THE ICE PICK

Characters Make Your Story, by Maren Elwood. Boston, The Writer. ISBN 0-87116-019-6. $14.95.

"It is characters that sell stories," says Maren Elwood.

One of the major criticisms of sci fi/fantasy/horror is of the flat characters that so often people these genres. If the reader doesn’t care what happens to Capt. Snarf or Sir Barf all the wonderful plotting in this, or any other, world won’t help. Look at the popularity of Star Trek and Star Wars. The science may have been bad, but the characters were lovable and reached far beyond sf/f/h fandom to touch people’s lives. Can you write accurate sf/f/h background/plots and lovable characters to cheer for and weep with? If you can, maybe you can write a best seller.

Do you sometimes fall in love with a character and wonder how you could "steal" the author’s technique to make readers fall in love with your characters? Elwood shows you how to do that with solid, practical advice on how to actually make your characters (and your story) come alive.

When do you tell about a character and when do you show? Separate chapters explain creating your characters through their appearance, by walk and gesture, by facial expression and glance, by their voice and manner of speech, through dialogue, through their thoughts, and by their action.

Do you have difficulty showing motivation, individualizing minor characters, or making your readers feel a certain emotion? Further chapters show how to develop your characters’ motivation, how to handle simple and complex characterization, and how to use contrast in setting and description to bring your characters to life.
And of special interest to those who write fan fiction is a chapter on how you can develop plot from your characters. Other chapters deal with the common problems of characterization in the short-short story, film, or novel, and in juvenile versus adult stories.

Elwood also discusses the taboos in writing. Some look pretty silly to us now, but ask yourself what taboos we have right now. What new ones may exist in a few years that will make today’s look just as offensive?
As a bonus, in the back of the book are five short stories, analyzed so you can see how different techniques are applied.

Given the short print life of most how-to-write books, any one still in print after fifty-five years deserves some serious attention.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, Nov. 1997. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Jan. 1999.}