Knob

Character sliders

You might say: relatability, proactivity, capability

Sanderson’s three dials for a character: how relatable, how proactive and how capable they are.

What it does

Let you tune how readers feel about a character without changing the plot.

Ask

Which slider is low, and is that on purpose?

Typical

Each slider low to high; a character can move up or down during the story

Trouble

A character feels flat or annoying and you cannot say why.

Sources

1. Brandon Sanderson, Creating Proactive, Relatable, and Capable Characters (Writing Lecture #5, 2025), The Three Pillars of Compelling CharactersThink of proactivity, relatability, and capability as sliding scales.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Character sliders" (character-sliders) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/fiction-writing/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

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