Inner Drives: How to Write and Create Characters Using the Eight Classic Centers of Motivation [Paperback]

Pamela Jaye Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2005

Inspiring and practical, Inner Drives goes to the very source of character motivation and action. Explores the fascinating world of archetypes, mythology, and the chakra system.

Product Details

• Paperback: 239 pages
• Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions (May 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932907033
• ISBN-13: 978-1932907032
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #856,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

PAMELA JAYE SMITH is an Author, international Consultant, Speaker, and award-winning Producer/Director with over 30 years experience in features, TV, music videos, commercials, documentaries, corporate, military films, and games.

Smith authored THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE: Create Great Villains and Dangerous Situations, INNER DRIVES: How to Write and Create Characters Using the 8 Classic Centers of Motivation, and SYMBOLS, IMAGES & CODES: The Secret Language of Meaning in Media, and BEYOND THE HERO'S JOURNEY: Other Powerful Mythic Themes.

She has appeared on national TV and radio programs as a mythology expert, including the "Forbidden Secrets" TV series. She was the on-camera spokesperson for Microsoft's "Age of Mythology" on-line computer game and designed their "Which God Are You?" quiz.

Pamela helps creative people enhance their stories and scripts with the power of myth using themes, symbols, and imagery. She also brings the insights and effectiveness of archetypes to storytellers' character development. Besides the standards, she specializes in myth, metaphyics, the military, and Masonry. These classic tools work for any style and any genre, in any stage of development -- plus, they're fun to use.

Clients and credits include Microsoft, Disney, Paramount, Columbia-Sony, Universal, RAI-TV Rome, UCLA, USC Film School, American Film Institute, Thot Fiction Marseille France, Natl. Film Institute of Denmark, Pepperdine University, Natl. Assoc. of Broadcasters, and various film festi¬vals and story conferences. Others include the American Assoc. of University Women, Junior ROTC, General Motors, Boeing, Hyundai, Hughes Space & Communi¬cations, the FBI, and the U.S. Army.

Various projects have taken Smith to the Arctic, the Andes, SE Asia, Europe, and New Zealand. She has filmed on the largest off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, slept in grass huts and eaten guinea pig under Ecuador's highest volcano, caught her own sushi in the Leyte Gulf, and rappelled into the jungles of Mindanao searching for lost WWII Japanese gold.

Pamela is an avid reader, drives a '77 Bronco, and enjoys opera. A dilettante approach to sports has included surfing, skiing, snorkeling, flying, go-cart & auto racing, and driving an off-shore oil rig and an Army tank -- both under close supervision.

She is Past President of the Pan Pacific S.E. Asia Women's Assoc. A Chapter, the Boeing Workforce Development Think Tank, the U.S. Army Advanced Warfighting Working Group, the China Exploration & Research Society, and California Emergency Response Team. Pamela was listed in WHO'S WHO IN THE WORLD - Millennium Edition.

Pamela is founder of MYTHWORKS www.mythworks.net and co-founder of the Alpha Babe Academy www.alphababeacademy.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Reads too much like a history book, October 3, 2007

By 

Zach Nelson - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Inner Drives: How to Write and Create Characters Using the Eight Classic Centers of Motivation (Paperback)

I don't understand why the consensus rating is 5/5. I found this book extremely wordy and it reads like a history book. If you want dozens of pages on the historical aspects of (insert your favorite chakra here), then this book is for you. If you want to see the same movies quoted and re-quoted over and over as examples of (insert your favorite chakra here), then this book is for you. If your idea of fun is combing through over one hundred pages dripping with hippy-isms looking for the "meat" you can use, then this book is for you. However, if you want a book that gives you a fair amount of background on a subject, fresh movie examples, and then leaves you with concrete ideas and examples of how to leverage the content matter to improve your characters and stories, then this book is not for you.

Notice how many times I repeat "this book is for you" and you'll get the idea of how this books reads. I am disappointed, especially given the 5/5 rating. It's more a 2/5 in my opinion, I got almost nothing useful out of it.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Treasure Trove for Writers, Directors, Actors and Designers!, September 6, 2005

By 

Carolyn H. Miller "Author, Digital Storytelling" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Inner Drives: How to Write and Create Characters Using the Eight Classic Centers of Motivation (Paperback)

In "Inner Drives," Pamela Jaye Smith mines ancient wisdom and compellingly offers up a system of concepts about human motivation that is as valid today as it was thousands of years ago. These astute insights into human character are wonderfully useful tools for today's storytellers, a category which includes not only writers, but also directors, actors, and designers. These concepts can be (and have already been) put to work in any type of narrative, be it a screenplay, a novel, a theatre piece, an opera, or a short story. I believe this system would also be a useful asset in documentary projects, and it will undoubtedly work in my own field of Digital Storytelling... the use of interactive digital media to tell new kinds of dramatic narratives. In fact, Ms. Smith offers up a number of examples from video games.

The system Ms. Smith describes is based on the Eight Classic Centers of Motivation. In Sanskrit, these centers are called the chakras, but other cultures have other names for them. I was amazed to learn how many peoples throughout the world and in different time periods came up with the same general system to understand human nature. She makes a thoroughly convincing case for the universality of this system, and its fundamental accuracy, based as it is on human physiology.

For those of us who are writers, this classic system can be used to answer the a question we are always asking ourselves: "What makes this particular character tick?" This system gives us the God-like power of creating lifelike characters who seem to feel, think and breathe. And we can also use it to populate entire casts of characters -- ones destined to hate each other, to become allies, or to fall in love.

The book abounds with concrete illustrations of characters drawn from various narrative works, familiar characters like Scarlett O'Hara, Rocky and Stanley Kowalski, as well as real people like Charles Manson and Napolean Bonaparte. The examples help make what might at first seem to be an abstract approach to character develpment extremely understandable and usable.

I believe "Inner Drives" is an exciting new way to approach characters and is a wonderful addition to every working writer's library, although as Ms. Smith makes clear, it is not a new system at all, but one that is extremely old.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Plenty of examples teamed with exercises to help writers structure characters, November 6, 2005

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inner Drives: How to Write and Create Characters Using the Eight Classic Centers of Motivation (Paperback)

There are some basic principles to writing good characters into novels and dramas and with them the aspiring screenwriter or novelist can produce powerful, three-dimension figures. Inner Drives: How To Write & Create Characters Using The Eight Classic Centers Of Motivation surveys these principles from the world of mythology, using plenty of examples teamed with exercises to help writers structure characters, devise subplots, make logical connections and more. Chapters discuss 'inner drive centers', link art and writing to New Age concepts, and survey archetypes and classic examples.