I just brought in a character who I already had who had been sitting collecting dust because his story had been abandoned. For his partner, I made a deliberate non-character. I decided to take someone from a story with plenty of plot holes, who had just been glimpsed for a second and had no personality of his own, and assign a personality to him.

I look at creatures or characters, and try to imagine how they'd look if I were the one in charge of designing them.

I created William because I wanted someone who uses magic (and as much as I love Harry Potter, their magic system is... too simple) and I was hesitating between The Mortal Instruments and The Dresden Files. In the end, TMI won because of more possibilities.

As for VJ... Hmm, good question. I guess I got inspired by Wendy from Gravity Falls.

So my idea is, pick continuum you know. Maybe not best, maybe not a die-hard fan who can nitpick every single thing, but one continuum that you return to the most and you can really feel comfortable writing.

Chris is the PC from my old Silver version game, and Ami is my ponysona even though I never actually wrote a story about/featuring her before the PPC. If you have any old or abandoned OCs/self-insert characters kicking around, try rewriting one of them to fit the PPC.

But I can tell you what I did with my agents.

-Des is a self-insert with a twist. The question here is, "how would I look like if I lived in a different world and took one significant different turn?"
-Anebrin was supposed to be a counterpoint to Des, but I'm not sure I managed to do any of that. One of the reasons I wrote him out of my spinoff (sans a possibility of showing up in Ispace, maybe) is because I figured he's flat and I have no idea how to make him three-dimensional.
-The Librarian began his life as a joke; hS (if I am not mistaken) posted a thread asking "what would be your Renegade Time Lord name?" Somewhere along the line, Lump evolved from "Time Lord!me" to this amalgamation of all of my less-than-stellar traits mixed with a hefty dose of racism. Of course, [spoilers] is going to [spoilers] — hopefully we'll publish it soon.
-Navare is a recruited bit. What's happening to him is actually quite similar to what Nesh described &mdassh; I'm trying to take the little characterisation he got in his horrible home fic and extrapolate a three-dimensional character from it.
-Amris is, if you'll pardon my Tropense, is the Red, slightly deranged Oni to Navare's Blue. I imagine the Marquis de Sod put it with Navare because Navare can keep it in check, and might prove to be a stabilising influence on the "something went wrong when they made it" part of its personality. Of course, it's not the only possible outcome...

...is to take an original character of yours (whether for original fiction or fanfiction) and recruit them. I've both done this and seen it done. In the PPC at large there are recovering Sues, characters from semi-fic blips, characters from original fiction, and, I expect, characters from published fanfics. In my own work... while most of my agents do not fit this pattern, at least two of them do: Flash, who I'm not sure has gotten an appearance yet (except possibly in an rp?), is one of a cast of main characters in an original book I've been writing for a while, and, of course, the Reader, who hails from a DW screenplay fanfic I wrote back in 2011 for the now canceled ScriptFrenzy (NaNoWriMo's team used to run it, and the general idea was to write a 100-page screenplay in April. They closed it a year or several after I did it, and it hasn't been back, although there's certainly nothing stopping anyone from writing screenplays for their other events.)

Beyond that, though, I'm pretty sure most of my characters were created for the PPC (using a workshop of PC's, in one case, though her appearance is still very much in the works), or else (in a few cases) were rescues. But yeah, recruiting your own fanfic or original fiction characters can work as well.

~DF, who is not usually up this early but is only just now beginning to regret it a little

In preparation for a new project, I've had to come up with a whole slate of new characters - I need a cast of 14 (!!!), and only two of them are pre-existing. So I've had ample opportunity to observe exactly how I invent them!

What I've discovered is that my characters tend to come into existence not as a single idea, but by the combination of two. These ideas tend to be:

-Species/origin.
-Personality.
-Role in the PPC.
-Backstory.

So, for instance, one character is a Thomas the Tank Engine train. That's idea number one, but it doesn't inform an entire character. Combine that with a job description that keeps it in one place the whole time, though, and a character starts to come together: one who's dedicated enough to keep working on the same thing even though their entire life is contained in a single loop of track, and who is probably a little too geeky.

Another pair of characters came together from the manner of their arrival in the PPC, and the fact that they are two members of the same group of friends, but never really got on themselves - but are now stuck working together. I don't yet know the precise details of their personality conflict - I suspect that the first lines of their story will give me one, and the other will grow to bounce off them - but I have the clay I need to start with.

Know what's entirely missing from this, though? Things like the following:

-Name.
-Sex and gender.
-Appearance.

Those are pretty much the last things that need to be stuck on a character. At the moment, only three of my characters have genders - two of them are the preexisting ones, and the third is a fictionalised historical person. Two of those are the only ones with names. I have no idea what the ones outside that trio look like. At least one doesn't even have a species assigned yet!

Because those things... really are unimportant, despite the fact that people think of them as the first thing they need. If you asked me to write Dafydd Illian as a warty-skinned squat alien named Kzarth (who belongs to the fourth sex of yer species, which has seven), I could do that easily: the essential 'utterly convinced of yer own superiority, but not that of yer people necessarily' would be easy to pull through. But ask me to write the tall son of Feanor Dafydd Illian as a shy introvert? I couldn't do it; I'd be writing a completely different character.

Your agent already has one idea: they need to be a partner to your other one. Find a second idea. Maybe there's a species ["NOT TIME LORD!" ~ Morgan] you always wanted to play with. Maybe you can find them a backstory in the PPC - perhaps they used to work in a defunct department, or they've just transferred from Infrastructure to Action, or they were involved in the Macrovirus epidemic and have had intense germophobia ever since. Maybe (because there are exceptions to every rule) you can come up with a name that means things in half a dozen languages, and want to make a running joke out of that. All of these things can inform and plant the seed of a personality.

hS

I was going by the whole 'opposite personalities get assigned as partners' deal, so I first looked at my existing agent. Rina was brash, loud, and bratty. Zeb, therefore, was going to be timid, quiet, and a very sweet person. Bing bang boom, general character traits were ready to go. All that was left were tweaking the personality and making it more three-dimensional. I did this by considering his backstory.

I am a big believer in that the 'why's are just as important as the 'what's, since that helps me get a better feel for my characters and think about how they react in certain situations. For example, why was Zeb timid and quiet? Since I was in a bit of a Nuzlocke phase at the time, I decided he was going to be a Pokémon. He was a seasoned fighter (being a Pokémon), so getting sent to the DMS made sense, and he had reasons for his timidness (coming from a Nuzlocke game). This told me he'd have the capacity for bravery when needed; his character was going to be more 'cowardly lion' than just straight-up 'coward'. I wouldn't have arrived at this conclusion without knowing the cause for his personality traits, hence why I think backstory should play at least a part in deciding characterization.

-Iximaz, who should really be asleep right now and probably will think she made this post drunk when she wakes up tomorrow

Especially because almost every single one of my PPC characters was rescued from a badfic, either actual or imaginary.

If that approach doesn't suit you, though, you could always try dredging up old OCs and seeing if you could create stronger characterization for them. That approach is what I did with Falchion, Rashida, and to some extent, Lapis (who wasn't technically rescued in a mission, since I wrote that I ditched her homefic before anyone could spork it).

Or you could just pick a random concept you think would be suitable and go nuts like I did with Whitney. The key word is "suitable", though - just because you want to write that sort of character doesn't always mean it'll fit the PPC. But hey, no pressure :)

Three of my four action agents are former bit characters. It's fun to take a tossed-off concept and turn it into a full, three-dimensional character that people actually care about. You'll find a few adoptables here (though I have vague designs on Iskillion and Delroch, and the latter's a horse anyway), but you might do better to ask around; that page is sadly neglected.

Also, whether you use a recruited bit character or make a new character all your own, take a look at PoorCynic's Character Creation Workshop for some helpful advice.

~Neshomeh