Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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61 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, but don't get fooled, August 15, 2001
It's very important you understand what the function of this book is. This is not a book written to advise you on how to write characters. This is a book to help you create extra depth to your characters. That may sound like a contridiction, but I assure you it's not.The book offers straight forward profiles of various personality types. It covers normal personality types, abnormal types, types connected with various occupations, etc. These profiles are presented in an easy to read and understand manner. Use this book to create personality profiles for your characters. The book won't show you how to bring those traits out. It won't show you how to develop characters or add subtext or any of those things. What it does is give you a foundation on which to build your characters. It helps you keep your characters real and plausable. It's excellent within its intended function. I highly recommend it. Just don't think that it's a cure all for character issues.
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44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Memorable Characters Are Created By Hard Working Writers, February 10, 2005
As I read some of the reviews of THE WRITER'S GUIDE TO CHARACTER TRAITS I found a wide variety of points of view. Some love the book, others hate it. One reviewer calls it a guide for lazy writers, others praised it as an excellent resource especially for novice writers. Now I could take one side, or another, or some middle ground position that says that each reviewer is partially correct. I think it depends on how you use the resource and what you want to accomplish as a writer as to whether the book has any merit.
If you use the book as a means of developing all of your characters in a short story, novel or play, you will end up with characters that are either stereotypes or cliché. Some people like stereotypes and cliché, but isn't one of the challenges of writing trying to present original characters in a memorable way to teach us something about ourselves and give meaning to our world? If you are tempted to buy this book as a dictionary to create characters for a story, use the money you would use for this book and buy some books by Dickens, Austen, or Shakespeare. You could probably buy three since there are mid priced editions of the works of any of these masters and you will encounter memorable and interesting characters. See how the characters are developed and why they speak to us so powerfully, and emulate these great writers in your writing. Of course if you are planning on developing predictable and boring characters you probably stopped reading after the names Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare were mentioned.
Since most of us would rather walk barefoot on broken glass than create a dry, predictable, ordinary character, probably the words above seemed intended for someone else. After all, as we spend countless hours at the computer, writing words we hope will not be considered drivel by our writing groups. We share these words with our mothers and fathers and pray they will not decide after reading our output that our education was a waste of their time and money. We plug away and hope for the day be our works will be included in the same category as GREAT EXPECTATIONS, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and HAMLET. So will this book be helpful to those of us who await greatness, hoping it is only a few words away?
If you type in my name in the Amazon search, you will not find the great American novel yet, so maybe my recommendation may not be of merit, at least yet, but this is not a bad reference tool to include in a writing library. It should not be the basis for developing main characters. It may help with secondary characters, and it can be used as a checklist of sorts to see if our main characters are believable. The character traits included in the book are based on the norm of a drug addict, cheating spouse, dysfunctional family member, alcoholic, etc. These would also be the traits of someone we might see on television or in a formulaic book. So checking the traits listed in this book could help a writer diversify a character (e.g. not the typical alcoholic underachiever). Basically, the book will be helpful resource for people who have already done the difficult work of characterization, but it is not a substitute fro the hard work of creating characters. In all fairness to the book's author Linda Edelstein, she does not claim that the book is a one step approach to character development, but the book is marketed in this manner.
I received this book as a gift by a well meaning friend who knew I was struggling to develop a character in my novel in progress. I probably would not have purchased it on my own. Most of my main characters are already developed but I have used the book to make sure they are somewhat believable and realistic. People who have read my work and like it do say my characters are believable, so this book may have been helpful, but the traits do not seem to make my characters memorable to the people in my writing classes, the dialogue, interaction with other characters and expressions of their emotions and feelings make them believable and in some cases, not believable. If you want the traits to be believable, this book will be somewhat helpful, but it does not do the work of creating memorable characters. Characters that have their life breath coming from a writer who loves and nurtures them and puts them in believable situations where they become real are the characters we remember and can only come from a writer dedicated to the task of writing.
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45 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing Resource, July 28, 2004
Based on the Amazon description for this book, I had imagined it would be useful in fleshing out existing characters. I already write very detailed histories on major characters, but there are always those minor characters whose stories I'd like to explore without taking massive amounts of time to do it. When this book arrived, I decided to run through it with one particular fellow and see what it could tell me about him.
Nothing. Sure, he fits within several categories, but there's no detailed information about any of them. And some of them are so sketchy as to defy classification as traits.
Take "symphorophiliac" for instance. Edelstein advises that "Individual is sexually aroused by accidents or catastrophes." She explains that at the extreme, individuals may arrange accidents for personal pleasure. She doesn't say who these symphorophiliacs are or where they come from. It takes quite a stretch to consider that a profile of a human behavior or personality type.
I give the book some credit for its potential in sparking ideas. Read through it and you might find inspiration for a character you'd like to create. However, if you really want to know what makes that character tick, you're going to have to look somewhere else. The answer simply isn't here.
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