Breathing Life into Your Characters

Rating:
Summary: The Psychology of Characters and Characterization
Review: "Breathing Life into Your Characters" uses the discipline of psychology to help you endow your characters with realistic depth and dimension. There's a ton of useful information in here: Archetypes, inner and outer goals, personal transformations, self-esteem, private and public selves, desperation, dysfunctional families, mental disorders, and much more. The material is accessible to a layman, but still useful to someone who already has an interest in psychology.

The exercises push you to delve into aspects of your own memories, emotions, and personality that you might not be comfortable with; the author believes that you can't create realistic characters that feel the wide range of human emotions if you don't even know what those emotions feel like yourself. But this isn't an approach that everyone is going to want to take, and some people may have good reasons for avoiding it. Just be aware of this aspect of "Breathing Life into Your Characters", and be sure that you're willing to go there if you decide to buy this book--the exercises are a serious part of the material, not a glued-on after-thought.

I do have a few minor problems with this book:

1. In the first half of the book there's a LOT of repetition of concepts--it gets old pretty fast.

2. Ms. Ballon stresses the value of exploring memories and releasing our emotions, with few if any caveats about this process. I think this is a little careless. There are circumstances under which exploring traumatic memories without the supervision of a trained therapist can do more harm than good, and I think she should have mentioned this--particularly since she herself is a psychotherapist.

3. For everyone who sees an issue one way, you're bound to find someone who sees it a different way. This is particularly true when talking about what constitutes a good story. Thus, the various phrases like "in any good story" and "in all good writing" that litter parts of this book seriously pushed my Pet Peeve Button--even when I agreed with them.

For all my complaints about the presentation issues, they're just that--presentation issues. They're annoyances that plenty of readers won't share. When it comes down to it, this is a very useful book that is almost certain to benefit your fiction-writing as much as it did mine. And so, while the annoyed part of me is tempted to give this book three stars, the more objective part of me impels me to give it four. It produced impressive results, and that's the true test of a writing book.

Rating:
Summary: Insight for all writers
Review: I can't speak for everyone, but I don't like to see flat characters in a plot heavy script. As a USC film school grad and struggling screenwriter myself, I know how hard it is to write stories with depth (be it psychological or other kinds of depth -- this book focuses on psychological, but we can also use films with spiritual and intellectual depth these days).

Dr. Ballon draws on her vast expertise as a therapist, and a therapist for writers, to show a myriad of ways that you can improve your characters by analyzing their psychologies. Although most films and TV shows end up with simple, and even simplistic, solutions to serious psychological problems, Ballon shows how you can show transformation in your characters and keep it believable.

Drawing on great films and books, she offers numerous examples, and for the beginning writer, the exercises are spot on excellent for using your own experiences to enliven your characters. Not that writing should always be therapy, or that your characters should only be you, observation of others and knowledge of psychology should always add to your own experience to broaden your work. Ballon acknowledges this, but focuses on how you can dig into your own inner depths to deepen the people you create. Well done!

(P.S. My only negative here is that I wish that many more specifics were brought in. I think the generalities make it too difficult to apply certain aspects to my own scripts, but maybe I just need to dig deeper.)

Rating:
Summary: Great writing book
Review: I thought Dr. Ballon's book was excellent. So many writing books emphasize plot structure and gimmicks toward creating a best seller. What Ballon illuminates is that the key to a great story is in the strength and depth of the characters. She leads writers through creative excercises to access parts of their own pysche so they may create truly interesting, conflicted and authentic characters. Drawing from her work in psychology and teaching writing, I think she hit on some very valuable insights into what works and what doesn't with characters that either fall flat or jump off the page. Bravo.

Rating:
Summary: Authenticity Builds Character
Review: There are countless writing books in and out of print, but few of genuine worth. This one is invaluable. If you are a writer of fiction who wants to move your audience with authentic and believable characters, this book offers some unexpected gems on how to get there. Dr. Ballon draws upon her experience as both a writing teacher and psychotherapist to put forth interesting ways of thinking about your characters. This book provides tools for penetrating the psyche of your characters to make them more motivated, complex, and believable. If more writers were to take Dr. Ballon's advice, there'd be less snickering in theaters at the endless parade of hollow characters and empty dialogue that plagues Hollywood today.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but...
Review: There's a lot of good material here. The author uses her psychology background to present a lot of various aspects of personality for imbuing into your characters. For example,there's two pages that list no less than 8 different kinds of defense mechanisms.

I didn't give the book five stars because of the exercises and general approach: that analyzing yourself will help you with your characters.

For example, one exercise asks you to consider what you would fight for and what you would be willing to die for. Then you're to ask that of your characters. The exercise doesn't take into account that not only can these be complete polar opposites, but they could be very different in intensity or value.

In other words, what your character is willing to die for within the story framework is not necessarily relevant to the choices you would make or what you consider important. The danger with this approach is that you could end up creating many characters that are ultimately similar and somewhat autobiographical.

For a psychological overview of personality that might give you ideas that you can work into your characters, it's well-organized and worthy of 4 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Making characters come alive.
Review: Wow! After reading Dr. Rachel Ballon's insightful book writers will discover a myriad of three dimensional characters waiting to burst out of them onto the page. Dr. Ballon takes the reader through a unique journey of self-discovery in a book I highly recommend to writers of all descriptions.