Creating Characters

Creating Characters is the Writer’s Digest compilation focused on the single element most readers actually remember from a book: the people in it. Like its sibling anthologies, it gathers material from many authors and craft books into one volume, here trained entirely on character, building people who feel real, who readers care about, and who carry a story. As a focused compilation, it is more useful than the everything-at-once volumes precisely because it stays on one subject deeply enough to be worth owning.

Character is arguably the most important craft skill, since readers forgive a great deal in a book whose characters they love and forgive nothing in one whose characters they do not believe.

Many angles on one subject

The compilation’s breadth works better here than in the broader volumes, because focusing many contributors on a single element produces depth through accumulation instead of scattered coverage. The book gathers approaches to the core character problems, building three-dimensional characters with consistent psychology, creating believable motivation, writing characters who change across a story, distinguishing protagonists from the supporting cast, and revealing character through action and dialogue instead of description. Different contributors come at character from different theories, psychological, structural, intuitive, and the variety gives a writer several routes into the same skill, increasing the odds that one approach clicks.

Motivation and the inner life

The strongest material in any good character collection is on motivation and interiority, why a character does what they does and how to make a reader feel their inner life, because this is where believable characters are actually built. A character is convincing not when they are described in detail but when their actions flow from a coherent, knowable inner life, and the contributors who address how to root behavior in psychology and history provide the book’s most valuable lessons. Wherever it gathers strong material on the want-versus-need tension and on making interiority felt instead of stated, it earns its place.

The familiar compilation caveat

The anthology limitations apply, though less damagingly than in the broader volumes. Assembled from separate sources, the pieces can overlap, repeat, or vary in depth and quality, and the book does not build a single progressive method, leaving the reader to synthesize. Because the focus is narrow, the repetition is more tolerable, several good treatments of the same character problem reinforce instead of scatter, but a writer wanting one coherent, authored approach to character may still prefer a strong single-author book on the subject over a gathering of many.

Verdict

It is the most useful of the Writer’s Digest compilations, because focusing many strong contributors on the single most important craft element, character, produces real depth through accumulation instead of the shallowness of the everything volumes. It loses a little for the inherent unevenness of the anthology form and the synthesis it leaves to the reader. For a writer working specifically to deepen their characters who wants many expert angles in one place, it delivers; for one who wants a single coherent method, a focused single-author character book may serve better. A strong, well-targeted compilation, the pick of its siblings.

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