Reddit Reddit reviews Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints (Write Great Fiction)

We found 4 Reddit comments about Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints (Write Great Fiction). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Literature & Fiction
Books
Short Stories & Anthologies
Short Stories Anthologies
Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints (Write Great Fiction)
Check price on Amazon

4 Reddit comments about Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints (Write Great Fiction):

u/GregHullender · 3 pointsr/scifiwriting

First paragraph is an info-dump. Rule of thumb for info-dumps: you can only do one when the readers are begging you to. Normally, I wouldn't read past that.

Second paragraph has some very awkward sentences in it. I did double-takes to figure out the pronouns.

By the third paragraph I realize that a big part of what makes the prose so awkward is that you use the passive voice like it was going out of style. Sometimes the passive really is the right voice to use, but not here. It distances us from your protagonist. You do that in other ways too, such as when you say "he felt" or "he thought" when you don't need to. "The lights were painfully bright" is far, far better than "He felt the lights were bright and caused him pain."

Fourth paragraph. The biggest problem here is that you need to "show, don't tell." Don't tell us the man's voice is soothing--show it to us through your hero's reactions. Don't tell us what's in his mind--take us there. I'll illustrate:

"Welcome to the breeding deck."

Langdon jumped. Squinting into the glare, he made out a pale bald man in a white coat.

"Hello, Landon." The man smiled at him. "I'm Jules."

Langdon took a deep breath and managed a weak smile in return. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad after all.

The reader doesn't like being told how they're supposed to feel. You need to show them what the character experiences but without telling how to interpret that. "Tell the visible to show the invisible."

Telling instead of showing is the #1 thing that makes prose sound "lame." You do it everywhere. Taken together, these problems mark you as a beginner.

There are a lot of great books for beginners that teach how to avoid these problems. I like the "Write Great Fiction" series. http://www.amazon.com/Characters-Emotion-Viewpoint-Techniques-Viewpoints/dp/1582973164

u/WillWeisser · 3 pointsr/scifiwriting

"How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy" is a good book, there's some useful stuff in it. But for a raw beginner it doesn't hold a candle to Ben Bova's "The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells" (http://www.amazon.com/Craft-Writing-Science-Fiction-Sells/dp/0898796008).

Some other books I recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Characters-Emotion-Viewpoint-Techniques-Viewpoints/dp/1582973164

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Yourself/dp/0060545690 (note: despite the title, I'd recommend reading this before you write a book).

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-10th-Anniversary-Memoir-Craft/dp/1439156816

Mr. Coorlim is right however that you should ignore anything you read about the business side of writing. It's all changing too quickly now for any book to keep up.

u/Mifune_Zero_Thirteen · 1 pointr/rpg

OH! Hm. Well I haven't had a chance to read it myself, but there is a book called Characters, Emotion, & Viewpoints. Work with your GM and you should be able to generate an appropriate background. However, if you're just using it for creating your character background, I think that the Hero Builder Guidebook should still be useful.

u/legalpothead · 1 pointr/scifiwriting

You've got some visual ideas about the setting, which is a good place to start. Next, I think you want to figure out the basic structure, what kind of story you want to write in this setting. It could be a noir detective, a mystery romance, more lighthearted action, coming of age story, etc. And at the same time, you want to decide what the story problem is going to be. Maybe the city has set up a series of terraforming stations in a 50 mile radius that harvest moisture from the air, preventing not only reforestation, but any agriculture as well.

This should give you some idea of the type of main character you're looking for. I think you can design your main character's personality to fit the story problem. Sort of like, there's a job to do, and this is the person to do it.

Once you have your MC, you can start making character sketches for the rest of your characters, especially the antagonist. Your character sketches will contain details about your character's personalities and how they solve problems, typical expressions they might say, patterns of behavior and speech, etc.

Then when you're going to have a dialogue between 2 characters, you can refer to your character sketches so they won't come off sounding the same.

-

You don't need to have all your character sketches complete before you start writing. You may discover when you're writing that you need to add characters here and there. If you're writing and suddenly realize you need a bartender, you can start a character sketch for them on the fly.













-









Have a look at Nancy Kress's Characters, Emotion and Viewpoint. She's a Hugo and Nebula award winning SF author.