Breathing Life into Your Characters has been a terrific help to me in improving my WIP (work in progress). The information was laid out clearly with great examples, and exercises followed every section so you could try out what you just learned. To the very end I was returning to my manuscript to use what I had learned. Without a doubt, my characters will be fuller, more real creations because of Ballon's book. ( )

"Breathing Life into Your Characters" uses the discipline of psychology to help you endow your characters with realistic depth and dimension. There's a ton of useful information in here: Archetypes, inner and outer goals, personal transformations, self-esteem, private and public selves, desperation, dysfunctional families, mental disorders, and much more. The material is accessible to a layman, but still useful to someone who already has an interest in psychology.

The exercises push you to delve into aspects of your own memories, emotions, and personality that you might not be comfortable with; the author believes that you can't create realistic characters that feel the wide range of human emotions if you don't even know what those emotions feel like yourself. But this isn't an approach that everyone is going to want to take, and some people may have good reasons for avoiding it.

I do have a few minor problems with this book:

1. In the first half of the book there's a LOT of repetition of concepts--it gets old pretty fast.

2. Ms. Ballon stresses the value of exploring memories and releasing our emotions, with few if any caveats about this process. I think this is a little careless. There are circumstances under which exploring traumatic memories without the supervision of a trained therapist can do more harm than good, and I think she should have mentioned this--particularly since she herself is a psychotherapist.

3. For everyone who sees an issue one way, you're bound to find someone who sees it a different way. This is particularly true when talking about what constitutes a good story. Thus, the various phrases like "in any good story" and "in all good writing" that litter parts of this book seriously pushed my Pet Peeve Button--even when I agreed with them.

For all my complaints about the presentation issues, they're just that--presentation issues. They're annoyances that plenty of readers won't share. When it comes down to it, this is a very useful book that is almost certain to benefit your fiction-writing as much as it did mine. And so, while the annoyed part of me is tempted to give this book three stars, the more objective part of me impels me to give it four. It produced impressive results, and that's the true test of a writing book.

Full review at ErrantDreams ( )

So so. I've got better in my library. ( )

This is one of the two best books that I've read on character development for writers. ( )