By Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is a teacher, playwright and award winning author who "lays it out for you" in this excellent work. He shows the reader how to invent and construct believable characters for fiction stories and novels. He then explains those two aspects of fiction that seem to give beginners fits: point of view and voice.

Card describes his book as a toolbox that contains "literary crowbars, chisels, … and mallets" that are used to force the characters from your memory and onto the page. He breaks the book into three parts. In Part One, he shows us how to INVENT a character with motives, actions, habits, a past, and other characteristics that breathe life into him or her as an individual. He discusses where to get characters. Of course, the author’s memory and life experiences are obvious sources, but you may be surprised to learn that a major source of characters is the story itself. Read Characters & Viewpoint to find out how your story provides characters that you may not have thought of while you were outlining the story.

Part Two deals with CONSTRUCTING CHARACTERS, that is, making them believable human beings that the reader can love or hate. In this section, he talks about constructing the story around your characters so that they show the proper emotion, attitude and transformation to make your story "work".

Part Three, entitled "Performing Characters", is where he brings the reader back to high school with a brief, but important, treatise on person (as in First Person, Third Person, etc.). So if you can’t remember what your Freshman English teacher beat into your head so many years ago, this section will refresh you. Card also gives a clear explanation of narrative voice and point of view.

This is an excellent text that should be on every writer’s reference shelf -- highlighted, annotated, and dog-eared with use. It is a "right-arm" caliber work.

Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card is published by Writer’s Digest Books and is available in paperback for $10.39 at Amazon.com.