Writing Tips

Tips to Avoid Creating Static, One-Dimensional Characters

Faizan Mehdi
· 1 min read
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AI writing tip: In order to differentiate your writing from AI, imbue your characters with rich inner lives and allow them to grow and change in response to the events of your story. Pay special attention – not just to their exterior journey –  but also their motivations, fears, and hopes, and how those evolve as the narrative does.

If you’re trying your hand at fictional writing supported by AI, you’ll find yourself coming up woefully short on character construction. That’s because when AI constructs characters, it relies on pre-existing archetypes that come from a database of literature and media inputs.

AI characters will feel recognizable and follow the usual narrative conventions, but they’ll also feel static and one-dimensional. AI won’t do anything unexpected or daring with a character; those characters won’t actually experience true growth over the course of a narrative.

AI's understanding is fundamentally algorithmic and pattern-based. In contrast, a human writer draws upon a nuanced understanding of life. So while transformative character arcs are the underpinning of great storytelling, AI-generated characters can’t ride the wave of those arcs. They will lack the inconsistencies and imperfections that humans naturally possess, making them seem less real and harder for readers to connect with on an emotional level.

After all, AI's challenge in creating dynamic characters stems from its inability to genuinely understand the human condition. AI doesn’t have any empathy for anyone else. So while emotional depth can be simulated, based on patterns, there’s no algorithm for life that makes it immediately navigable and comprehensible. Writing fiction is what humans do to try to make some sense of life, as they live it, using their own unique psyche and philosophies as well as their hard-won lessons learned.

As a human writer, you have a leg up on AI if you engage with your characters like they’re real people. Your readers will respond to the authenticity and complexity of that storytelling, in all of its imperfect glory.