How to Calibrate Superpowers

Jeff Somers

Super-powered characters are incredibly fun to write, but they come with the challenge of balancing their powers within your story. A character too powerful risks undermining your story's tension, but a character who fails to use their power to its fullest potential makes the reader question what the point of their powers is at all. To mitigate these risks, the writer must consider their character within the context of the fiction world they have created. In this tutorial, Jeff Somers provides advice on how you can create super-powered characters who fit into the world of your story in compelling ways, and whose powers can augment tension and move the plot forward.