Change the shape, not just the skin
Let’s say you’re writing about aliens. You’re sick of boring aliens in scifi. You know the type - humans with a bit of makeup, who all act like Mongols, Romans, Native Americans or corporate raiders.
You want an alien alien.
So you ditch the bipedal, trapezoidal form. Torso, head, arms for manipulation, legs for locomotion? Please, you’re not some hack.
You give them a large, spherical, armoured body, because why not? Make them move on thousands of tiny wheels, with retractable, prehensile tentacles. Oh, and they communicate through pheromone blasts. They have dozens of different sacks, each capable of producing a different phoneme (pheroneme?).
Awesome, talk about a weird creature! Given how wild nature is on Earth, you’d expect to meet aliens at least this bizarre.
Proud of yourself, you sit down to write some scenes with them. Translated from Smellian into English, you get something weird.
Or, rather, not weird enough.
“I’m so frustrated!” Bzzrrrt said, in the usual manner of well-timed pheromone ejections. “Hrrrhoo wants to take me on a hike - he says there’s a romantic place we can be alone together. But my stupid parental swarm says I can’t go until I finish studying maths! But I hate maths!”
Yikes, something went wrong here.
Your aliens are human. Yeah, they don’t look anything like us, until they start talking. Now, I can’t unsee it. I hate to say it but I’ve met people like Bzzrrrt.
You changed the skin of these creatures, but they still have a human shape.
“Some things will be universal across sentient species! Like love, youthful rebellion, a desire for freedom and privacy…”
That first sentence was spot on, especially the word some.
Thought experiment: elevate a species of spiders to human intelligence and sentience. Will individuals pine for their love? The same way I pine for a curry, maybe. Will their young rebel against their parents? No, they’ll probably eat them too - but that’s not rebellion, that’s following tradition.
Bzzrrrt’s dialogue is identical to a (bad) script about a typical teenage girl in the modern West.
It’s weird how unweird they seem.
One solution: confuse strangeness with randomness, like the slew of imitators following LOST’s success. Make up what they do, scene-by-scene.
There, now they’re no longer human.
They’re also no longer interesting. Why care about characters - whether they’re protagonists, villains or part of the scenery - if they have no motivations?
Because that’s what acting randomly means - having no motivation.
A better solution?
Read Call of the Gods and apply the AMAM model.
Between their physiology and their environment, you’ll be able to craft truly unique characters - characters with non-human thoughts, emotions and goals, but will still make sense.
You can find it here: