Character Avatar Creator For Writers

In this tutorial, we’re going to use an AI character generation tool to help us create avatars for our book characters. You can see some of the avatars I’ve recently created by watching the video below.

Why Create Character Avatars?

Recently we published two other character development videos. First, we published a video that walks you through that 15 point character profile template. We also published an in depth video that explores the first two sections of this template: the character’s want and need. I used various examples to highlight the importance of creating friction between these two character design elements. Again, watch those videos if you haven’t already.

However, what I want to talk about today is a little less structural and a little more visual. When writing our stories, we need to be able to see, touch, smell and feel our character’s world. However, many times, especially when you’re first getting started, the actual look of your character can be elusive. The physical appearance and facial expressions of this character are important to us, but often exist in a strange abstract state at the beginning of the writing process.

Today, I’m going to show you how to use an AI powered character design tool within Scribble to help you design to look of your characters.

What I like about this tool is that it will help you fight against the stock images that flood your mind when you’re first starting to think about your character. For example, right now imagine a criminal. Many of us will visualize a similar looking type of person. A.I allows us to get away from these initial images to create a person who is more unique and human. And although it’s only a visual design tool, there is something about this tool which I find helps lead narrative choices as well. For example, look at this character I just created:

There is something about being able to see this character now, and being able to look in his eyes, that lead me down unique narrative paths which I might not have thought about on my own if I wasn’t first fed this visual prompt.

This can be a very powerful tool, so let’s jump in and start using it.

Using the Character Avatar Creator

First, you need to go over to Scribble and sign up for an account, if you don’t have one already.

The next thing we need to do is add a book. Characters are associated with specific books, so you can’t add characters without books. I already have a book created here (see below).

So let’s dive into this book now. Now from our writing pad, we’ll click on “people and places” in the sidebar. Now, you’ll notice that I have some characters added here already (see image below).

Now, from an organization standpoint, the benefit of adding your characters to a book is that it allows you to do a few things within the scribble app. Let’s go over those quickly first.

First, back on the writing pad page, I can add any character associated with this book to individual chapters. For example, I could add or remove characters here (see image). This helps me keep track of who is in each scene.

Second, over on the plot visualization page, I can see a top level overview of which characters are in each scene by looking at the bottom of each plot card (see image below).

Third, over on our story base page, I can see all of the characters who are on the protagonist’s as well as on the antagonist side. This is helpful to be able to see your characters in relationship to the groups of characters they will interact with (see image below).

But before we can use any of these features, we need to add characters. So let’s head back to people and places.

Generating Your First Character Avatar

Now begin by clicking on “add character”. Let’s begin by giving our character a name. Then, we’ll select “character priority”. Generally speaking, you’ll have one main primary character. However, if you’re telling a story following multiple protagonists, you can do that as well, but in my case, I just have one protagonist, so I’ll select primary here. Also, because I’m designing a protagonist, I’ll select “protagonist” down here.

Next, I’ll give my character an age, a nationality and profession. Let’s make this character have the profession of a criminal. I want to show you how this tool allows us to fight against the stock images of criminals we have in our head. Next, I’ll say it’s a female criminal who has neck tattoos and wears glasses and has a thin build.. Now, here, I’m a pro plan so I’ll select 5 character generations, but if you’re on a free plan, I suggest you only select 1 so you don’t burn through your AI runs too quickly. Let’s see what the AI comes up with.

As you can see, the results are interesting. This character is very different from the stock criminal images I was thinking about when I first started this process.

The value of the AI in this case, is that it widens my imagination and allows me to take my character idea out of an abstract space by painting a picture of them.

Now that this character exists in front of you, you can look at her, and ask yourself questions about who this character is and how she got to where she is today.

Once we’re ready we can select the character we want to use and then click on “add character”.

Now, this character will show up in our book and we can add her to whatever chapters she’ll appear in. Also, remember two important things.

First, you can always swap out this character image for any of the other images you generated by clicking on “new image” over on your “people and places” page. Or, you can generate new character avatars by running more AI prompts in the upper right corner of the page (see image below). All new images will be added to this character sheet.

Another thing you could do to save on AI runs is download one of these alternative images and then when creating your next character, rather than generating that character using AI runs, simply click on the “image upload” tab which allows you to upload an avatar. Here you can upload the image and use that as another character image.

Going Deeper Than Just Character Avatars

Also, we’ve covered this in another tutorial but currently we’ve only just created the character avatar. A character is much more than their physical appearance. So to go deeper, we have a 15 point character profile template which you can access by clicking on the “edit character” button on your “people and places” page. Now, the character avatar will show up in the upper left corner, and we can start designing the rest of the character below (see image).

Here we can expand on their wants, their needs, the obstacles they’ll face, their character arc and much more.

The main takeaway here is that this image can act as a visual jumping off point for you to start coming up with ideas about who this character is, what they want and what they will do to get it.

Conclusion

So that’s all I have for you today. Thanks for stopping by our writing blog.

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