How do you come up with ideas for OCs and how to flesh them out?
Brainstorming and then writing.
Brainstorming the bare bones for the characters’ names, appearances, some base traits. I’ve been known to look up traits of characters I want to be similar, or just lists of traits in general, and pick some of those.
And then after I’ve got that figured out, I just. Start writing. The main reason why I became an AU horder is because I use AUs to flesh out my characters. I use them to determine how different characters would react to things under different circumstances. This process is crucial.
For example. My main OC, Angie, was originally a somewhat shy aro ace who didn’t easily take charge. But somewhere along the way, she became the spunky natural leader biro demi that we know and love.
I have some stuff somewhere on my laptop of the very first stuff I wrote with Angie, and it’s drastically different from how I write her now. And that fleshing out is because I talked out a million different AUs, wrote for a good chunk of them (I have way more AUs than I’ve actually written stuff for lmao), and done a lot of late night brainstorming.
Seriously, the best way I can think of to flesh out your characters is to start putting them in situations. Write. Roleplay. Brainstorm. Bounce ideas off a friend. OCs won’t become their own people until you start playing with them.
Warning: The person your OC ends up becoming might deviate drastically from your original idea, or any character you’d ever thought you made. That’s a good sign, in my opinion. Your character has taken a life of their own and is truly a well-rounded, fleshed out character.