STEEL HEARTS. writing help

ii. Creating an OC

     At first, I thought this was a relatively small problem. That a very small minority suffered from it's plight. Oh, how I was wrong.

     You will not believe the amount stories I've had to battle through where their characters are all a bunch of one-sided, fake deep arseholes I'd slap should we ever meet. Fanfictions, original stories, one shots, all of them! They all have shitty characters that I, for the life of me, cannot remember the names or faces of, because I just don't care.

     If you want people to actually read your shit, you gotta make it good. We can't have no pretty, perfect, goody two-shoes main character who we all know is a major hypocrite falling for some wannabe gangbanger that basically stalks the main character until they fall in love with them. It just doesn't work. Especially when we can't relate to them whatsoever.

     That's why people read! To see themselves within the characters they read, to feel like they belong to something beyond this miserable hell we call reality.

     If you can't capture the spirit of that with your characters, you're fucked. And no plot will change that.

     How can I change that, you ask?

     Well, first off, don't make any Mary Sues.

     Look, I understand if you have a hard time creating a character for your book without making them overpowered and perfect at everything, but it isn't really an excuse. They're a bore to read and no book I've ever actually liked had characters who weren't flawed.

     It's the principle of things. If your character faces no obstacles, you have no good story. And people will click off of them faster than you can say 'mayonnaise.'

     Another cliche character I despise is the endlessly tortured soul.

     There's a difference between facing hardships in life and having everything that could go wrong in life go wrong. This usually happens when the author is a sadistic fuck with no empathy, they want to justify turning their character into a Mary Sue later on, or they want a reason to kill all of their other characters ( this is usually more seen in fanfiction ).

     And I'm tired of it, okay? Of all the unnecessary bullshit I have to read, because believe it or not, but I don't like reading about the main character graphically being raped by their father. It's just... eww. Go garden or masturbate or something. Anything to stop you from making more of that.

     Anyway, this was more of a rant than anything. If you want to me talk about more fucked, cliché OC's hit up those comments, my doods.

     See ya!