Creating Characters

Creating Characters is the Writer’s Digest compilation focused on the single element most readers 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 hold a story together. As a focused compilation, it’s more useful than the everything-at-once volumes because it stays on one subject deeply enough to be worth owning.

Character is probably the most important craft skill. Readers forgive a great deal in a book whose characters they love. They forgive nothing in one whose characters they don’t 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.

The book covers 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. The variety gives a writer several routes into the same skill. That raises 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 do and how to make a reader feel their inner life. A character convinces a reader when their actions flow from a coherent, knowable inner life, however much or little description they get, 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’s worth having.

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 doesn’t 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.

Is Creating Characters worth reading?

It’s 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 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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