Customer Reviews

Breathing Life into Your Characters

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Breathing Life into Your Characters" uses the discipline of psychology to help you endow your characters with realistic depth and dimension. There's a ton of useful information in here: Archetypes, inner and outer goals, personal transformations, self-esteem, private and public selves, desperation, dysfunctional families, mental disorders, and much more. The material is accessible to a layman, but still useful to someone who already has an interest in psychology.

The exercises push you to delve into aspects of your own memories, emotions, and personality that you might not be comfortable with; the author believes that you can't create realistic characters that feel the wide range of human emotions if you don't even know what those emotions feel like yourself. But this isn't an approach that everyone is going to want to take, and some people may have good reasons for avoiding it. Just be aware of this aspect of "Breathing Life into Your Characters", and be sure that you're willing to go there if you decide to buy this book--the exercises are a serious part of the material, not a glued-on after-thought.

I do have a few minor problems with this book:

1. In the first half of the book there's a LOT of repetition of concepts--it gets old pretty fast.

2. Ms. Ballon stresses the value of exploring memories and releasing our emotions, with few if any caveats about this process. I think this is a little careless. There are circumstances under which exploring traumatic memories without the supervision of a trained therapist can do more harm than good, and I think she should have mentioned this--particularly since she herself is a psychotherapist.

3. For everyone who sees an issue one way, you're bound to find someone who sees it a different way. This is particularly true when talking about what constitutes a good story. Thus, the various phrases like "in any good story" and "in all good writing" that litter parts of this book seriously pushed my Pet Peeve Button--even when I agreed with them.

For all my complaints about the presentation issues, they're just that--presentation issues. They're annoyances that plenty of readers won't share. When it comes down to it, this is a very useful book that is almost certain to benefit your fiction-writing as much as it did mine. And so, while the annoyed part of me is tempted to give this book three stars, the more objective part of me impels me to give it four. It produced impressive results, and that's the true test of a writing book.

There are countless writing books in and out of print, but few of genuine worth. This one is invaluable. If you are a writer of fiction who wants to move your audience with authentic and believable characters, this book offers some unexpected gems on how to get there. Dr. Ballon draws upon her experience as both a writing teacher and psychotherapist to put forth interesting ways of thinking about your characters. This book provides tools for penetrating the psyche of your characters to make them more motivated, complex, and believable. If more writers were to take Dr. Ballon's advice, there'd be less snickering in theaters at the endless parade of hollow characters and empty dialogue that plagues Hollywood today.

I was disappointed in the repetitions and the stereotypes in this book. Some of the research is wrong. Virginia Woolf is NOT a character in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (page 195). The author is thinking of the character Martha, instead. Normally such a gaffe would not upset me much but because this is a book FOR writers, it bothered me.

Much here is simply too obvious. Much is derivative of other, better-known guides to writing and creativity that were published before this book was. If you've lived in the world a while, you will know it. A lot of the material could be transformed into a sort of self-help or self-knowledge book. Ballon has written a few other books about writing and about writing as therapy, writing as healing, etc. She has not, however, published any fiction that I can find.

Take the time to read something such as Ford Madox Ford's THE GOOD SOLDIER to learn about writing character (it's a novel largely about figuring out how to tell a story). Try the short stories of Richard Yates. Or go back to study the range of characters you can find in Shakespeare or Jane Austen's absolute integrity of characterization.

As a mythologist who works with archetypes, I highly recommend Dr. Rachel Ballon's book, "Breathing Life Into Your Characters".

Dr. Ballon's book offers a professional's insight into what makes characters tick. For the writer, director, or actor, this is invaluable information to help shape your story characters.

I have attended seminars at the American Film Institute, UCLA, StoryCon, the Writers Store, and many other venues where Rachel leads people through exercises in understanding characters. I have listened afterwards to their comments. "Amazing, I didn't know I had that in me." "I was afraid at first, but it really opened up a wellspring of emotion." "The free-flow helped me free my ideas." "There was something my character was hiding and I couldn't get past it. Dr. Ballon's exercise helped me dig deeper and find the real motivation." These are the sorts of comments her work elicits.

The layout of the book makes it easy to locate certain character types and flaws and then goes into clear detail about how to use these flaws to create believable story characters.

Buy this book, read it through for a better understanding of human psychology, then come back to it again and again to fine-tune your characters.

From all the incredible reviews for this book, I really thought this would solve all my questions in trying to learn how to write believable characters. It didn't. This book wasn't very helpful at all. Over and over the author says stuff like this about creating characters - "you must be able to lay down their motivation and make their behavior realistic. You need to make them consistent in personality so they'll be believable. You must build their backstory by understanding their childhood" (p. 188). She tells us over and over that You MUST, You MUST, You MUST, but she doesn't explain HOW.

If you want long (and I mean interminably long) pages of descriptions of what neurotics or addicts or psychos or people with rotten childhoods or abused people are like, the whole 2nd half of the book is full of those facts. But that's the trouble-- it's just a lot of facts. She never discusses HOW to use those facts (most of which we could glean from TV) to build real-life story people.

To make things worse, I found none of the exercises to be in the slightest bit useful. "What emotions have your characters suppressed? What traumatic events or crises happened to your character in the past? How did you character act out his repressed emotions? Write a scene answering the above questions" (p. 120). Over and over asking a bunch of questions, then telling an author-in-training to write a scene isn't an EXERCISE! I know the answers to those questions. I want to know how to make the character clear on the page - not just in my head.

By the second half of this book, I just hated this book and felt cheated that it didn't provide anything useful for actually creating characters, so I was vastly disappointed. I did read through to the end, and even there the reader is cheated. There is no wrap-up, no final summary, no list of resources, nothing. The book ends abruptly after chapter 11 while talking about "Looks Can Be Deceiving." Truer words were never spoken. The look of this book completely deceived me.

I thought Dr. Ballon's book was excellent. So many writing books emphasize plot structure and gimmicks toward creating a best seller. What Ballon illuminates is that the key to a great story is in the strength and depth of the characters. She leads writers through creative excercises to access parts of their own pysche so they may create truly interesting, conflicted and authentic characters. Drawing from her work in psychology and teaching writing, I think she hit on some very valuable insights into what works and what doesn't with characters that either fall flat or jump off the page. Bravo.

There's a lot of good material here. The author uses her psychology background to present a lot of various aspects of personality for imbuing into your characters. For example,there's two pages that list no less than 8 different kinds of defense mechanisms.

I didn't give the book five stars because of the exercises and general approach: that analyzing yourself will help you with your characters.

For example, one exercise asks you to consider what you would fight for and what you would be willing to die for. Then you're to ask that of your characters. The exercise doesn't take into account that not only can these be complete polar opposites, but they could be very different in intensity or value.

In other words, what your character is willing to die for within the story framework is not necessarily relevant to the choices you would make or what you consider important. The danger with this approach is that you could end up creating many characters that are ultimately similar and somewhat autobiographical.

For a psychological overview of personality that might give you ideas that you can work into your characters, it's well-organized and worthy of 4 stars.

I can't speak for everyone, but I don't like to see flat characters in a plot heavy script. As a USC film school grad and struggling screenwriter myself, I know how hard it is to write stories with depth (be it psychological or other kinds of depth -- this book focuses on psychological, but we can also use films with spiritual and intellectual depth these days).

Dr. Ballon draws on her vast expertise as a therapist, and a therapist for writers, to show a myriad of ways that you can improve your characters by analyzing their psychologies. Although most films and TV shows end up with simple, and even simplistic, solutions to serious psychological problems, Ballon shows how you can show transformation in your characters and keep it believable.

Drawing on great films and books, she offers numerous examples, and for the beginning writer, the exercises are spot on excellent for using your own experiences to enliven your characters. Not that writing should always be therapy, or that your characters should only be you, observation of others and knowledge of psychology should always add to your own experience to broaden your work. Ballon acknowledges this, but focuses on how you can dig into your own inner depths to deepen the people you create. Well done!

(P.S. My only negative here is that I wish that many more specifics were brought in. I think the generalities make it too difficult to apply certain aspects to my own scripts, but maybe I just need to dig deeper.)

Found this to be an invaluable resource, not only for screenwriters, but for fiction writers as well. With an emphasis on providing "insight" into characterization & story instead of on craft alone, Ballon has given writers an experienced & helpful perspective at what makes people "tick". It is clear that this is not meant to be a one-book stop for writers in terms of creating & molding everything about their characters -- instead, it's a helpful primer that gives writers a full menu of choices, guidelines and professional insight, which allows the writer to use his/her own creativity & talent to provide the detailed layering of compelling and believable personality traits, quirks, habits & motives which will "individualize" their characters & bring them to life. BREATHING LIFE INTO YOUR CHARACTERS will be a welcome addition to any serious writer's library!

Some of the preceding reviews bash on this book for its simplicity or repetition, but in it I found a lot of advice that I didn't realize I needed desperately. My story and characters are a hundred times more clear now.
This book will help you see your characters as people and make them infinitely more interesting. It will also help open your eyes to the characters living around you every day. I checked it out from the local library, renewed it, and was about to renew it again when I realized "I am going to be using this book for years. I should have it on my bookshelf."


In other words, buy it now.