We all have characters in our heads that we love, but for one reason or another might not be striking our audience as cool/evil as we intend for them to be. How do you troubleshoot what’s going on, and modify what your character does to make them have the impact you want?

In a series of episodes of the podcast Writing Excuses, the hosts come up with a helpful framework of 3 “sliders” that you can scale up or down to affect how a character is perceived:

Sympathy - How sympathetic or relatable they are. You can adjust this by ____

Proactivity - How much do your protags “protag”.  You can adjust this by ____

Competence - Are they good at what they do?

Interesting Combinations