Leveraging AI for Richer Character Development in Your Novels

Rich, well-developed characters are essential for a novel that readers will not want to put down. At the same time, character development is also a challenge for many writers who want to produce the complete details needed to create a solid emotional connection with their audience.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers an excellent tool for helping develop characters. Consider AI a creative stimulant that can prompt some serious exploration of what your characters can be. 

So, let’s examine how AI can help you create engaging, deep characters that readers want to follow.

Creating A Backstory

A character with a compelling backstory helps the reader develop an emotional bond that can last throughout the completion of a book. The challenge, of course, is creating a backstory with sufficient detail to be believable and valuable simultaneously. 

AI can help here. Keep in mind that AI can pull in information from across much of the Internet, so it has access to many characters and a tremendous amount of data that you just have to ask for. For example, if you are discussing the beliefs and customs of your character and their people, you can use AI to look for real customs and build a scene around the idea of practicing something specific. 

You can use almost any prompt with AI, as software generally recognizes natural language. If it doesn’t work or come out to your liking, you can always try again.

Making An Outline

Having an outline can be surprisingly helpful - and in some cases essential, in ensuring that your story is organized and sensical and that your characters have a meaningful arc without getting lost. Using a novel outline template to generate an outline without spending too much time and energy developing one can increase efficiency.

An outline can also give your character development a strong sense of direction, including where to put specific character details so that their actions over the rest of their model have clear motivations.

Developing Language

Of course, some writers choose to create their own language. That’s fine! AI can also be used to choose just the right wording and style of writing for characters. The exact wording choice makes a big difference in conveying intent and tone—or, for that matter, in showing a character’s lack of attempt to communicate clearly. 

AI can be used in this scenario to develop the dialogue itself. Consider writing what you think the dialogue should be and asking AI to rewrite it using different slang or characteristics. Again, AI is wide open with prompts and won’t be offended if you ask repeatedly.

Break Down Existing Characters

Whether it’s your own characters or a popular character in fiction or nonfiction, you can use AI to replicate or explain a character for you. For example, some people use AI to write a movie or TV show based on a character’s personality. 

It's important to provide your AI software with plenty of contextual information here, though you can also go as vague as works for you. You could set the entire scene with some background info and ask for the dialogue you want based on another character’s personality or one that you defined.

Either way, using AI to consider all opinions and examples of your character or another can bring up some helpful results when describing your character and seeing them through your reader’s eyes.

Efficient Creation

One of the best parts about using AI in general is that you can access lots of knowledge on demand. While AI is not creative at all and only does what it’s asked to do, it can still be a great tool when you can’t ask that many friends or follow writers at a given moment. If you need an idea while you are on a roll in your writing, AI is a terrific resource when others aren’t currently available.

Conclusion

AI can help make your character development more interesting and efficient by providing prompts that bring you information from across the internet. While AI is not intended to be creative, prompts can give you the inspiration you need to further character development while creating a more complete character that drives your reader’s emotions.