want to make things difficult for yourself -- or if your plot absolutely requires it -- you can write your OC as a pretty 17-year-old American teenager, but why not make life easier?
Rather than having your characters saved from bandits by the attractive teenage daughter of the local innkeeper, have a crotchety old farmer save them instead. Rather than having the 19-year-old beautiful new Marine flirting with Sheppard, have it be the unexpectedly sexy, 60-year-old leader of the steampunk people they're trading with. And so forth. Not only do you avoid having the nearly impossible-to-remove insta-Sue label affixed to your character's forehead, but you open yourself up to a wide range of story possibilities by writing about characters who are a little bit different than the ones everyone else is writing about. How does Sheppard respond to finding himself attracted to a woman 20 years older than he is? How does everyone else respond?
Young, female and Caucasian, or some combination of the three, are usually the default for OCs, so the more you deviate from this, the more memorable (and interesting to write) your OCs will tend to be. (Of course, I'm slightly biased here, because as a reader I really LIKE diverse casts of OCs and would like to see more of them!)
Okay, I really MUST work on my novel now, or at least go take the clothes out of the dryer and make myself another cup of tea while I pretend to work, so I'll resume this in a later post. Let me leave you with a link to what I believe is one of the best, if not THE best OC-centered stories in SGA fandom,
kodiak_bear's The Last Survivor. It's ... research!Very belated ETA: If you're expecting a "part two" to this ... I think, from the reaction that this got, that I screwed up somewhere either in my concept or delivery -- so I need to figure out what I screwed up and fix it before I write more of this, if that makes any sense.
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