Prior to becoming a fiction writer, I had spent many years as a games writer, and during that period I realized that game writers are among the most knowledgeable when it comes to building characters. As a player can examine your character from any perspective, you are not allowed the luxury of revealing things gradually like a novelist. You must craft a character that works no matter which way they are viewed.

A character is a system, not a description

Novice writers create characters through descriptions that include eye color, body type, or one or two personality traits. But game writers create characters by constructing an entire system for the character that tells you how he or she would react in a multitude of situations, their desires, their fears, and what they will never do. Character description becomes only the surface of a very complex model that underlies it. If the model makes sense, then the character holds together regardless of what happens to him in a narrative.

This is precisely the reason why so many fictional characters come across as one-dimensional. The author described their appearance and mannerisms, but forgot to construct the internal machinery driving it, which results in their actions being inconsistent with the plot needs, which were not covered by the outward description given. It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly, yet the readers sense the discrepancy and can tell whether the characters are credible or not.

Start with contradiction

The technique of the writer is to begin with the contradiction, for human beings are themselves full of contradictions. A courageous person who is afraid of just one particular thing. A generous person who turns out to be stingy in some way. This is not an error in creation; on the contrary, this is what creates the individuality of the character as a human being and not as a stereotype. An uncontradictory character is merely a mechanism and we don’t connect with mechanisms.

For those writers who find themselves having trouble moving beyond mere descriptions, the key step is creating an ample profile and adding layers to it through contradiction and detail. An ai character description generator can produce that detailed starting point fast, which the writer then complicates and personalizes until the character stops feeling generic.

The draft is raw clay

Let me be clear about the proper usage of the generated character profile since improper use will yield the same boring characters we don’t want to create. The generated character profile is simply raw material that needs more work. It contains enough information for you to respond to and create conflict within. The artistry lies in what you add from there – the exact flaw, the inconsistency, how this character would speak and think. This tool gets you started on the right track; then judgment transforms it into something personal.

The authors who publish their profiles without editing receive generic characters and blame the generator. It has performed its duty; it has helped overcome the fear of starting. But the one whose job is really done here hasn’t done anything. You create your character by choosing all the unique traits, which can’t be done for you by the generator.

Testing a character

I also learned to playtest my characters prior to making decisions based on them. Place the character in an environment that is not relevant to the plot and ask what the character’s response will be in that situation. If the response is easy to figure out and seems like an inevitability, your character is a good one. When you find yourself inventing a response because none exists already, you know that there is a flaw in the underlying system.

Build people, not descriptions

If your characters lack depth, cease describing and begin creating structures: desires, fears, contradictions, and the particular rationale for how this person functions within the world. Tools like FaddyAI are useful for generating the starting material, but the depth that makes a character unforgettable always comes from the writer’s own choices.

It is only the well-rounded individuals who make good characters in anything and that too, for the same reason as before: They are systems with inherent flaws. This is an important concept learned by game script writers since they have no choice, but it can be applied in any situation. Create a character, put it under strain and then feed him specific inconsistencies.

The contradiction at the heart of character

If there was ever just one thing I could teach writers about characters, it would definitely be this: begin with contradiction. People in real life aren’t always consistent; there are opposing forces within them, and they act contrary to what’s in their best interest, shocking even themselves from time to time. Without contradiction, a character comes across as nothing but a type, a mere conveyor of an attitude or trait. Contradiction isn’t something to be erased or eliminated; it’s the thread of humanity that helps make a character believable.

The practical approach is to identify the very thing that makes up the character and then identify what contradicts it. An organized character with an unorganized appetite. A cynic who just can’t help being hopeful. Such contradictions create actions that seem organic in that the actions cannot be predicted based on one personality. The moment you create such contradictions in your characters, they start making decisions that you didn’t think they would ever make. This unexpected reaction by the characters is how you know that you have created a believable person.