I cheat on writing children, you know. *grin* In other words, I based pretty much all of Naruto's behavior on things kids in my religious education classes have said and done over the years. (This is, incidentally, why the kids in "Secrets" tend to skew older than their actual ages; I don't have a lot of real life experience with pre-teens as a corrective, the way I do with 6-to-8-year-old kids.)
As for original characters, well, I did not discover fanfiction until I was almost 20 years old, so all my practice from 12 to 19 was done in original fiction, where you have to get good at creating and introducing worlds and characters or you won't have anything to work with! This is actually potentially counterproductive for fanfiction, because it means my instinct is to create OCs to fill any story roles rather than search for a minor canon character who could fit the position, and that has the potential to turn readers off -- you will note, for example, that when I needed an assassination target for "The Guardian in Spite of Herself," I invented Amane Eiji and all his entanglements rather than, say, deciding to kill Gato several years early -- but I think it does also lead me to be more mindful of a fictional world as a world, so overall the effect is probably a wash. And it does mean I've never had any fear of creating OCs for fanfiction stories, if only because I've always been sure that I could invent a person and make sure she or he fit into the world I designed him or her to live in. The only difference between doing that in fanfiction and doing that in original fiction is that in fanfic, I'm not the one who set the initial rules for the world. *wry* Either way, the rules are the rules.
Re: Top 5 favorite stories I've written
As for original characters, well, I did not discover fanfiction until I was almost 20 years old, so all my practice from 12 to 19 was done in original fiction, where you have to get good at creating and introducing worlds and characters or you won't have anything to work with! This is actually potentially counterproductive for fanfiction, because it means my instinct is to create OCs to fill any story roles rather than search for a minor canon character who could fit the position, and that has the potential to turn readers off -- you will note, for example, that when I needed an assassination target for "The Guardian in Spite of Herself," I invented Amane Eiji and all his entanglements rather than, say, deciding to kill Gato several years early -- but I think it does also lead me to be more mindful of a fictional world as a world, so overall the effect is probably a wash. And it does mean I've never had any fear of creating OCs for fanfiction stories, if only because I've always been sure that I could invent a person and make sure she or he fit into the world I designed him or her to live in. The only difference between doing that in fanfiction and doing that in original fiction is that in fanfic, I'm not the one who set the initial rules for the world. *wry* Either way, the rules are the rules.