Elements of Writing Fiction - Characters & Viewpoint (Elements of Fiction Writing)

The are chapters on description, motivation and growth are solid. Combined with the wonderful and numerous contrasting examples of good characterization/bad characterization, you will be able to go back to any story you've written and add, subtract and tweak your characters to make them leap off the page. Don't sell this book short because Orson Scott Card is primarily a writer of science fiction, either. This material will make absolutely any fiction a whole measure better.

Worth the money. Revise your stories with it. Write new, better ones after reading it. Run your writing workshops according to it. Card has given the writers' community a true winner here.


Good Book by an Excellent Author   August 14, 2002
 37 out of 40 found this review helpful

Orson Scott Card is one of the foremost Sci-Fi authors today. He has written numerous novels and short stories, several of which have become major motion pictures.

He gives his advice on character development and viewpoint in this book, which does it rather well. Viewpoint, for me, was a tough subject, and Card covers the basics rather well. He discusses common mistakes, as well as ways to improve. He explains the good points, as well as the bad points about each point of view, then lets you decide which to use.

His characterization help is flawless. I have read several other books on this, and his advice is similar, if not the same as other authors. I have found that his basic format is probably the best way to "create" a person - writing character back-stories, etc. He gives his advice for creating the necessary changes that have to occur over the course of a story, and also gives the reasons why these changes must occur.

This book deserves to be on any beginning writer's bookshelf, although experienced writers may not find the point of view information useful. I feel any writer, experienced or not would benefit from the characterization info.


A dry and uninspiring text book   October 7, 2000
 28 out of 43 found this review helpful

Having enjoyed Description by Monica Wood, I decided to buy another book in the series. This time I was out of luck. I'm about half way through, and I'm not only ready to burn this text book at the stake, but also pledge that I will never read an Orson Scott Card book. Okay, that's somewhat of an exaggeration, but I'm certainly not sure that I'm going to finish this one.

The simplest way to characterise the faults of this book is to say that its major fault is lack of character. Its suggestions seem trite, and its examples stereotypical and boring. It's not that the book lacks any worthwhile ideas. For example, the discussion of how characterisation is affected by the kind of story (milieu, idea, character or event) is interesting. But it all degenerates into a very formulaic treatment of characters. The author frequently resorts to reminding us readers that even though he's giving all those recipes, we shouldn't treat character creation in this way, and these reminders just enforce the feeling that this is a recipe book.

A good example is in Chapter 9, which discusses of the hero. To illustrate how finding the unique quality in a person allows you to break a creative block, the author describes an everyday person named Pete, a name he uses throughout the examples to describe different people, which, to me, is again a problem of characterisation (these are different people; the least he could do was find different names for them). Mr. Card develops a trait we might care about and puts some flesh into the story based on it.

But has there been a story there in the first place? When Pete's "story" is first described, there is nothing there. It's a story about someone who doesn't get promoted. Is this a story? What is it trying to say? Even after Mr. Card develops the character and some plot, the "story" still has nothing to say. It's just an exercise in creating a character. We could now find something for the story to say, but shouldn't it be the other way round? Are you writing a story because you care about something, want to give a certain feeling, want to share something that you thought of or dreamt of? Or are you just trying to write a story, any story? Perhaps if you're trying to write for money, that's the way to do it. Maybe that's how Orson Scott Card writes. I have a problem with this.

So sure, it may be that going back to a character can get you out of a writer's block. It probably helped the author in his own stories. And I'd much rather read how it helped in a real story than have a textbook example of how this might help. The bare bones textbook example just doesn't work. You find yourself looking at a skeleton, and asking where the meat is.

For me, this is the major difference between Orson Scott Card's book and Monica Wood's book. Monica Wood's examples provide some descriptions that may be too over the top for me, with a lot of colour and different senses, and metaphors. This is good, since it pulls me to new heights, and I can always tone this down for my own style. In a sense, Monica Wood's examples embody the descriptive concepts she tries to teach. Orson Scott Card, on the other hand, provides a dry text book with examples that won't belong in any real story. As I said in the review of Description, that book gave me inspiration to make a character more complex. Mr. Card's book doesn't inspire me at all. In that sense, a book about description was more helpful for my characters than a book about characters.

It could be that this book is helpful for writers who are truly beginners. It might help writers avoid some errors, and give them ideas on how to construct characters (in a formulaic manner), but I believe that a twenty page article could have taught all those concepts with as much success. For me, it is too much work having to plod through those basic ideas and examples, just to find a new idea here and there. But maybe that's just because I'm writing for fun, and not trying to make it into a profession. With a profession, you expect to occasionally suffer. It adds character.


A Probing Look Into Character and Viewpoint   June 25, 2000
 26 out of 27 found this review helpful

The book is divided into three parts: Inventing Characters, Constructing Characters, and Performing Characters. Card discusses a wide range of related topics: factors that make or break a character, the different types of stories (Milieu, Idea, Character, Event), how to write emotional scenes, transformations in the lives of characters, show and tell, and the benefits and drawbacks of each point-of-view (POV)---among others. Each chapter flows with a conversational, succinct style, leaving the reader with no excuse for misunderstanding. The final chapters on (POV) were well worth the money I paid for the book. Card explores POV deeply, deeper than any other writer of writer's books that I've read. Between paragraphs, I thought about my own stories and how they grossly lack POV unity (now back to the computer to revise). He uses illustrations, draw by Janice Card, to clarify his points (not that he needed to). After reading the last chapter, I set the book down and thought, "that's a damned good book." It's plain that Card loves fiction and has a thorough comprehension of what good fiction is; this book radiates it fully.