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How to Create Fresh and Blood People

Orson Scott Card walks us through the process of creating interesting, believable characters to tell a story in Characters and Viewpoints.

Characters and Viewpoints is a book filled with fundamental concepts of storytelling, great examples and clever comments where Scott Card exposes his ideas using examples from popular films, TV series, other books and real life situations.

The first part of Characters and Viewpoints focuses on characterization, everything about the people that you, as a writer, invent. Scott Card emphasizes the need of modeling the attitude, motives, social network and life of your characters. These are real people, not just names written on a screen or piece of paper.

You'll learn techniques to draw attention to your main characters and how to make the audience forget about the not so important ones.

Who would be better to write about this than Orson Scott Card, who created Ender Wiggin, one of the most powerful fictional characters I've enjoyed. After reading Scott Card's Characters and Viewpoints you'll realize why the troubled child hero is so memorable.

You need to know your characters. Forget they are only in your mind, they really exist, they breathe, they can feel pain or joy. Dedicate them a good deal of time before writing even one line.

Scott Card uses two characters throughout the book, Nora and Peter, to show you how to get your audience involved, making your readers love the good guy, hate the bad, cry when she cries or feel relieved when she escapes from stressful or dangerous situations.

Characters and Viewpoints introduces a classification of stories based on their structure, mentioning works most of us will remember as examples. I know why Lord of the Rings can be considered a milieu story and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are idea stories.

This helped me to see fiction with new eyes. Now I consider every new episode of The Sopranos not just fun but a learning experience.

The second part of the title, viewpoints, is also the second part of the book and the one I enjoyed the most. It's about deciding who's going to tell the story; how and when.

You'll discover why Watson is better suited than Conan Doyle to tell us about Holmes' adventures.

And I have a better idea of why Jose Saramago uses such a peculiar form of narrative in his books.

Knowing why first person or third person should be used and how deep to penetrate the mind of your characters makes a huge difference; the difference between getting just a “yeah right” or eternal devotion from your readers.

Scott Card explains everything with simple words, there's no erudite explanations here, just good ideas on how to tell a story. He also often uses smart jokes to get his point across; it works quite well.

Characters and Viewpoints is a book every fiction writer should read. I've done it twice and
will do it again. It has helped me to understand how I can transform those beings flying in my mind into actual persons somebody should care about.

Scott Card's book is not only inspiring, it's also fun and a valuable reference.