hello!! first of all, i just want to say, i love evie and all of your bg3 works. i find her a very realised OC and you write her in a way that makes it so easy to slip into her mind.
which is where my actual question comes in! i've been writing fanfic for a while, but have only recently become interested in writing my own OC in the bg universe. as someone who is new to actually creating a character from the ground up (with a backstory, and a sort of developed POV), i was wondering if you had any advice on how you got to a point with evie, either in her character creation or something beyond that, where you had certainty on who she was and how she'd behave in particular moments? i really hope that makes sense!
thank u again for all the work you do, it's such a treat to read your work
This is so lovely ohmygosh 😭😭 Thank you for appreciating Evie, I hope I can offer anything insightful about her creation or at least blab for a while.
I think it's helpful to just begin with one simple idea you find interesting and see what flows from it. D&D (and bg3) has so much room for big, brave heroes and so with Evie, my original thought was, "I want a character who is not going to be naturally heroic or good at adventuring." That's it.
So what kind of person (within the D&D universe) would probably not be naturally heroic? Maybe someone spoiled and pampered. That leads me to make her a wealthy noble. What would a spoiled noblewoman probably look like? Probably like a Barbie, beautiful and blonde. Well, if she's very beautiful, maybe she also uses her looks to skate through life. But also! Maybe she's also unfairly judged for the way she looks. How can she skate through her life even more than your regular noblewoman? Make her the youngest of three, a spare of a spare, lots of privilege and no expectations. Now there are several details about her backstory and her personality that all came from one idea that I wanted to explore.
I also think you don't need to spend too much time on this background part before just throwing your little guy into some Situations. One of Evie's defining character traits is being charismatic but afraid of being truly seen or known, and wondering if the image people project onto her is really all there is to her. And that core part of her personality didn't come to me until the third fic with her that I wrote.
You can think of a character's whole backstory and honestly bog yourself down in this planning phase, but you can't begin to know how they'll react to certain things without throwing them into some scenarios and asking yourself what they might do with it. It's the nature of people to change and evolve, so your characters will also change and evolve as you play around with them. And IMO the best way to play with them is just push them out on stage and see what stands out to you and what interests you. And you can always backfill biographical details as they occur to you.
Short version: pick one simple idea for a person you want to play with and then just start throwing them at characters and situations. Grab the ideas and traits that jump out to you and those will help you form the character's reactions to anything they might face.
I hope this means anything at all!!! Thank you for asking and for reading my work!!
