Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23144 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 182 pages

Customer Reviews

An essential and important book for your literary arsenal
As a professional writer and reader for a film company my overwhelming criticism of the material I receive lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of both character motivation and narrative point of view. If you feel that this is a weakness in your own writing I urge you to beg, borrow or steal this book.

It is not a tome, like many of the so-called "how-to" books, nor does it need to be as the author has a gift for distilling the essence of good writing: always remembering your contract with your reader. Whether this is the general public, your friends and relatives or the gatekeepeer at a major publishing house or prod. co, you need an understanding of the effect your stories and characters will have on your audience. Orson Scott Card takes you through the importance of motivation, the effect different kinds of characters have on the audience, and the importance of detail in creating a realistic and believable world inside your story. The section on viewpoint is incredibly comprehensive, enabling you to make an informed choice about the correct point of view for your particular story, making it the most powerful it can be for the structure, philosophy and effect you want to create within your reader. These are not random choices, something which the new writer, especially, needs to have drilled into them emphatically.

The quality of the writing in this book is reflected in the high standard of the examples the author gives; his own prose is entertaining, affecting and clear. I think this would be a marvellous guide to have with you when you already have a story that you want to tell. Read this book in tandem with your daily writing and revise your story's weak points by consulting with the text. It will be enlightening how much you can strengthen your own work simply by applying the principles outlined here.

I have reviewed a number of writing books in my professional career and this is one that I would be happy to recommend wholeheartedly.

good intermediate textbook
This book deserves the praise others have given it below with one caveat: it is not the end of the line. These writers will learn that there are more heights to scale, and to do so they'll need detailed books like Creating Character Emotions, Advanced Writing: Fiction and Film and the like. But for those who have had it with introductory books, this book will come as a welcome relief. Characters, of course, are not the whole story. You need other intermediate books like Plot by Dibel, etc. When you've digested all those, then move on to the books mentioned above. Bonne Chance!

The best of best
I was looking for this book for forever. I never could buy it when it was in stock (I didn't have a credit card at that time) and mourned over it when I finally could buy it but wasn't in stock anymore. Then, I bought it as used and had to wait more thn 15 days for it to arrive. I had given up ... but luckily it *did* arrive.

I wasn't disappointed of all the work I endured in order to buy it and of all the sighs I made on this page when I didn't have a CC. This book is *really* useful and one of the best one I've ever read about writing. Maybe the only one that I found more useful is "On Writing" by Stephen King, which stole a piece of my heart and made me an adverb-phobic forever :D.

I find Orson Scott Card's style very easy to follow, and nice to read. I could read a few pages of this book even when I happened to go to bed at 4 AM and had my eyes shutting in front of the pages. Because it was interesting and not at all boring. I'm even not a native English speaker, but I didn't find it difficult to follow and to understand.

It was very useful for me, above all in the part where it talks about the attitude and about the takes. It was funny to recognize some of the techniques he had talked about not only in the films and books I often read, but also in the mangas I love.

A very compelling book, which I suggest to anybody who wants to improve his/her skills as a writer and in the same time have a great read.