superpowers: a list of stuff to think about

Okay so I'll just start out this blog post by saying that this is a subject very near and dear to my heart.The first story I ever started writing was about children with superpowers, and while I have never actually finished any story with superpeople at the helm, one of my life goals is to do so.

While I am no expert on the world of superpeople, I do think about it an awful lot because I love it so much, and I read a lot of other people's ramblings about writing superpowers and everything that goes along with that.

So, a few thoughts for pretty much anybody who is similarly obsessed with other people's ramblings about superpeople:


We should totally think more about team superpowers and how they work.

Like, seriously. Every time I have written a super group of people, they get their abilities because I go, "ooooh I have a cool idea! I want a character with that ability!" and then I make a character in the group with that ability. This is not such a hot idea for a few different reasons, I guess, but the one I'm getting at here is that in a story the different characters' individual skills and personalities should have a chance to shine and add a different and important dimension to the group. Same goes for their superpowers-- if their abilities aren't important to the plot, why bother giving them out at all, other than just for the "ooh cool!" factor (which gets a little dull after a while, since you can't realistically show something unimportant to the plot)?


Characters first, superheroes second.

Not gonna lie, since most of my superhumans were made up simply because I had a cool idea for a superpower, they were all originally nothing more than superpowers with a name. Personality? No. Appearance? Not really.

Fortunately for these lifeless superpeople I tend to go back to them and play with them and eventually turn them into something neat. Jake Thomson, lifetime winner of "Chloe's Favorite Character" award...

good job, baby, you won something

...originally started out as nothing but a name (Jake Thomson) and an ability (healing other people but not himself). Over a large period of time (we're talking years) I eventually threw the superpower out the window because it was hindering his development. Free from the burden of his stupidly assigned ability, Mr. Thomson became this simultaneously anxious and snobby British kid without many brains, relentlessly fretting about other people's safety since he was capable of healing himself and he didn't want these poor delicate normal people to kill themselves.

now I love Jake, I really really really do.

I really really really really really truly do.

But despite my love for him (And I know you don't believe me but I so love this guy) he is not really that wonderful of a character. I'm pretty sure I would get tired of him if I ever wrote a book about him, and I'm pretty sure other people would get tired of him if they ever read a book with him as a character in it. It isn't his fault, it's mine-- his whole character has been hindered by the fact that I put no thought into him. He was just this guy who could heal stuff, the end.



Telepathy is hard to write and makes for boring characters.

Everybody knows about ordinary mind-reader characters, right? They're notorious in their abilities to creep all the other characters out, even while being as completely vague about their supposedly all-encompassing abilities as possible.

Telepathy is hard to write for a number of pretty good reasons. (Bullet list time!)

• Good characters have secrets
• Telepaths remove all secrets
• (unless they are ridiculously useless and vague telepaths. me no like vague telepaths)
• Thus, good telepaths destroy good characters.
• and make your novel kind of wordy.
• and boring.
• why is this a bullet list??

Oh, that was supposed to be a bullet list of stuff that made telepaths hard to write. Ugh. Okay, I'm going to do a real bullet list this time:

• Telepaths cannot have ordinary relationships with people due to lack of privacy.
• Telepaths will always know an infinite amount more than any other character, and the reader, and the author. 
• You can't have a telepath filling up your novel with aimless and pointless words about a different character's musings of their childhood buddies (unless your name is Chloe. People named Chloe are the only people allowed to get away with filling novels full of random musings.) (That was a joke.) (I wish it was true, but sadly it just means I am a bad writer.) (I digress) To combat the issue of excessive rambliness, your telepath must have his or her voice curbed. The easiest way to do this is to only bring up their telepathy when they have something relevant to the plot to say, which makes them pretty much extremely boring.
• How do you write how a telepath thinks? Help!
• That's about all for this bullet list because I am getting bored.

These poor characters are pretty much just more trouble than they are worth.

All this said, I do have a telepathic character who is one of my oldest and dearest creations. I didn't specifically try to make him break all the annoying habits of telepathic characters listed above, but through his own general personality and my own weird writing style he ended up being a pretty weird example. My personal favorite thing about him is how specific he is in his mind reading. How much information does he glean from other people? 100 percent. How much of this information is he going to spill, as matter-of-factly as possible? As much as he can say while still breathing. More on him later.


We hear so much about not overpowering our characters. Why can't our characters overpower themselves?

Remember about five seconds ago when I said I'd tell you more about my telepath character later? Well, that time is now.  My telepath character, who we'll call Duncan, is a terrible character. (No offense, character who we are calling Duncan.) He's kind of in that stage that is a little bit like C.S. Louis's Wood Between Worlds-- a sleepy little place in my brain where the characters are thought about nigh-constantly, but nothing really helpful or exciting ever actually happens. (Is that actually anything like the Wood between Worlds? Not really.)

I will say one thing about Mr. Faul-- uh, the character we are calling Duncan. I really, really enjoy his telepathic abilities. I have had other telepathic characters, many of whom I spent far more time on than this lad. But this one takes the cake, by which I mean I would cheerfully bake him a cake with the words "Chloe's favorite telepath" in cursive on top.

I digress.

The best and most fun and most plotty-problematic thing about this kid is, quite simply, that I threw out all those rules you always see about superhero characters. You know the ones: "Superman is too strong", "Batman is too prepared", "Overpowered = unrelatable". When faced with the knowledge that my precious character who we are calling Duncan was becoming a tad too overpowered, instead of saying "NOPE NO MORE POWERS FOR YOU" I took his powers away, made them about 400 times more powerful, and then gave them back to him.

Best decision I ever made. The poor lad was so overwhelmed with his abilities that he went kind of insane and became unable to communicate with the outside world. He is now a poor overloaded computer of a being-- he has a hive mind connection with the entire universe and he cannot organize their thoughts well enough for his own brain to function.

He is so much fun to write.

Now, what is the point of this long and rambly bit of chatter? Basically, just me wanting to talk about my characters. But also, as personal advice. If you are writing a story, and your story has a character in it with superpowers, and this person is starting to be a little bit of an omnipowerful Mary Sue as far as powers go... don't take the easy route out and water them down a little bit. Give the ability consequences. Make it stronger than the character can handle. And have fun perfecting your evil author's laugh.


I will talk about superpowers more at some later date, probably, because I really love superpowers.

Also, if you have some kind of superhero story that you want to write with a partner, I will volunteer.

Also, SUPERPOWERS.

Also, read more stuff at this awesome website, which I am sure says all the stuff I just said except more clearly: SUPERHERO NATION