Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

Rating:
Summary: risky advice
Review: A whole book on characterization may be just what you need. Is this it? The chapters treat the usual aspects or problems of characterization: making your character real, motivating your character, giving some background of your character, offbeat characters, heroes, amusing characters, describing characters, characterization through dialogue, characters in unfamiliar settings. The central thing, says the author, is to make your character care about something-your character, not necessarily your reader. "It doesn't matter whether this something is major or minor, cataclysmic or trivial." (p.1) Doesn't it? How is the reader going to feel about a character who cares about something trivial? According to Swain, this is unimportant. But be forewarned: it may be important to your reader if you choose such a protagonist for your novel.
Further: "Finding a character means...giving human form to aspects of yourself that you like, or dislike, or wish you had. ... all your characters are you." (p. 7) Besides the fact that many would disagree with this recommendation, it is risky advice.
The details of each chapter also will be familiar to anyone who has read other books on writing: give the sex, age, vocation and manner. (p. 15) "Manner is...style." (p. 16) And so it goes. How do you do characterization? Adjectives and incidents. (p. 18) This is the kind of vanilla advice this book consists of. "It's to your advantage to consider the tastes and prejudices of your particular audience." (p. 54) Such redundant statements are not so much untrue as they are unhelpful. To make your character likeable: "The character is striving to attain something. ...The character is today-slanted.... The character does not contradict readers' feelings or their basic beliefs." If only if were that simple!
In sum, if you haven't read many books on fiction-writing, you can get the basic ideas from this book, but you run the risk of thinking that you know how to do characterization after you finish. You won't. You'll only know some of the kinds of thing you can do. And even then, you won't have a clue which work better for your purposes than others.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best!
Review: Over the years I've bought a lot of books on writing, and I can honestly say that the insights presented here are among the practical and useful.

Swain understands that characters are NOT folks but instead are constructs, partially based on folks and partially based on the author's needs.

I can highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Book You'll Really Use
Review: There are some books you read and then put away and there are books you'll use. This is one you'll use. Swain tells us how to create all types of story characters, how to make them credible, how to describe them, how to motivate them and much more. The book's easy, fun-to-read style makes it ideal for beginners, though more experienced writers can profit as well. Every page offers something worthwhile!

Rating:
Summary: A Book You'll Really Use
Review: There are some books you read and then put away and there are books you'll use. This is one you'll use. Swain tells us how to create all types of story characters, how to make them credible, how to describe them, how to motivate them and much more. The book's easy, fun-to-read style makes it ideal for beginners, though more experienced writers can profit as well. Every page offers something worthwhile!

Rating:
Summary: Scatterbrained
Review: There is some good information in Dwight Swain's book for building characters, but you'll have to dig to find it. Personally, I felt that Swain's book lacked organization and tended to ramble about character traits never really getting down to the meat and potatoes of the subject. The examples seemed to have been put together in a rushed way without much thought. It's almost as if Swain wanted us to know that anything was possible.

It's true that anything is possible in writing. That is the reason that many of us become writers, but our unlimited possibilities need to be tempered with believability. I was hoping that Swain would spend more time on discussing what makes a character believable, and what makes a character more real and less like a cardboard cutout. Swain does hit this mark on occasion, but it is nothing more than accidental as the information I was looking for was few and far between.

I also found Swain difficult to read because of his rambling. He starts to explain his idea in a new way before finishing the previous explanation. The book seems like he wrote it from the top of his head in one sitting. I was disappointed in this book, and I don't feel that my characters gained anything significant for the time that I spent reading it. There are better books out there that get more involved with characterization without taking up the space.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best out there
Review: This book is at once both informative and disorganized. The author, while I'm sure good intentioned, has haphazardly assembled a guide to writing that is full of fluff. It's so full of fluff, in fact, that you'll find yourself neck-deep in tangients trying to seperate the useful information from the numerous asides and messy explanations. At best, I consider this book to be a boondoggle (read as: wasted project).