john_amend_all

8) Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.

I should think there are some kinds of fic it would be hard to write without any OCs at all — if there's a scene in a shop, you may well need to create somebody to work the till. (Of course, it's not unavoidable; depending on the work, it might be possible to avoid an OC by using Rose, or Kelly from Closing Time, or a fragment of Clara. That's even happened in a published spinoff — in The Crystal Bucephalus, rather than create an OC waitress, Craig Hinton used a pre-series Ace).

That aside, I do indeed write OCs. One major source is my habit of promoting companions to be the protagonist of a story, which means that they need their own companion-figures (in the same way that Sarah Jane picked up Luke, Maria, Clyde and Rani). The one who gets the most exposure in my work is probably Lily Carson, Zoë's sidekick from my 'Holiday Jobs' fic. As her surname implies, she was created to be the Watson to Zoë's Holmes. She needed to be someone from Zoë's time who knew her slightly, but hadn't been with her on the Wheel when the Cybermen attacked. Canon doesn't provide any character matching those criteria, so I had to construct one of my own. Likewise, Ace and Dodo needed subordinates (not to mention an outsider POV character) for An Act of Charity, necessitating the existence of Fruitbox, Deez, and Josh.

As for how to make sure they aren't Mary Sues, the obvious answer is to make a canon character my Mary Sue instead :-p.