A completely newbie on RP seeking guidance
Hello, Johnny, and welcome. You will find a lot of experienced players and GMS here.
The FAQs are a good place to start, and you will find a link in the upper right corner.
Unfortunately, I do not know of any general guides for creating your first character. How you go about that will depend on the game's system, setting, GM requirements, etc.
The best advice I can give you is decide what sort of things you're interested in, then browse the site and look through a few of the games.
If you're completely new to RP, then there are some things you should consider -- some games are geared for beginners, others for intermediate players, and some for experienced players. One of the best things you can do when you're interested in joining a game is look for any information the GM has posted on requests to join or acceptable characters. Some games ask for a full character sheet, some just a basic one sentence concept, and some are anywhere in between.
Creating a character for a freeform game will likely be little like creating a character for a system-intensive game using GURPS, any of the D&D variants, VtM, CoC, etc.
Start out by looking around, and perhaps post in Wanted-GMs to describe the kind of game(s) that interest you and include the information that you're looking for some help getting started.
Good luck, and hope this helped at least a little.