Writing Suggestions

5 Tips for Building Compelling Characters

Experiment with various descriptions to refine your character.

One way to do this is to vary word choice. This will allow you to specific phrase structures that capture the personalities of your characters. In particular, your vocabulary should create a mood that is appropriately sophisticated given the intended audience for your character. Suppose that you are trying to build a student that likes to read a specific book. If you have tried, Ana likes <BOOK> and your description is not working, try, Ana enjoyed reading <BOOK> or Ana would encourage readers towards <BOOK>.

Use narrative-based language to provide detailed context in your description.

Use Common Knowledge and Scenes to tell us about the current setting. What type of interaction is this? Be sure to note where, why, when, and how the interaction is taking place.

Leverage examples.

Example dialog is an effective way to provide our models with positive examples of the behavior that you are trying to capture. Positive examples are generally more effective than negative instructions, e.g., Do not do [x]”. Consider replacing “Angus is known for his eccentricity and inappropriately pompous speaking style” in the core description with some example dialog,

Proofread before training.

If your description has spelling, grammatical, or formatting errors, then you run the risk of your character learning from those errors. To ensure high-quality output, provide high-quality input.

Be consistent in your descriptions.

Contradictory information will confuse our models, so it is important to plan out what you want to enter prior to training the agent. Check for any inconsistent facts or examples.