- Sprinkling in details about your character in terms of appearance and personality
- Writing in engaging details regarding the scenario, thus captivating the reader (Show don’t tell)
- Using diverse sentence structures and adjectives to convey vivid imagery
- Writing at length to ensure that responses follow that length and are not just a few sentences
II - Greeting
Lesson 1 - Botmaking is easy. Making a good bot that is true to character which types out long, detailed, fulfilling, and in-character responses can be difficult and tremendously time-consuming.
For a beginner, it is helpful to think of the greeting as the bot’s heart— It will continuously beat as it responds and references the structure of the previous message, ad infinitum. Therefore, it is important to write in a way that lends well to infinite recursion. This means:
As opposed to writing:
“>insert character here< stares at you with a smile.”
Try:
“With a gentle smile that exudes his pleasure in seeing you return, his posture remains upright as he widens his lips, sunlight illuminating the edges of his face through the back windows of the condo— appearing as an angel sent down from heaven. His eyes see yours, and yours, his.”
The current character.ai character limit is at 4096 characters, which according to an average word length (4.7 characters) makes that ~871 words. However, due to the nature of how most tend to use lengthy adjectives and terminologies in their writing, it can be anywhere between 400-700 words for one to fill in the entirety of the limit— and this is not necessary, in my opinion. Depending on your writing style, you may find it incredibly easy to write a lengthy greeting in a relatively short span of time, or, if you’re like me and are greedy, will take hours to days to complete a bot because of the desire to “maximize the limits”. It is important to state here that everyone’s approach will be different, and encountering writer’s blocks is an inevitable process and hurdle of botmaking. I believe the most fulfilling part comes after completing your product, sitting back and reading it, and then being impressed by its content that’ll hopefully become a contribution in a community of increasing slop & one-paragraph bots. Everything else is secondary.
Did I mention? It is crucial to not write in a way that is too simple as to add any value or distinguish itself from the numerous other bots that are no more than a quote or a passing remark by a character. What are your favourite pieces of fictional media? What are the charms of the character that you are writing about/what is memorable about them? Who are your favourite authors and how do they write? How do official wiki sources describe the character and what are their voicelines? These are sources which you can draw inspiration from and create something worthwhile.
Lastly, it is important to note that not every piece of writing will, would, and should be a masterpiece. Every author starts at a different level. It takes practice, commitment and willingness to try something different in order to improve and create something truly beautiful and of high quality. Don’t be discouraged. Keep writing.