Who was your very first original character?

Oh, look at that - I ruined the formatting. Was supposed to read "I did commission this picture of him a few years ago." Forgive the wonky linking, please.

Having been called in here very many times over the past few months to answer for this or that misdemeanor, Oliver was well acquainted with the room's nuances and eccentricities – most of them fungal.

Ruffy, my stuffed dog and best friend since I was five. He's been the star of many tales and epic adventures. xD And of course, he's been drawn several times.

A rokeplaying game character (DnD). I was maybe 10

My first characters didn't have a name. First characters were these rodent creatures in the wallpaper and I'd give them a story before falling asleep. I was five years old. Story was lame and fluffy. I didn't know how to write so I didn't do that one. I also used to put on plays for my parents too and make up continuations.

First human character of my own invention? Hard... I had a streak of fairies, imps, Cinderella continuations, and then a huge streak of bad Emo Mary Sues/Gary Stus. And I was the type to make stories about absolutely everything. One of the first voice recordings is me making up a story on the spot.

First name I can *remember* was Shiyana of the twin planet, who was a Scientist. --;; Disaster of a character. The world building was great, but her conflict was horrid. Incidentally, that's the first book I actually finished and when it was done, I knew it was crap right away. And so it's never seen the light of day again. (It got destroyed in one of my fits to preserve my reputation.)

Earliest story I have written that I can remember is about a magical tree? --;; What was with me and non-human characters?

Anyway, I call the single-digit, didn't know how to read or write yet card. Also the non-human character card. (Magical rodents--seriously...)

When I learned rabbits weren't rodents, I put that into the story too. Oddly enough the next story I made up for myself was a fairy fight-devils story which was bloody and dark... So from fluffy prancing magical rodents to bloody thirsty war with captives...

Novelists are a conscienceless lot.--Diana Gabaldon (An Echo in the Bone)

She didn't have a name. I was about five when I came up with the concept of Her, but it wasn't until I was ten that I got everything hashed out.

She was this wierd faerie person with the giant blue wings (like butterfly wings, only pointy), and blue hair.

At first she was just a character that would hop from 'world to world' (in other words, 'movie to movie' or 'book to boo' depending on what I watched/read last), but later she became a dream director, in that everytime I was having a dream, or thinking about what I wanted to dream before I fell asleep, she'd be there with a director's megaphone, calling out directions to the characters and complaining about the lack of detail in the scenery. She still shows up once in a blue moon, though I haven't intentionally thought about her since I was like twelve.

My first original character was this cat-like person named Cisco. He was named after my first cat. I made him up sometime in elementary school. Maybe second or third grade? He was half-imaginary friend, half there to tell stories with my other friends who made up stories about odd things. Cisco was pretty much decked out as someone in the army and was pretty much arm to the whiskers... Glad the army phase went away.

Oh, I definitely had some fairies, too. But their names and personalities haven't stuck with me, so I say they don't count. Calyrce Mercelest Mondraen counts, because I can remember that stupid name, and I can remember her habit of sitting on rocks in the middle of lakes waiting for men to come by and admire her, and I can remember how long her silly red hair was, all after nearly ten years of steadfastly not thinking about her.

Having been called in here very many times over the past few months to answer for this or that misdemeanor, Oliver was well acquainted with the room's nuances and eccentricities – most of them fungal.

Evan Forgehand

He was my first attempt at writing after reading the first of the shannara series. I was about ten. Evan (which seemed like a very unusual name to me then) was the apprentice blacksmith of a small village that was attacked by nasty orc types. Evan was out gathering wood when it happened. Heartbroken he swore vengeance. Only to find out that the orcs have a leader that can only be killed by a weapon in the hands of the one who forged it. What luck Evan was an apprentice blacksmith!

I remember being greatly disappointed that the story had resolved itself in about three pages. I tried inserting dialogue, but to no avail. Poor Evan, he suffered from an incurable case of premature heroism. Oh, but his village had been up in the trees, so that was pretty cool.

Thanks, I had not thought of him for probably 25 years.

When I was about 2 and my older brother was 3, we played out stories with Lego. The first character we came up with was a lego minifigure who had a generic happy face and a brown outfit, who we imaginatively named Brown Guy. His antagonist was Red Guy. I don't remember much about the earliest, toddler days of Brown Guy - all I know is that we had created him before we moved out of my first house, which was at around 3 and a half. By the time I was 4 and my brother was 5, Brown Guy lived in a castle and was a... hunter/servant/honorary knight... thing. Who was in love with Princess. He still fought Red Guy, but also just protected the castle from whatever random monsters my dad helped us build with Lego. I never actually wrote or drew anything for him, and I probably never will because in an actual story he'd need a name other than Brown Guy and nothing else can ever fit for him. I still have his figurine in a box on my dresser.

"When writing a novel, that's pretty much what life comes down to. 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 pretty easy words, so all in all a pretty good day.'" - Neil Gaiman

Evan Forgehand & Brown Guy alike sound positively charming. I'd read stories about both of them.

Having been called in here very many times over the past few months to answer for this or that misdemeanor, Oliver was well acquainted with the room's nuances and eccentricities – most of them fungal.

I'm pretty sure it was Duncan, a boy who found a key in the street that magically unlocked the mysterious box in his room, and pulled him into another world. :D

Wow I miss being a kid. I think I was about 6 when I wrote that.

NaNo 09: House of Cards

First OC, oh god. Well, not counting the numerous lego dinosaurs when I was really young, I'd have to say that Piko would be mine. I would have been nine or so, and she was actually a hallucination. She was the basis of my entire world (in the novel I'm writing now for NaNo), and was my best friend for years. I don't see her anymore, but the memory of her lives on in my stories of the tales she used to tell me about her world.

Non-hallucination would have to be Shaltara, a very Mary-Sue character, that I created when I was twelve. She was a human teenager that could shapeshift into a *takes a deep breath* ten legged, eight winged, three headed shire horse with three eyes on each head as well as a horn. Yeah. Talk about starting easy *rolls eyes*

Now I have well over 40 characters that I regularly draw, over 30 that I regularly write/rp with, and over 100 different species and creatures to my name. Busy, busy, busy!

... You know, I've never thought about it before. I've been writing stories since... well, forever.

When I was eleven, I was obsessed with the heroic journey of Shey the human-turned-fairy. I kept a journal filled with world-building and made-up animals.

At nine, I developed a personality and a character for a silly name from a rhyme my father made up. She was named Magapeenapegaleena-Rhoobinsteina-Dyna-Rhyna-Hokkapokkaloca. I think I drew her as a monster with one pod foot, five arms, and an eye in a head-blob with two teeth.

At seven, I learned about the Oregon trail. I wrote a story about a pioneer family that met a friendly talking bear near the rocky mountains. He was very nice. The pioneers killed him, ate him, and pronounced him delicious. The end.

Twisted child, wasn't I?

It was somewhere between seven and nine that they started gaining names, between nine and eleven that my characters began having personalities. That said, the oldest character that I still use for serious writing is ten years old (in real life). I made Wyrren up at fifteen as a side character for an online story. My readers loved her so much more than my main cast that Wyrren was given a major role. Now she's my heroine for a novel that I'm about to take agent shopping.

http://elizawyatt.net
http://elizaw.wordpress.com

I think my first OCs were a trio of foxes called Fancy, Mister and Baby. They had adventures in the forest together and were not cunning evil foxes, they were nice and silly foxes.

The first original characters that I was serious about were a magical pair of warrior/mage twins who had galaxy-spanning adventures. I was pretty young when I developed them, but they managed to get a heck of a lot done, including defeat the Big Bad, have families, rule countries etc.

"I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."
Sarah Williams

"All that's left are our own imaginings"
Kezia Spears

Good question!
(that would most definitely have gotten +1 rep vote, if only this forum had a rep system)

The first I can remember was humanoid robot guy. I must have been seven or eight or so.
Basically, as I walked home from school, I became this robot-guy and had lived through adventures. The robot was able to mimic any machine you know and was a rather good computer.
One of his feats was the fact that he had dozens of cd drives. Oh, and he could get into the games that were running on himself. I guess there was a lot more to it, but I guess that was just your avarage superhero kind of thing. It wasn't as as amazing as the computer stuff. Oh, and I remember some part of him was in some way modeled after superworm jim, but more than that I do not know.

First character in a story (I'm not counting the stories that never got rolling) was a robot too :P
Basically there was this evil guy that is making the ultimate weapon. In a Frankensteinish scene he activates it, but it turns out they cannot control it, so they turn the good-evil knob to the good side as they expect a good robot to be easier to control. However, they were wrong and they created a robot so bent on being good and fighting evil that he even gets on the nerves of the good guys and "the good" and "the evil" make a pact against him. One of the main guys pleading for the good to get rid of the robot before he takes down the least good one of them - who actually also gets his personal action scene against the robots that the one robot reprogrammed - again got a role in the sequel, much bigger that time, from where he claimed his own series (which was the only fiction in which I ever said "No, that's just not going to happen!" and rolled back the story back a bit).
Super powers for a single guy still seems to be somewhat of a pet peeve of mine, though I should add to that I have a large number of works of fiction in my mind about them and they are all very, very different.

Anyway, I must have been 12 or 13 when I and a friend of mine started a really long roleplaying campaign. We did not know what roleplaying was, we had no book to guide us, there were no rules, or a DM, but it worked out quite well (to the point that other people wanted to join in - some successfully and others - who did not understand that they would not exactly be welcomed if they were our enemies - less successfully. We just did something and only years later did I realize that it was roleplaying :P It was science fiction (but that's really just another form of fantasy) and it was not about persons, but about space empires (of which were the leaders, of course, this planet was but a cover for many, many space leaders). But even though it was about empires instead of characters, I still think it should count as the different empires were fleshed out thoroughly and there was a whole lot of our personalities in them.

A year or two later I did my first (and possibly only? Nah, I guess I made one D&D setting without tying it up to a story) worldbuilding. Even back then a world was a product of a story for me, not the other way around. Anyway, I did attempt to build a world for a Magic (the Gathering) expansion I was designing simultaneously. And that's most of the firsts there is.

Man, typing this all makes me feel sad for the stories that did not yet find their way out of my head yet. Be patient, my babies, I'll get to you sooner or later. In the appropriate format.

My novel's little corner

Toying with widgets!

My first character which I remembered was named Lugin, a comination of Lupin and Giggin from the Lupin series. xD

My first *real* character for novel was an out-of-luck detective named Uriab who keeps the balance in the world by hunting angels and demons. The second one was a humane vampire who spent almost 100 years possessed by several souls.
I haven't given up on the concept, but it has changed drastically since then, although it's still recognisable.

--
Twitter profile: http://twitter.com/4thguy

I have probably forgotten my first character, but the first I can remember was named 'They Though', pronouced 'thay thaw'. She was a wolf, and a princess, and a warrior. And her family was all killed by evil black 'monsters', and she had to lead a resistance force. Yeah, pretty cliche, but I liked it.

The funny thing was, despite being so cliche in everything, her personailty was great. She was rebellious, had a nasty temper, questioned everyone and everything, and held grudes forever.

I still do. I just need to twist it around a bit, and it might even make a decent story. It feels warm and fuzzy to me somehow...

Look! It's a completely bland colour of lime green!

You know, I don't know if I can remember for sure?

I mean, my dolls used to have all kinds of adventures, some of which I've tried to turn into stories (and may eventually succeed). I don't think they count as characters, though. And when I was a kid (maybe 7/8/9) I used to read mysteries a lot, and tried writing a few, but I don't think I ever got past a first line, which was generally nothing more than the lead detective's name and introduction ("So-and-so liked to solve crimes.") and I don't think that really counts either.

I had a creative writing class in 5th and 6th grade, though, which is probably where the earliest of my "real" characters came from - that or other school writing assignments around the same time. I wrote a few short stories, most of them unmemorable. The first one that really stuck was one I started in 6th grade about a girl named Caroline who got sent to stay with her aunt, which I later merged with another story I'd written about a girl who goes on a quest to find a golden elephant so she can wish for world peace or something like that. I tried writing that as a novel in early high school and didn't get very far, and tried again for NaNo in 2006 and didn't get very far then either, and what it is now is completely unrecognizable from what I wrote when I was twelve, but Caralynn (spelling changed in '06) is still very much alive in my imagination, when I bother to remember her.

My first original character ... is most likely forgotten in the sands of time, but I do remember having had Tarka from a very early age - four perhaps. I think I recall his name being 'Jimmy' at the start of his life, because I was a very uncreative child until the age of eight.
How Jimmy evolved into Tarka would probably take most of my lifetime to remember, but he got there eventually. I don't exactly remember what he did when I was younger, but when I was about twelve he was living on a small island in the middle of nowhere, beating off shadows with sticks and getting lost in the jungle with his little ginger cat Kiri for company. I wrote about him constantly, talked to him late at night, and drew him on every available scrap of paper with varying degrees of skill for more than ten years. I still have him now; essentially unchanged, though superficially unrecognisable from what he once was - a circle with sticks for limbs, two grey blobs for wings, black button eyes and a mess of brown crayon lines for hair. He's still the star of my show, my little angel.

"An essay is like a miniskirt: long enough to cover the subject but short enough to keep things interesting."

Um... the first story I wrote was when I was little. I don't really remember anymore. As far as my series goes, Regan the MMC. I started with him and built everything else around him.

NaNo '07 Winner: Divica Prequel: Blood Forsaken. Buy it here.
NaNo '08 Winner: Divica 1: Hunt for the Blood
NaNo'09: Divica 2: Rapscallion's Hammer

First written character? Dukana, at my first RPG when I was 15.

First character ever? That's tougher, because I can't really remember my childhood. I'd have to say the first one I can remember came about when I was eight and decided that when I grew up, I was going to be a cheetah, and thus every recess you could find me and a friend outside pretending to be cheetahs. These cheetahs had names, and purposes, and personalities, but don't ask me what those were because I can't remember exactly.

I also came up with a spy character when I was nine or ten (again, played by me) because my brother and I liked to spy on the neighbors. He (I don't know why he was a guy and not a girl) had a wife and kids back home, and needed to finish this job to get back to them, and was adept at all forms of martial arts (he was, in fact, part ninja) and could kill someone with his pinky toe and his eyes closed. I think he was my nine-year-old version of Chuck Norris.

"Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting." --John Russell

My very first original character were my imaginary friends, but I never count them because I didn't write about them and they didn't really have much personality... I was about four years old. They were Rockins, which were aliens that looked exactly like me - all of them! Beyond that, the only thing I remember was going "Smurf" with their designs. There were different Rockins that were good at different things - Baking Rockin, Singing Rockin, etc... I was watching the Smurfs at the time I made them up, so... yeah, I drew from the smurfs a lot for them (which was also why they all looked alike).

My first actual original character that I would make up stories with (although not write) was Aaron. He was the rightful heir of a land that had been conquored by another country. He actually served the usurper as something like a page and had fallen in love with said usurper's daughter. He was... 16 years old? He was psychic, but also sick most of the time and not very strong. He tended to get into trouble and need to be rescued more often than not. I never drew or wrote about him. He was exclusively for roleplays with my sister. (She'd be the one to rescue him. ^_^) Oh, and I was 10 when I thought him up...

Death toll: 9 named, about 181 unnamed

I wrote and illustrated a story about a family of emperor penguins. LOL That was my first original story and characters.

I have a terrible memory, so I can't remember any of the character from my stories pre-fifth grade. I remember some of my plots and ideas, but none of the characters.

If you start from where my memory begins, it would have to be Catlina, a normal girl who fell into a fantasy world. XD I don't really remember much about Catlina. She didn't have much of a personality back then. She was fifteen, I remember, because I thought that it was a magical age.

2007: False Silver, Broken Gold - Won @ 50,085 words.
2008: Crown of Ivy - Lost @ 9,569 words.

It's between two.
First novel character: Kimmerath a stuck up, flamboyant vampire.
First character in general: Roskov Tempest a very large white haired man who went from being human, to vampire, to werewolf, to both and back to werewolf in his time XD He is the most calm and nonchalant character I have ever had so I like roleplaying with him because no one expects how easy going he is for being a somewhat blood thirsty behemoth.

"You mean you can't take less, it's very easy to take more than nothing" --Mad Hatter

Easily my MC was the first character I came up with. He was an imaginary friend when I thought him up and he was a lot different than he is now. Although he still kept his name and skin color. Everything else has changed for him.

2007: Shadows
2008: Kal and Kala: Infinite Twilight WON!
2009: Kal and Kala: Veil of Shadows

This. Why is that? I was very disappointed when nothing particularly adventuresome happened on my15th birthday.

You all have glorious characters, by the way. Simply lovely.

Having been called in here very many times over the past few months to answer for this or that misdemeanor, Oliver was well acquainted with the room's nuances and eccentricities – most of them fungal.

The Red Pirate! He was a pirate. He wore red. I think he also had a radio station for reasons I don't quite understand anymore. I had him when I was four or five.

2007- The Emerald of Pharan (Lost)
2008- Darkening Skies (Won!)
2009- Undecided

Probably Artemis, who changed her setting three times and was the main character of the trilogy I will never write. She strolled around with a gang of other travellers... who wanted to go home and ended up saving the world. She was thirteen, I recall. I was eleven.

Next ones were Elranis, an avalonde (certain elf, almost albino, bright blue eyes and bird wings) who was 600 years old and looked like fifteen and Queen Meryle, a really Feanor-ish character who was so epic that she didn't die but passed out of the world and can probably still manifest herself. Indeed, I borrowed her name and have no intention to give it back.

It seems that I had an unhealthy dislike for male characters.

NaNo 2007: The Journey of Seldlerne Sisters- 44 000. I tried. Finished now.
NaNo 2008: The Ithildrian War- 50 030. Won. Five sixths of it unwritten.
NaNo 2009: Astrin's Daughters: Cause of the Red Wars- ?

When I was four or five-ish, I wrote a story about a penguin who ran away from home and met up with a giraffe or something. I also made a 'comic book' about going to live with Michael Jackson because he bought me ponies (this was back in the early-early nineties). I think I still have my first writing notebook, and in it is a short story about a girl named Cherry, who was basically a prettier version of me, and her Native American friends, who were twins. The boy was based on my then-boyfriend. I was 12? Anyway, Cherry fell down a hole and broke her leg but it's cool, she got rescued by the love of her life and also found a whole bunch of treasure down the hole so she was rich and lived happily ever after, whee.

Yeah. Mary Sue'ing it up at the age of 12.

Oh, oh, and there was the story that was inspired by playing Heroes of Might and Magic at around the same age. The rebellious princess and the hawt peasant boy. And dragons, dragons were involved somehow.