| Characters and Viewpoint (The elements of fiction writing) | 
 enlarge | Author: Orson Scott Card
Publisher: Writer's Digest Books
Category: Book
List Price: £10.99
Buy New: £4.53
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 8144
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 182
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.6
ISBN: 0898799279
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.3
EAN: 9780898799279
ASIN: 0898799279
Publication Date: August 1999
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: New book. WE USE PRIORITY AIRMAIL ONLY for books from the USA. UK & European delivery is 7-10 days. Over 2,000,000 books sold to Amazon customers
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 An essential and important book for your literary arsenal June 20, 2007
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
As a professional writer and reader for a film company my overwhelming criticism of the material I receive lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of both character motivation and narrative point of view. If you feel that this is a weakness in your own writing I urge you to beg, borrow or steal this book.
It is not a tome, like many of the so-called "how-to" books, nor does it need to be as the author has a gift for distilling the essence of good writing: always remembering your contract with your reader. Whether this is the general public, your friends and relatives or the gatekeepeer at a major publishing house or prod. co, you need an understanding of the effect your stories and characters will have on your audience. Orson Scott Card takes you through the importance of motivation, the effect different kinds of characters have on the audience, and the importance of detail in creating a realistic and believable world inside your story. The section on viewpoint is incredibly comprehensive, enabling you to make an informed choice about the correct point of view for your particular story, making it the most powerful it can be for the structure, philosophy and effect you want to create within your reader. These are not random choices, something which the new writer, especially, needs to have drilled into them emphatically.
The quality of the writing in this book is reflected in the high standard of the examples the author gives; his own prose is entertaining, affecting and clear. I think this would be a marvellous guide to have with you when you already have a story that you want to tell. Read this book in tandem with your daily writing and revise your story's weak points by consulting with the text. It will be enlightening how much you can strengthen your own work simply by applying the principles outlined here.
I have reviewed a number of writing books in my professional career and this is one that I would be happy to recommend wholeheartedly.
 good intermediate textbook November 28, 2004
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
This book deserves the praise others have given it below with one caveat: it is not the end of the line. These writers will learn that there are more heights to scale, and to do so they'll need detailed books like Creating Character Emotions, Advanced Writing: Fiction and Film and the like. But for those who have had it with introductory books, this book will come as a welcome relief. Characters, of course, are not the whole story. You need other intermediate books like Plot by Dibel, etc. When you've digested all those, then move on to the books mentioned above. Bonne Chance!
The best of best February 27, 2004
8 out of 16 found this review helpful
I was looking for this book for forever. I never could buy it when it was in stock (I didn't have a credit card at that time) and mourned over it when I finally could buy it but wasn't in stock anymore. Then, I bought it as used and had to wait more thn 15 days for it to arrive. I had given up ... but luckily it *did* arrive. I wasn't disappointed of all the work I endured in order to buy it and of all the sighs I made on this page when I didn't have a CC. This book is *really* useful and one of the best one I've ever read about writing. Maybe the only one that I found more useful is "On Writing" by Stephen King, which stole a piece of my heart and made me an adverb-phobic forever :D. I find Orson Scott Card's style very easy to follow, and nice to read. I could read a few pages of this book even when I happened to go to bed at 4 AM and had my eyes shutting in front of the pages. Because it was interesting and not at all boring. I'm even not a native English speaker, but I didn't find it difficult to follow and to understand. It was very useful for me, above all in the part where it talks about the attitude and about the takes. It was funny to recognize some of the techniques he had talked about not only in the films and books I often read, but also in the mangas I love. A very compelling book, which I suggest to anybody who wants to improve his/her skills as a writer and in the same time have a great read.
A must for aspiring writers October 24, 2002
17 out of 20 found this review helpful
Orson Scott Card knows writing pretty well; he's written novels from a dozen genres, as well as numerous plays, and he's even trying his hand at a movie script. So he's certainly a voice of authority. And his advice is excellent. His clear style of writing is as at home in non-fiction as it is fiction, and the book is broken down into sections to make it easier to read. These sections also make it ridiculously easy to dip into for quick advice. Said advice is presently simply, which belies the thought and experience behind it. In fact, the only reason that this book hasn't received five stars is that it reproduces some of the advice from his "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" (which I also recommend). To be fair, though, that advice is given a twist to make it more relevant to writing characters.This has helped my own writing no end, and I'd bet my bottom dollar it will help your's too.
An excellent overview and insight in to technique August 7, 2002
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
Having just finished reading this excellent work, I then had the opportunity to watch a couple of movies that I have seen before, and was surprised to see many of the techniques detailed in the book used on screen, where it was now noticable to me that they could have been done a lot better, had the director taken the time to read a book on writing...Orson Scott Card has laid out the character techniques used in books and in places how they overlap with movie techiniques to help the writer create believable characters and how the writer can use these techniques in order to help the reader immerse themselves into the book rather than focus on the fact that they are reading a book (or watching a movie or a play), unless that is indeed what the writer is trying to accomplish. I learned a great deal about a number of tools that can be used in writing, and would recommend this book to anybody who writes - be it fiction or not. I'll be sure to be using some of these techniques in my normal day to day life now that I know they exist and know how to apply them. This is much more than just a book on writing - its a great tool in learning how to get across an idea or topic to any form of audience.
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