In this guide, award-winning author Nancy Kress explores the crucial relationship between characterization and plot, illustrating how vibrant, well-constructed characters act as the driving force behind an exceptional story.
In teaching writers the fundamentals of creating characters that will keep their readers spellbound, Kress utilizes:
* Dozens of excerpts from well-known fiction
* Enlightening exercises to help writers build strong characters starting from the outside-in
* Beginning chapters that focus on the physical elements that comprise a character, providing techniques for using external qualities to reflect personality
Building skill upon skill, writers blend these qualities with emotional and mental characterization, forming multidimensional characters that initiate exciting action, react to tense situations and power the plot from beginning to end.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
A Must-Have for any Fiction Writer:
Drag out the highlighters, get comfortable and go to work. This book is filled with valuable information and instruction on characterization and how to keep a story moving. It explains how your characters can either make or kill a plot and how a character you love can still be a dud. I recommend purchasing this book as opposed to getting it from your local library. There are things in this book that you will refer to again and again. The Intelligent Dossier itself is worth the price of it. Although it... more info
Do You Want to Write a book--read this:
Book Review
Dynamic Characters
by Nancy Kress Dynamic Characters is the fourth book on Characterization I've read. I have two to go. I've been beating my head against the wall of traditional publishing for almost forty years. Instead of taking creative writing classes at UCLA, and other universities, I should have been reading books like this one. I would have learned so much more. When I recently started on this quest to improve my craft for developing characters in the fiction I write, I... more info
Other Books:
I ending up finding this because I was looking for sequels to her Probability series. No luck there, but I found this book. It was actually very readable, and filled with examples taken from a lot of books, which was pretty well done. Not that I am a writer at all, this book was still worth reading.
Another great book from this author:
Nancy Kress writes really informative books, bottom line. This one is so full of great information that it is hard to incorporate it all. Good characters drive good fiction and this book gets to the heart of the issues involved in creating those characters. I'm a beginning writer who has no formal classroom training, so I'm relying on books like these to help me hone my craft. This one, and other titles by this author, are among the most helpful books I have read.
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