5 Tips for Giving Your Character (Possibly Super) Powers

Superpowers are abilities or skills beyond normal human capabilities. They can be magical, mystical, paranormal, or even a librarian who knows exactly which book you need to read (What You Are Looking For is in the Library, Michiko Aoyama). My favorite types of these stories will use the power to put characters in extraordinary situations and leave me questioning what I’d do in their position.

(25 Plot Twist Ideas and Prompts for Writers.)

This is something I tried to do in my debut novel, An Ethical Guide to Murder, where a failed lawyer, Thea, discovers she has power over life and death. She can tell exactly how long someone has to live and transfer that life from one person to another—killing the first person in the process. She wants to do the right thing and creates an “Ethical Guide to Murder” to punish the wrongdoers and give the deserving more time. But of course, deciding who gets to live and die is tricky, to say the least, and she quickly finds herself in an ethical minefield.

When I describe it, people get excited about Thea’s power and instantly start asking questions I explore in the novel. So, without any further waffle, here are my tips for giving your character powers that people care about.

Superpowers tend to be more interesting when there’s a point to them. For example, telepathy is endlessly fascinating because we’d all love to know what people really think. Getting clear on what you care about will help you define your world, the story, and the power itself.

I was interested in the concept of fairness. Specifically, how is it fair that some good people die young while some bad people live long healthy lives? So, I gave Thea the power to change this.

So, what do you care about? I recommend doing some rambling free-writing to figure this out because you probably care about more than one thing. Continually ask yourself “and why do I care about this?” until you zero in on what feels like the most important reason—use this as the anchor for your story.

Your character and their power are intertwined. You’ve probably heard of concepts like “fatal flaws” and “defining misbeliefs”—powers are a great way to amplify these and see what they are really made of.

In Ethical Guide, Thea starts with a very black-and-white view of morality. Suddenly gaining power over life and death upends this worldview, and she spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out what “the right thing to do” really is. This gave me much more scope for character development than say, giving the power to an evil serial killer. No ethical dilemmas there, just murder.

She’s also a hot mess who struggles to be responsible for her own laundry—not someone you would trust with such power. Sometimes, giving powers to a surprising or unusual character and seeing what they do with it is more interesting than the power itself. It’s definitely more fun to write.

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Powers will help your character solve problems, but they should create just as many. Some of these will be external problems. Is there a cost to using the power? What happens if your character’s power is discovered? How will they learn to control it? Do other people have powers too?

But my favorite problems are the internal ones. A character with trust issues might struggle to find mentors. One with anger issues might use their power rashly and get caught.

The more powerful your character is, the bigger the problems you need to give them. This stops them simply solving the conflict of your novel too easily. In Ethical Guide, Thea is extremely powerful, but she’s also facing the impossible problem of deciding how to “ethically” murder people (alongside others, many of her own making).

It’s hard to create a truly unique power. You also don’t have to. I hadn’t seen Thea’s exact power before, but I’ve read about characters with the power to kill by touch and ones who could tell how long someone had to live. Sometimes you might combine existing ideas to create something new, or slightly change how a power works.

Your fresh spin could even be the situation or the setting. In Naomi Alderman’s The Power, the most unique aspect is not the power itself, but the fact that young women everywhere develop it overnight. In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren has hyperempathy. But what’s so unusual is that she has this power in a dystopian world full of pain and suffering. It can physically incapacitate her at times, making it an extremely dangerous ability to have.

Remember that it’s your character and ideas that make your story unique. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel unless you want to.

My final tip is a quick one. It’s tempting to over-explain how a power works, especially if you’ve put a lot of thought into it. Don’t! Give us enough to understand what’s going on, and then leave little seeds to intrigue us. Coming up with theories about how a power works is fun, especially if we’re proven right later on. Or, even more fun, when there’s a clever twist we didn’t see coming.

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