Review: Characters and Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card
Elements of Fiction, Writers Digest Books, 1988, 182 pages, ISBN: 0-89879-927-9

The Bottom Line: A Maybe. If you have a really hard time building characters or understanding one type of point of view from another, this book will be helpful. Mostly a good beginner book, though I found some parts of it useful.

However, unlike Nancy Kress’s associated Elements of Writing volume, this book has a lot of information, but it doesn’t have the useful exercises and lessons about building characters. There are some examples and diagrams (yes, diagrams), which might be useful for people trying to sort out what POV is, and which is which – if you don’t know limited third from omniscent from first, this book is for you.

There are also some very good practical comments on character building, which can motivate and help enliven characters who you are thinking about creating, or maybe even those you are already working on. Some good thoughts on creating villains. I found this useful to brainstorm little, enriching details, character quirks, for characters I have already been working with. So it did help in that area.

There is some good information here, though I didn’t entirely care for how it was presented – I found the layout of Kress’s book much more useful. I also thought this volume needed updating – it’s almost 20 years old, even though the release of the paperback is recent, I don’t think the content was updated. In commercial fiction and romance writing, for instance, there is a lot of recent talk about “deep POV” and POV switching – in this book you will find a conversation on various levels of “penetration” (same idea as deep POV) and the risks and benefits of various POVs. I don’t entirely agree with everything Card says on POV (of course, no one ever agrees with anyone on issues of POV, do they?), but that could just be because his view is more formal than mine.

However, for $12.99 this isn’t a terrible investment.

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