Writers, what was/were your first character(s) you wrote down like?

My first book character was horrible. I was about nine at the time. She was a self insert!Sue with some modifications. She was beautiful and had naturally long, lusciously curly, jet black hair. I thought my hair was black at the time, but it turns out my hair is actually black (the majority), brown, AND red, each naturally inherited from my parents. She also had hazelnut-colored eyes because I wish I had them. Anyways, her name was Christina Morgiana Serenity Parker and she had chocolate brown skin, and was a few years older than me. Christina could shape-shift into a werewolf whenever she felt like and rivaled some white chick who was secretly a vampire. They hated each other because werewolves and vampires "hated" each other in the book. She eventually destroys the prim and proper little ***** and steals her boyfriend, aka the most popular "hawtie" in school. I can't believe I was that racist and stupid when I was younger.

My writing has definitely improved over the years.

Heh, my first book began sometime last year. Here is the description.

Coming from a school that was completely homophobic, a young boy of 14 who's name is Charly Gessner stood at the gate of his first day on the 8th grade career path. The school was Viktar Kesmair jr. Middle School. It was a old faded down middle style school, but the school was full of technology as in tower computers in the library and many posters to cover the old faded cottage-cheese-looking-like walls. Charly, along with his best friend Blaine, have an epic adventure not only of brotherhood, but some things life change for the better or worse. The school in all peace with minor drama is about to really change! Not even the power of friendship can stop the hatred, deception, and violence this school has. Love, on the other hand, can be a resolve to all. Charly and Blaine play life and see what they can make of it.

I am still looking for names for the book. I am not going to do a spoiler, but both boys stated experiment with being gay/bi.

They were me, my best friend, my little brother and her little sister. Mind you, we were a whole seven years old...

I moved on to fanfic at eight, so apart from the screamingly awful self-insert who I added, they were existing characters (yes, with some modifications).

I think I just got better at writing as time went on. I don't think there ever was a great moment of realisation (though I did have a bit of a shock when I discovered "Mary Sue" as a concept, aged well over 30).

My first characters were probably Mary-Sues. At age 14 I hadn't learnt that characters need to have flaws. If they are too perfect it makes them dull and unrelatable.

The more I learnt about writing the more I could see what was wrong with my work. I could see my characters were too ridiculously perfect before I'd even heard of a Mary-Sue.

But that was just part of the learning process. I think most people start out with writing bad characters. We all have to write some crap before we do anything good.

You called me on it. My first character was base off of a character from a Final Fantasy video game. The characters name was Shadow. He was a big time gary-stu character perfect at every and any form of martial arts you could name, understand every and any language you could think of. Several other things were wrong with him and his crew.

After that I did something crazy and created even more gary stu characters. I still didn't know what a gary stu character was and I created this guy named Hunter. Jason Hunter! That seemed like a cliche name or at least overused. He and his crew were all gary stus and mary sues; the women hardly even spoke. It Sucked! I tried and tried to rewrite those books losing copy after copy of the story. Eventually I grew tired of those characters and decided to change them into something different.

I decided to make a story about a girl who was living in a desert wasteland town. She was kicked out of the seven cities along with her father and other friends of theirs. My characters are nowhere near perfect; they have big time problems and small time problems and they're alot cooler that way.

Please check out my question? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AjXMd... Thanks!