WRITING ADVICE REVIEW: Breathing Life into your Characters - Rachel Balloon

BOOK BLURB:

How do you write about characters who are nothing like you? If you haven't experienced what your characters have experienced, if you don't think the way they think, how do you successfully get inside their heads and portray them as real people whom readers would want to know? "Breathing Life Into Your Characters" has the answers to these questions. Author and psychotherapist Rachel Ballon shows you how to mine your characters' backstories; use transactional analysis for more complex characters; understand the correlation between needs, motivation and emotions; create characters different from yourself; understand a character's internal and external struggles; provide your character with an emotional transformation; understand the influence of a dysfunctional family dynamic; unravel natural defensive mechanisms; and, much, much more.

REVIEW:

This title is one that I’ve had to take a lot of time to review. As an amateur writer I look to find ways in which I can improve my writing and as such saw this title as a good way to get to know my characters a bit better. One of the reasons its taken so long for me to get this review done was the fact that I wanted to complete each of the exercises within and as such have found that I do have a clearer understanding as well as backstory for the vast majority. It’s a great exercise so when I come to write the full tale (which I can now expand to a series now) I feel that I’ll have something that is not only realistic in certain ways but fully rounded characters for the reader to love or hate. It takes a lot of time to establish this but when you get the hang the files that you end up with really do make them something special and more tangible. Definitely a writing book that I’m going to recommend to others even if its just to complete one or two parts so that they can find that inner voice.