Clearly, my type is "Tall, Dark and Big-Ass Eyebrows".
If you ask your average writer [whether hobbyist or pro] when we started, the answer is usually sometime in childhood or as a teenager.
When I was 15, I had aspirations of writing the Great American Novel, as one does. This was the mid-1990s, and at the time I was a born-again Christian, but I was conflicted between the compassionate, kind teachings of Christ and the people at my church who believed in conservative "family values" and condemned my mother for leaving my abusive father, and thought gays were demonic [meanwhile "the gays" had been more loving and accepting of me and my weirdness than the Christians were].
I wanted to write a story about a teenage girl who loved God and grunge, who wanted to make a difference in the world through love and not hate. Her name was Meghan, and she was tall, with black hair and green eyes: she looked a lot like Antonia [pre-transition Anthony], as a matter of fact.
What ended up happening was that my main character quickly shifted to her boyfriend, Tyler, who started the stories at 17-going-on-18 and was 19 by the time I stopped writing them. Tyler Magnusson had Ed Kowalczyk from Live as a faceclaim, which began my tradition of having a celebrity faceclaim for OCs. Back in those days, I had the biggest crush on Ed. I had both Mental Jewelry and Throwing Copper on CD, I began to teach myself guitar and the first songs I learned were all Live songs, I had sexual fantasies about Ed and apologized to Jesus for masturbating, I had posters of Ed in my room, and I eventually went to go see them at Woodstock 99.
Tyler was, for better or worse, the kind of boyfriend I wanted to have at the time and couldn't get. But I went from fantasizing about him to sort of projecting on him. I didn't hear the word "transgender" for the first time until I was 28, but I knew when I was 4 that I wanted to be a boy and I learned quickly not to say it in front of people. That didn't make the feelings go away, and Tyler was an outlet for me to live the boy's life I didn't get to have.
Tyler wasn't just me projecting my gender stuff, but he was also me working out my problems with religion. He was from a Christian family and he was starting to have some serious doubts about the existence and benevolence of God with all of the bad things in the world, and even bigger doubts that fundamentalists were on the side of moral good, with their hateful judgmental attitudes.
Also, Tyler was in a garage band with his best friend Mark, a neighbor guy nebulously in his late twenties/early thirties who was a hesher [he still listened to 80s hair metal and continued to sport long hair when longhaired guys were starting to cut theirs], and Mark was also a "benevolently bad influence" - doing things like getting Tyler to toke up with him by pointing out Bible verses that God made the herb for mankind and [one of the few exact quotes I remember] "Bob Marley sang about Jah a lot and he was high, like, all the time". Mark was bisexual, which directly contributed to why Tyler thought the anti-gay attitudes of his family's branch of Christianity were probably messed up.
In their band - which was named Sister Christian [after the Night Ranger song and because Tyler was Christian] 🤣🤣🤣 - Mark played guitar and sang, Tyler played bass and sang backup [he looked like Ed but didn't have Ed's pipes], and Meghan's brother Chad played drums because back then it was basically the law that your drummer had to be named Chad. 😂
While I continued to have stupid amounts of Ed Kowalczyk thirst through the 90s, I started to realize that Mark had replaced Tyler in my mind as boyfriend material when I began to write Tyler questioning his sexuality, and having the "oh shit" moment where he figured out he loved Meghan but wasn't in love with her, and he had it bad for Mark. Tyler's "I think I'm gay" conversation with his parents didn't go well, which included his father not merely deciding to throw him out and disown him but his father told him he wasn't even Tyler's father and that Tyler had been adopted, his real father was an Icelander. [Tyler had been adopted by a Scandinavian-American couple struggling with infertility.]
Disgusted with the hypocrisy of his parents lying to him all these years, Tyler decided he was taking a hiatus from Christianity... and asked Mark to go with him to find his birth parents.
If you're wondering what happened after this, what happened was that my mother threw out all my notebooks, told me to "stop wasting my time" because I would "never make any money as a writer", said a bunch of really mean shit including anti-gay slurs, and I ended up with writer's block until my early fucking thirties.
When I began to write again in my thirties, I considered revisiting Tyler but decided it was too fraught, and I was embarrassed by teenage me being "cringe". However, Mark eventually ended up coming back.
I'm in my forties now, and I've once again considered whether Tyler's story is one worth telling, but I have my hands full with The Squad. Some of Tyler ended up in my OC Sören as well [Sören is also something of a self-insert but there are ways in which we are demonstrably different]. I think I'm also too Old Man Yells At Cloud to write about someone 17-19, so there's that.
Nonetheless... I have a soft spot for my very first OC, and what he taught me about myself.