Customer Reviews

Creating Unforgettable Characters

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Linda Seger provides a wonderful gift to aspiring writers in her book CREATING UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERS. The book is a hodge-podge of Linda's own observations--plus, it is interlaced with interviews with world-class writers. Linda also throws in examples of characters and dialogue from movies, books, TV and stage that we've all heard of (Rain Man, Moonlighting--TV, Broadcast News, Casablanca, Ordinary People, Cheers, etc.). The book is a quick read--I read one chapter a day for a week and a half, but it is chock full of tidbits and insights that make it invaluable.

Dr. Seger encourages the aspiring writer to 'research, research, research' that character (Chapter 1). She then encourages us to consider the dimensionality of a character by introducing motivations 'and' paradoxes (Chapter 2). She explores creating a backstory, a pre-history to a character, and how this can open the writer up to new insights and plot exploration (Chapter 3). The chapter on psychological types (Chapter 4) was helpful in exploring human psychology and abnormal behaviors. Ron Bass's comments on how RAIN MAN's characters (Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman) evolved in the writing phase are terrific. Chapter 5 explores creating character relationships, which includes a section on 'the triangle' and the section on replacing characters in the TV sitcom 'Cheers' was a fun read.

Other chapters follow (Supporting Characters, Writing Dialogue, Beyond Stereotyping, and Character Problems), but my favorite section was the one on Creating Nonrealistic Characters. This chapter on fictional, 'unreal' characters, with Linda Seger's contrast between the symbolic (for example, The Joker=evil), nonhuman (Lassie/animal...), fantasy (Vincent in the TV series Beauty and the Beast, Jolly Green Giant--advertisement), mythic (Batman), was worth a full-day seminar of screenwriting.

The book also shares from Linda's interviews with other writers some of the frustrations that they have had in writing. It was nice to read how other writers, proven and successful, struggled to improve their craft.

A quick read, insightful, and full of great stories.

"Creating Unforgettable Characters" succeeds in giving practical steps in the development of character. The book covers several disciplines like psychology, acting, backstory and relationships in an effort to refine and inform the way you approach your characters. For more experienced writers looking to drill down rewrites, the digestible 'get to the freakin' point' style of the book helps you get to what you need, instead of wasting your time lording over topics you don't give shlip about (if I could only take a minute of life away from every author who's wasted my time patting themselves on the back for their puddling observations... there'd be a lot of dead folks in LA).

Particularly useful are the summarizations and categorical exercises at the end of each chapter, helping you immediately implement the lesson into your writing. There are also frequent exercises throughout the book to help jog your mind in relation to your characters.

Seger gives special attention to minor, supporting and nonrealistic characters which populate every script, but are often neglected. Seger's not asking for every character to be the central figure of your narrative... but they better be the central figure of their own story in some way. The book helps in creating characters, small and large, that have a reason for being. It's easy to neglect lesser characters, when they should be poignant and relevant.

Thankfully, Seger has the 'How' mentality that is missing from so many other books on writing. If you are new to writing, this is an excellent resource for illuminating all the elements that go into making a fully fleshed out character. If you're an experienced writer and are looking for a way to make your characters 'pop' off the page a bit more, "Creating Unforgettable Characters" could help you find that edge.

This book is geared mainly for screenwriting, but it can be useful for novelists and short story writers as well. Linda Seger discusses character backstory, relationships with supporting characters, dialogue, and so on. Plus, there are interviews with today's leading writers across the spectrum. Her narrative is clear and easy to understand, with plenty of examples of both good and bad writing. Even though I'm not a screenwriter, I found this book very useful and entertaining.

Creating Unforgettable Characters is a wonderful tool for writers because it goes into details about the amount of backstory that is appropriate and how to set it up and the traits and characteristics that should breathe life into the characters. This book has been extremely helpful to me and I have read it three times.

Unlike her book, Making a Good Script Great, this book is disappointing. Creating characters involves: "getting the first idea..., creating the first broad strokes, finding the core of the character...finding the paradoxes within the character..., adding emotions, attitudes, and values, adding details to make the character specific and unique" (p.23). These steps are then elaborated in separate chapters (although the elaboration consists mostly of extended examples of films most people--those who actually saw the films--would consider to be mixed bags at best, long series of autobiographical paragraphs, and extended quotes from screenwriters ruminating about their experiences in writing this or that character). Seldom is information actually added to that already given on page 23.
There are also chapters on backstory--use backstory only when you have to (p.56), minor characters, dialogue--"bad dialogue is difficult to speak...all characters sound alike...spells out every thought...simplifies people instead of revealing their complexity" (p.151), and nonrealistic characters. Also a chapter on avoiding stereotypes and other character problems such as unlikable characters and vague characters.

There is only enough actual information in the book to fill an article; but if you are a beginning screenwriter, this book (and many others) can be a help to you. The thing to be careful of is (a) emulating writing from movies that most viewers were lukewarm about. You want to learn the best techniques, not the mediocre ones. And (b) thinking that if you've read this book, you know all you need to know about characterization. You don't. Far from it.

This is one of the finest books I've ever read on the crafting of fiction. It's not just for screenwriters, but also for those who develop any form of creative writing. Along with 'Making a Good Script Great', I'd highly recommend Dr. Seger's books as a terrific asset to any fiction writer's shelf.

This book is phenomenal for nearly any writer, because of the wide range of characters Seger uses as examples. She offers sage advice on making your characters unique and leaving a lasting effect on the reader/viewer. Readers of this book will undoubtly recognize every character referenced from movies, television and novels.

I keep returning to this book repeatedly, trying to find an idea, a thought, a quality to give my characters. And it always works.

Before I read this book, I have to admit - my characters were all pretty lame. Then, hey, I read this book, and boom! Ok, so they still need work, but this book made me understand how to keep characters exotic, good, and believable.
The first part of this book didn't interest me as much, because it was advising on how to make sure your characters are good on their background - of people who live in this world. This wasn't 'really' helpful for me, because I write fantasy in other worlds, but I picked up a few helpful things.
Then came a section on Dialogue, which was good too - at the time I was reading it I didn't realize it, I thought it was a bit dull, but then I realized I had started taking the advice unconciously.
But then came along the next part of the book, and I could hardly wait to pick it up each time. It explains greatly how to make sure your characters aren't hollow, and how they should respond in situations according to their attitudes and past life.
This book I highly recommend to any author who feels his characters aren't to their full potential (or if they don't want to admit that, this book was fun to read as well).

Disclosure. I'm an experienced writer, not a novice. So maybe this isn't fair. But I find this book thin, general, and unhelpful. I was particularly hoping that her examples from films would be illustrative, but I found them really bland and not illustrative of much of anything. For a rank beginner this attention to character is good, but for anyone who's past through the first few gateways, this empress is butt naked.

Bums me out how the literature on creating characters on the page is so limited. The screenplay page is so sparse, so minimal, that the writer is pressed to be extremely selective and precise in ways no novelist has to deal with. To me, Seger's focus on backstory and history - while important - reveals that she's never dealt with this problem up close. As a consultant she gets away with broad prescriptions, but when you're facing a blank page, broad prescriptions aren't good enough. Where's the book that takes apart some great scripts and shows precisely why this scene setting reveals character, why this dialog bite is so important to character, why this clothing choice was made, why this juxtaposition shows a character change etc. Examples from the greats, specifically annotated. We need one. This ain't it.

Thankyou for this book. I am a screen and television writer. In the last six months it has been an enormous pleasure to first discover Linda Segers books and then to sit under her teaching in person and hear her lecture this past Feb. in Toronto, Ont. when she taught at the Guilds. Her insights, intuitive nature, her ability and grasp of story ..both through book and in person is a highly trained gift and a guide to those of us finding our way in the world of story. I strongly recommend any work she does in book form or lecture and look forward to reading more from her.