Creating Unforgettable Characters

As I read through this book, I found a few snippets of information for the novel or short story writer. The cover claims it should assist all writers, but what it lists mostly follows for the screen writer. Many of its case studies and suggestions trend toward the writing of a screen play, rather than a general feel on creating characters for a written story.

Some advice the author offers does cover things of interest, like the psycology of a character, examining possible character issues, and how readers perceive non-standard characters. Other tidbits definitely leave a person seeking assistance to scramble for another reference to fill in additional details that the author left aside.

Interview pieces are informative to learn about show more older movies. Will definitely make me willing to look at referenced material with a different eye, but doesn't assist the present status of my writing. While informative for some things, I would recommend finding an additional source to boost a writer's character creation ability. show less

I picked this book up as part of a class on the future of storytelling. I'll use this advice in planning and running roleplaying games, to build better characters. I thought that it had a lot of good advice (some of which seems pretty basic too me), but it seemed very solid, was presented logically and the chapters built on each other. This book was also written in 1990, which worked fine for me given my age, but may seem dated or obscure to younger people, particularly those born in the late 80s or beyond.

At times I really enjoyed some of the tips and shared experience that this book had to offer, and at other times I felt out of the loop because of the large amount of references made to works that I had not read or seen. When the author was talking about characters from a film I'd seen, I felt like I was learning a lot, but that didn't happen often enough to warrant more than 3 stars for this book.

Amazon: This book is geared mainly for screenwriting, but it can be useful for novelists and short story writers as well. Linda Seger discusses character backstory, relationships with supporting characters, dialogue, and so on. Plus, there are interviews with today's leading writers across the spectrum. Her narrative is clear and easy to understand, with plenty of examples of both good and bad writing.
There is only enough actual information in the book to fill an article; but if you are a beginning screenwriter, this book (and many others) can be a help to you. The thing to be careful of is (a) emulating writing from movies that most viewers were lukewarm about. You want to learn the best techniques, not the mediocre ones. And (b) show more thinking that if you've read this book, you know all you need to know about characterization. You don't. Far from it. show less